Hidden - Dead Land Energy
Hidden take a whole bunch of genres and mash them in together with each track on their third album, 'Dead Land Energy.' It took five years to come out but it was well worth it. New fans may take some time to adjust to this because track after track they may say it all sounds the same, but closer inspection provides a wealth of death, thrash, black, prog, and doom metal to be in the band's arsenal. The unfortunate thing is they tend to keep the same formula throughout the album, so despite each song's diversity, it tends to sound the same.
A lot of the album lends towards the very early Darkthrone era when they performed death metal on 'Soul Side Journey.' The music is raw, fuzzy, and the vocals have that echoing death/ black metal effect. Some might attribute this to poor production, but later songs disprove this. The fuzziness was a choice which lends to the doom metal style. Sometimes when the music really slows down and crushes the listener, such as with "No Purpose," it really hits hard. On most of the track though, one can find the doom elements near the end of the track, the black metal or thrash metal in the rest, and prog/ ambient parts in the very beginning. The death metal bits are hard to find because they tend to sound so much like black metal, but the blastbeats and chugging guitars give it away at times.
"Starboard Pandemic" is one of the examples of the 'prog' side of the band, but sadly many of these are only a few seconds long, or if they continue throughout the track, are buried in the rest of hte music. While the bleeping 'chirps' are definitely present here, other tracks like "Enormous Hazardous" feature their proggy parts for a few seconds before it is lost forever. It is easy to pass this album off as forgettable, but give it some time to grow and listeners will soon find that there is more than meets the eyes with Hidden- go figure that they try to hide all the genres within the music because of their band name...
A lot of the album lends towards the very early Darkthrone era when they performed death metal on 'Soul Side Journey.' The music is raw, fuzzy, and the vocals have that echoing death/ black metal effect. Some might attribute this to poor production, but later songs disprove this. The fuzziness was a choice which lends to the doom metal style. Sometimes when the music really slows down and crushes the listener, such as with "No Purpose," it really hits hard. On most of the track though, one can find the doom elements near the end of the track, the black metal or thrash metal in the rest, and prog/ ambient parts in the very beginning. The death metal bits are hard to find because they tend to sound so much like black metal, but the blastbeats and chugging guitars give it away at times.
"Starboard Pandemic" is one of the examples of the 'prog' side of the band, but sadly many of these are only a few seconds long, or if they continue throughout the track, are buried in the rest of hte music. While the bleeping 'chirps' are definitely present here, other tracks like "Enormous Hazardous" feature their proggy parts for a few seconds before it is lost forever. It is easy to pass this album off as forgettable, but give it some time to grow and listeners will soon find that there is more than meets the eyes with Hidden- go figure that they try to hide all the genres within the music because of their band name...
- Out Of Control
- Dead Land Energy
- Humanjunk
- Archaic Wasteland
- Starboard Pandemic
- Giganormous
- Hydrazine Plasma
- Shorelines Pound
- Prehistoric Impact
- No Purpose
- Gone South
- Enormous Hazardous
- Vaporization Of The Behemoth
Red Stream
Reviewer: Colin McNamara
Feb 4, 2011
Feb 4, 2011
Next review:
Heathen Beast - Ayodhya Burns
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