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Released on October 27, 2014 via InsideOut Music
With the clamour of accolades for last year’s The Mountain still ringing in their pitch-perfect ears, the London-based sextet have gone back to the beginning again by revisiting their 2007 demo for this 3-track EP. Being Haken the EP weighs in at 34 minutes – that’s just 4 minutes shy of the running time of Yes’s prog classic Close to the Edge and, like that album, comprises 2 mid-length songs and one ‘side-long’ epic.
Restoration is the first recording with new bassist, Conner Green, so while it looks backwards in one regard it is a statement of the band that is very much in the present with one eye to the future. With this in mind those old songs have been revamped and updated with the knowledge the boys have acquired over three strong and constantly improving albums.
The first track, ’Darkest Light’, with its stop-start down-tuned riff harks back to the days when the band were more overtly metal. In the intervening years those heavy influences have not dissipated but have been augmented by a blossoming florid sophistication as evidenced by the opener’s labyrinthine instrumental mid-section.
Sticking with my tenuous Yes parallel, ’Earthlings’ is the ‘And You And I’ of the set – slower, softer, with a brooding intensity that evokes some of the atmosphere of Steven Wilson’s The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories). It’s refreshing to hear some individual tracks that don’t require contextualising within a movie-length concept – the experience is more direct although the music itself is just as demanding, elusive, infuriating and ultimately rewarding as ever.
The real gem is, unsurprisingly, the twenty-minute-long ‘Crystallised’. Its complexity is offset by genuinely catchy refrains. It is the consummate Haken epic with a focus on ensemble playing, allowing individual flashes of instrumental flair but never allowing showboating to detract from the organic ebb-and-flow. The Gentle Giant-isms of ‘Cockroach King’ have clearly not yet been exorcised as at the half-way point a baroque vocal canon appears. This introduces a whole section of medieval-inspired music evoking Renaissance – Ross Jennings even seems to borrow Annie Haslam’s melody from ‘Running Hard’. What next? An album of Gryphon covers? It’s a great track but it does highlight an ongoing problem – that of a band with an identity crisis.
If this review seems top-heavy with comparisons to other artists that is because I am willing Haken on to find their own voice. Yes, they’re one of the finest progressive metal bands in the world, technically and compositionally they have few peers and yet they have not found that stylistic fingerprint to make them really stand out and take them to the next level.
As ‘Crystallised’ presents its denouement, Jennings opines “Escaping the past by embracing the future”. Yes, Ross. That is it precisely. I’ll be waiting.
