To limit the Prog year 2013 only to Steven Wilsons masterpiece The Raven That Refused To Sing would be grossly negligent. Because you would miss the fourth album of London based HAKEN. Their last two records Aquarious and Visions were already a crazy ride through the universes of imaginativeness, at full speed. On The Mountain it seems that craziness got even amplified. But HAKEN managed to wrap their musical insanity into surprisingly compact and homogenous (!!!) songs, in places with great hit potential. Doing so, single ingredients are of course anything but new: powerful metal guitars, belling 70s Hammond organ sounds, crystal clear 80s Neo-Prog keyboards and a jazzy rhythm section. On top there are many-voiced vocals that occasionally remind of Gentle Giant. Between pulsative lunacy, brutal metal and an epic widescreen cinema style HAKEN always intersperse quiet moments to take a break and let overwhelming compositions time to breathe and unfold. Despite of high demands The Mountain never sounds intellectual detached. There is too much earthy Rock in between. This kind of balancing act between Metal, Progressive, bombast and demand one might find most likely at Devin Townsend, although this comparison is somewhat misleading. Those who like Prog(metal) beyond “quotation & technical exaggeration“ (as in Dream Theater) will find proof on The Mountain that Prog music, demand and comprehensible songs will not exclude each other.
The interested listener takes 8 minutes of time and enjoys the musical roller coaster of Coackroach Kings and thus gets an impression what may happen on The Mountain. Great record!