Review: The Haunted

The Haunted
“One Kill Wonder”
(Earache)

The slow crawl that brings this disk alive, named “Privation of Faith” gave me the chills I felt when I first heard Slayers “Seasons in the Abyss”.  I wondered if this newest album would show a mellowing of tempo, a slowing of the pace from their previous blitzkrieg “The Haunted Made Me Do It”.  We were so impressed with that album, we put them on the cover of Modern Fix.  I was almost confirmed in my suspicions of a more laid back The Haunted, until all that was slapped stupid by the second track “Godpuppet”.  Speed baby, speed.  It’s a controlled train wreck of double blast beats, sewn tight by razor sharp riffs and a huff and gruff vocalist.

This falls into the category of “fucking brilliant metal”.  Such a shining beacon of what today’s scene is capable of producing.  Phenomenal lead work.  You’d think the idea of a ‘guitar solo’ has been done into the ground.  And it has.  But witness the evil wails Jensen can illicit.  Balanced against intricately melodic (both loud and heavy) assaults that fall prey to the carnage that is the actual rhythm and percussions of each well thought out number.

All songs have such a crafted and evolved sense to their structures and deliveries, this is no carbon copy metal.  Marco Aro should do just a little something more with his vocal approach.  It works with a gruff charm for a metal band, but it’s so one-dimensional.  Brutal, commanding and dark as sin, but still one-dimensional.  But that does little to deter from the overall dominating effect this album holds.  The Haunted are one of the main forces that is keeping metal brutally fresh.  “One Kill Wonder” is testimony to just that.