Hidden
Spectral Magnitude
4.6
Every now and then you come across a band that seems to have something original, fresh, and new on their hands. Some can get across what they are trying to do, and some can't. Hidden seems to be that of the later. Hidden's members must have really enjoyed their High School Science classes. Their music is based on the cosmos and the universe, that of the unknown basically. This is a really interesting subject, lyrically, to me. I often find myself just staring up at the stars at night and just wondering. It's too bad the music can't come across as interesting as the lyrics. Musically this band seems rather boring, at least to me. Most songs start out with a crawl speed doom type sound only to progress into the fast paced black metal sound, with an occasional death riff thrown in there. The doom passages tend to be more boring than haunting too. There's not really too much to get excited about here, other than the fact that the bassist has some pretty descent bass lines. The vokills seem to lie somewhere between black and death style vokills. There's a bit of the death growling but there's also the raspiness of black metal in there too. Either way I can't say I'm a fan of the vokill styling; especially when he seems to just bark them out like in the second song. There's also some clean stuff that is nothing to jump up and down about either. Lyrically this album is really cool. The lyrics are very exploratory and thought provoking. It almost seems as if a bunch of astronomists got together and decided to form and extreme metal band. I have to say I really did enjoy the lyrics, but that's about all I enjoyed. As I mentioned above the music wasn't anything to get too excited about. By about the second and third time through the CD after the first couple tracks I felt like I had heard enough and was ready to hit stop. Another thing is the production on this really mars the album. In the first song all I pretty much hear is the bass and drums. There's some fuzz in the background that changes sound, which seems like guitars but sounds closer to keyboards. You go to the second song, Formation of the Universe, and the bass is almost nonexistent, instead you hear the guitars above anything else. It's like this throughout the album. Maybe this is what Hidden was aiming for, I'm not sure; but I found it just plain weird. I've never heard production this inconsistent between instruments before. The only production that stays the same is the drum production, which by the way is pretty bad. Hidden definitely seems to be on to something here, but to me it seems like they just can't get it across. This might be a band that I might have to check out as they progress, but as of right now it's safe to say Spectral Magnitude won't be gracing my CD player anytime soon.
