ALBUM REVIEW: HAKEN - FAUNA

ENGLISH PROGRESSIVE CRAZIES RELEASE THEIR MOST FAR-REACHING AND AMBITIOUS TRIP YET

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stick your head inside the Large Hadron Collider as particles are accelerated close to the speed of light? It is quite understandable if you have not but it is a scenario most probably pondered at length by English progressive metal mad scientists, Haken.

Listening to their ambitious and far-reaching album Fauna, released earlier this year, you can feel your brain enter some sort of quantum realm where the laws of physics go out the window as thoughts are compressed into quarks and gluons. In trying to articulate the genre-bending mind-warp that Fauna presents, it could be described as commensurately bonkers and beautiful.

This is a band operating at their creative apex, who haven't just designed a demented rollercoaster, but an entire trans-dimensional theme park where they asked you to spend a day munching on salted caramel popcorn of progressive and poppy melodies before puking up on the djent dodgems. With songs inspired by the harsh romanticism and tragedies of the animal kingdom including the fates of a wildebeest (Taurus), the cannibalistic sex lives of black widow spiders (Lovebite), elephants (Elephants Never Forget) and the almost extinct white rhino (Eyes of Ebony) used as otherworldly allegories of spiritual challenge and social commentary, it is ambitious in scope and subject matter.

Haken seem able to create musical micro-universes which expand in some sort of pristine 10-dimensional torus, then are subsequently destroyed at will. CERN don't need to spend 30 billion dollars on their next particle accelerator, they can just put on Fauna and watch the world instantly dissolve into fundamental universal properties.

Check out Haken here: https://hakenmusic.com/