Haken - "Fauna"
Prog metal with primal metaphors
Haken are one of the top bands in Prog Metal right now. They’ve been on the rise for a while, and I believe that the consensus in the community is that they fully arrived one or two albums back. And their star continues to grow with the release of “Fauna”, which features several contenders for top tracks of the year; honestly, about two-thirds of the album’s nine tracks could easily rank inside of a top fifty songs list, were I to compose one. I know it’s only March, but I’m confident in that.
Please don’t expect me to follow through on that. That’s a lotta work.
On top of the quality of the music, the album has an interesting theme in “Fauna” - literally animals. Each track uses a different animal for inspiration for its writing and composition. Some of these are more literal than others; some are incredibly vague. The songs are, largely, not “about” their respective animals, but the animal guides the tone and, especially, the lyricism, with metaphors and descriptors skewing toward the primal.
“Nightingale”, for instance, uses the bird’s totemic inspiration as, literally, music; that is to say, the song envisions the bird as a muse for them, the band, to inspire them to keep breaking new ground and evolving. Falling back on their old discography, their established sound and success, here the “mechanical animal” and “clockwork song”, could mean their downfall.
“A mechanical animal, a dangerous game That clockwork song it sings will send you to your grave Now heed the nightingale's cautionary tale Away, away, for I will fly to thee”
“Lovebite” is one of the best metal (and “most metal”) love songs I’ve ever heard, and was conceptualized on the black widow spider’s mating ritual:
“You and I cannibalise My heart's still beating on the outside We consummate, decapitate I taste the venom of your love bite”
It’s also a surprisingly accessible length, at just shy of four minutes, and has a, generally, simpler composition, making it an easy song to push at people who find Metal to be…an acquired taste. So if you want to sample a track from this album, start with “Lovebite”.
As much as I’m harping on this album, I am just keeping it at Blue for now, roughly 9/10. It is very complex (Metal can take a while to digest), but I wasn’t struck with enough consistency within and across songs to be confident in scoring it higher. More to the point - there are sections in several tracks where maybe they take the djent just a bit too far. This is likely a contender for the 2023 top ten, though; and definitely for the top twenty.
Rating: Blue