(After a very long wait The Haunted are returning with a new album now set for release by Century Media on May 30th, and below you’ll find DGR‘s musings about it.)
We’re not doctors around here. We have crew on the staff of this site that have higher education degrees and have made something of themselves – not yours truly, though – but at last check we don’t maintain anyone with the ability to diagnose anything or write a prescription. That said, if you’ll allow for some folksy wisdom, we can definitely see patterns and recognize solutions that seem to work.
Given that The Haunted experienced a second extended hiatus where it seemed for a while that the future of the band was up in there air, only for them to return with a ferocious new single that makes them seem scrappy again and with some vitality in their step, perhaps an argument is to be made that The Haunted are a band best served with a nice break between albums.
Photo by Linda Florin
Surprisingly, although the lineup hasn’t changed – the upheaval between Unseen and Exit Wounds was a little more dramatic – it has been close to eight years between their 2017 album Strength In Numbers and the release of their newest disc Songs Of Last Resort. Yet, in listening to it for the first few times, it’s clear there’s a reason why The Haunted have become something of a “house band” around this website – because when they have some fire in their step and something to actually “say”, there’s few bands that can pull off the more aggressive and thrashier side of melodeath quite like they can.
There is an art to recognizing that you may need to return to what has worked for you previously when you make music. Strength In Numbers was not a bad disc but it did at times come off oddly tepid – especially in the face of its immediate sibling three years prior. The Haunted seem to work best when they’re at their quickest and most lethal and Strength In Numbers did not have as much of that element as their previous albums had. Songs Of Last Resort – at its beginning few at least – seems to recognize this, and so it stacks a lot of its heavy hitters up front. A song like “Warhead” for instance, with its straightforward shock-and-awe tactics and “oh, there it is” moment at about a minute-twenty where the song seems to click together, is joined by a few equally ferocious brethren with “Death To The Crown”, “Unbound”, and “Hell Is Wasted On The Dead”.
The Haunted‘s “two moods” are on display early on as well, with the melodic groover of “To Bleed Out” stepping in just as Songs Of Last Resort seems to be leaning heavily on only one aspect of the band’s sound. How an album splits along these two lines has a hearty effect on how people view the album in hindsight, and thankfully a song like “To Bleed Out” is more strategically positioned to break up the carnage around it than having that dominate the overall flow of this release.
“Death To The Crown” is a song that’s stuffed with classic The Haunted trademarks throughout it. Taken in wider view “Death To The Crown” could easily be seen as The Haunted just playing to the cheap seats, appealing to us salivating dipshits on the other side of the receiver with barbed riff-work and high tempos. Yet, goddamn if it still doesn’t hit hard anyway. It can sometimes be just as good to hear The Haunted just be The Haunted for about three minutes before they set off on their next auditory fist-fight.
Songs such as the aforementioned “Unbound” and “Hell Is Wasted On The Dead” work equally well for nearly the same factor. It may be an endurance run on guitar for Patrik Jensen and Ola Englund to have to maintain the high-speed guitar chug for much of an album like Songs Of Last Resort but the immolating lock step in which this release moves gives this album a lot of life. Songs Of Last Resort is about as zero-pretense as a Haunted disc has been in a while – which is a stunning feat given that the two previous were of a similar ilk. There’s little room to breathe as they tear from song to song save for one minute-and-a-half instrumental entitled “Blood Clots” that leads into Songs Of Last Resort‘s last three songs.
Every round taken with Songs Of Last Resort surfaces a new couple of songs to enjoy. This is a release of strong first impressions, so it can feel a little frontloaded – especially when you have an instrumental before your last three songs – yet there are other tracks to enjoy along the way.
“Salvation Recalled” is a good run-through closer to the end of the album as it shows that while the whole disc doesn’t have to be quick two-steps – although it is appreciated – The Haunted can still move quick with an inventive and thrash-worthy guitar part all the same. The stuttering opening bit that echoes towards the end of each run is far more percussive than you’d be led to believe and works intuitively for those who like to nod their head immediately.
“Through The Fire” may just be three minutes of surgical-straight-shootin’ for the band yet the song could still burn a car to a crisp. Also, who among us had the big, sludge-worthy rhythm section making up “Letters Of Last Resort” on their Bingo cards? It is Songs Of Last Resort‘s closing number so perhaps The Haunted felt a little more free to play with their sound than they’d been able to in their previous eleven acts of reclaiming their place in the melodeath world. Likewise, they’ve purchased enough goodwill by this point to actually surprise, which is why “Letters Of Last Resort” is effective as a closing number. It may not be where The Haunted should head in the future, yet the moodier experimentation slots into place here as a final comedown in the act of someone burning themselves out.
The Haunted‘s blueprint is one that has been honed down to an exacting science over the course of the band’s near-three-decade-long career. The simplicity of the overall approach has done them a multitude of favors. Weaponizing aggression into an overall package is something that can take time to master – anyone can slam together angry sounding riffs but keeping it at a thrash-metal tempo and using the melodeath guitar lead like a broadsword is something The Haunted are practiced at.
There’s always a risk that the group could return to extended hibernation, but much like Exit Wounds did before this – wherein the group had something to prove and basically came out swinging from moment one – Songs Of Last Resort finds itself performing a similar act. At this point, The Haunted have had to prove themselves with each album more than all but a small handful of bands out there, given how often the forged and resurrected-in-fire act seems to take place with the group in recent years. Songs Of Last Resort has some serious teeth to it, and while it may be returning to a lot of tried-and-true for the band, it does so in such a way that they aren’t reduced to self-plagiarism. It is instead a new shot in the arm for the group and one that hopefully has some lasting effects.
https://the-haunted.lnk.to/SongsOfLastResort-Album
https://centurymedia.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-last-resort-24-bit-hd-audio
https://thehaunted.shop/
https://www.facebook.com/officialthehaunted/