*** Go to our YouTube channel in the link below to see the video review of this record in episode #39 of the SBR Album of the Week.
When you think back to bands that were twenty years ahead of their time, you don’t think of Will Haven. Yet the Sacramento outfit are one of the few artists that defy categorisation to this day. 2001’s classic Carpe Diem album did not fit into any scene upon release, but it made most end-of-year polls. Their 2011 effort, Voir Dire, had a similar impact. Most people know them as either the favourite band of Deftones or as a hardcore unit that played drop-tuned grooves way before today’s artists discovered Meshuggah. You could even make the case that Will Haven were post-metal before the movement turned into a homage to Neurosis.
Fans will be pleased to know that charismatic frontman, Grady Avenell, handles microphone duties on the group’s seventh album, after leaving in 2002, returning in 2005, departing again for 2007’s The Hierophant, and pitching up once more for their 2011 masterpiece. Grady is a master scholar of the scream vocals and made a name for himself in the early 2000s as one of the best in the business. Nowadays, everyone does it, but can they match the might and muscle of his naked vocal roar on opener, ‘Luna’? Listen how a smooth 4/4 beat and growling bassline work with a vertiginous sample effect to cast you into a chronic imbalance. This is music trapped in a psychotic episode. One moment you’ll hear guitars locked into a death metal frenzy; the next passage will perk up your shoulders and flex your biceps. The hardcore vocals and incorporeal thrash metal rhythms in ‘5 of Fire’ show that the boys have lost nothing of their ability to evade comfortable genre definitions. We said it in 1999, and we say it again – what is Will Haven? To which scene do they belong?
Of course, the answer is none. The hanging shadow of oppression lurking over the crunchy drop-tuned guitars in ‘For All Future Time’ is too ethereal for hardcore, too slow for death metal, and far beyond the one-dimensional rage of sludge. Guitars sway and swerve in drop-G tunings like Meshuggah caught up in a traumatic encounter with planet Earth rather than planet Mars. Here, you can hear the shredded nerves of Kayo Dot as much as the avant-garde hardcore of Faith No More circa 1995. Grady seems condemned to a permanent state of despair, even when the band explore radical dynamic shifts on the excellent ‘Evolution of a Man’. The raw double-timing beats and fiendish tremolo fills in ‘Wings of Mariposa’ install Will Haven’s frontman with the belief that he can overturn a Boeing jet with his bare hands.
Perhaps one thing stands out more than anything on this album, which may also articulate some of the uniqueness in the band’s sound. They use eerie keyboard samples and cinematic ambience to ignite the aggressive guitars in ways that few bands would contemplate. You can feel the burden growing on your shoulders in ‘No Stars to Guide Me’ as the keyboard atmospherics creep up on you and give the chest-convulsing guitars of Jeff Irwin and Anthony Paganelli a darker shadow. It’s the nearest thing to a post-metal song on the album with its poignant piano outro, yet they follow it with the throat-ripping intensity of ‘Feeding the Soil’ as if transplanting hardcore from its urban ghetto into the heights of an earth observation satellite.
Twenty-eight years into their career, Will Haven still present us with that perennial question – what is this music? It’s a testament to their originality that we still have no succinct answer. The guitarists eschew solos; the drums play in common time; the vocals seldom deviate away from gut-spilling screams. And yet they sound like nothing else. Is the metal world now ready to catch up with their creative vision?
JVB
Verdict
Release Date: 07/07/2023
Record Label: Minus Head Records
Standout tracks: 5 of Fire, For All Future Time, No Stars to Guide Me
Suggested Further Listening: Kayo Dot – Blasphemy (2019), Frontierer – Oxidized (2021), Raum Kingdom – Monarch (2023)