Yes. London’s Haken really like Yes. That much has been evident since they burst on to the progressive metal scene back in 2010 with their debut album, Aquarius. As the sands have clunked through the hourglass, the sextet has used a big ol’ Yes-shaped lasso to round up as many sub-genre bits ‘n’ bobs, throwing in some metal glitter, a la Dream Theater, into the fray.
The result has produced three consistent albums of material with sky-high musical IQ encoded in the helixes of its DNA. Yes were, and still are, auteurs at borrowing from genres outside of the rock world and wrangling them under the banner of their own identity while, more often than not, delivering toe-tapping rhythms and infectious melodies (and consequently, the hit singles) and you can hear Haken striving to exhibit this quality. Obviously, existing 40-plus years after the emergence of Fragile gives Haken a bigger pool of musical material to dip into, resulting in a stronger need for focus. Hell, if you want to throw a bit of cheekiness into the mix, feel free to point out that the band not only has traditional, late 60’s/70s Yes to be inspired by, they also have the new wave-ish, prog-pop of 90215 and Big Generator to borrow from the musical reference library, should they so desire. And they do.
“Crystallised” features, amongst others, elements of electronica, folk rock, minstrel music, jazz, baroque, show tunes, quirky funk and, of course, various forms of metal. Over the course of its 20 minutes, there is a noticeable tendency to fire off in a number of directions, some of them disparate and uncalled for, but where they triumph is in the repeated reference to strong melodies and the return to the basic infectiousness of the chorus. At the same time, it’s a 20 minute track; who among us is going to expect (or want) anyone to drive on a single riff or two into the ground for that long, no matter how good it is? Even Venom understood that when they birthed “At War with Satan” into the world back in 1984.
The procedural traits mentioned above are stamped all over this three song-er. “Darkest Light” is the runt of the litter at 6:52, but has the most modern references what with the appearance of djent-y guitars and spate of neutered polyrhythms. “Earthlings” presents more like a slow-burning ballad as it balances delicate, clean-plucked guitars with Ross Jennings’ space angel vocals and loose crescendos of guitars and keyboard swells.
When I first came across Haken around the time of the release of Aquarius, the individual who steered me in their direction described them not as “good” or “bad,” but “interesting.” This is a word I’m certainly still on board with using as a describer four years down the line. Their material is rife with flashy complexity, studious interplay, conglomerate layers, tonal nuance…all the stuff of schooled perfectionists playing music for scholarly, as opposed to emotional, pursuits. If you want cathartic release and raw emotion bubbling from your stereo speakers is something you cherish in a listening experience, you won’t find it here. On the other hand, if you’re the sort of dude/dudette whose idea of a good time is an evening spent tackling calculus problems and questioning the air-tightness of the science spouted off during an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Haken is your Foundational Theories of Classical and Constructive Mathematics. If there’s a secondary recommendation we can make, it’s that Haken make for a good dose of intensely and intently involved prog-metal for those of you who wish Between the Buried and Me would just quit it with the blasts and growls.
7.5/10
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHlHs17dQY8&w=560&h=315]
