(We present DGR‘s review of the sophomore album by the Dutch symphonic black/death metal band Haliphron, which was released a few weeks ago by Listenable Records.)
Truth be told, I hadn’t expected to see a second release from Haliphron to go sliding across my desk so soon after the first album had hit. Of course, it is often said that you have forever and a day to write your debut, and sometimes you have people who can’t seem to stop writing once that initial spark has been lit, and they burn brighter than a star lightyears away. Sometimes you’ll have people join the band with a bevy of ideas already percolating in their heads, as in Soilwork and Aborted‘s tendencies to have someone join and release a new EP soon after. And sometimes groups will wind up with an excess of material and it would be a shame to let that go to waste.
There’s a multitude of the cases available with Haliphron‘s lastest release via Listenable Records, Anatomy Of Darkness, but picking one certainly does help to mentally square the fact that we’re looking so soon at a second album.
It’s only been a year and seven months since the group’s first full-length Prey landed – even though it certainly took us some time to stumble into it – and honestly, followup albums with quick turnarounds tend to be worrying. You’d never figure that out at NCS though, because our policy tends to generally have us covering stuff in which we find quality rather than taking time to dogpile on any unfortunate release that doesn’t pass muster – at the very least we’ll try to have something constructive to say.
Which in the long run has created a weird narrative here, because you’ll often see me lamenting the time between albums being so short and identifying that as the aforementioned object of worry, and then walking out of the back end of the album genuinely reassured that the band know what they’re doing and that the album with a shiny new hat is nearly as good as its predecessor.
And it’s nice to say that this particular narrative won’t be changing much as we dive into Haliphron‘s Anatomy Of Darkness, although this does not mean we’ll be escaping completely unscathed.
Compared to Prey before it, Anatomy of Darkness is a trim album. Prey was a disc that was big in its ambitions and musical scope; Anatomy of Darkness retains the musical scope but rends a whole block of the orchestral fat from the overall songwriting process.
It wasn’t uncommon to see a song on Prey stretching well into the five-minute range as the Haliphron crew wrung every drop of worth out of a particular sound that they could – while Anatomy Of Darkness takes a different angle and it’s the surgical, “every part will serve a purpose and none shall be wasted”, style of songwriting. The resulting effort places most of Anatomy Of Darkness‘ songs in a four-minute or so ballpark and many of them are fairly straight-shooting as a result.
While there are definite dalliances across musical spheres, the big wandering journeys get waylaid for Haliphron‘s second album in favor of this relentless march forward approach. Guitar riffs that cut to the bone are the order of the day for much of the album whereas the keyboard work that did much of the embellishment of the band’s previous effort is applied a little more judiciously for the band’s second go-around.
They still have big orchestral swells at times but Haliphron experiment more with the type of instrumentation available to them in synthesized form here, so if you’ve been curious to hear an orchestra flavored by middle-eastern instrumentation a la some of SepticFlesh‘s recent efforts on 2022’s Modern Primitive, Haliphron have started to mix that into their spinning musical mass.
Haliphron deserve a lot of commendation because, gods be damned, they have an immense amount of ambition with their music and they’re going to use whatever is available to them to get there. Anatomy Of Darkness is interesting in that respect because it is not Haliphron at their most gargantuan, and instead it seems like the group were trying to redirect and redefine on their second album. What they’re doing here is instead spreading out a multitude of ideas across nine songs, two of which are fully instrumental; Anatomy Of Darkness feels a little bit like an EP that got out of control in that respect. Coupled with the fact that songs here are much shorter and straight-to-the-point, you can see how this is an album that weighs in much trimmer than its older sibling.
The shotgun musical approach means you’ll have a variety of different experiences instead of a lumbering and massive overarching throughline, but it also means you’re going to have people drawn to different songs so you can learn what is truly sticking. Haliphron redirect a lot of the musical resources throughout Anatomy Of Darkness in that way, because the seven main tracks on this album are working very hard to appear distinct from one another this time… at least on the orchestration front.
But not all albums like this emerge from battle in shining armor, glistening in the sunlight and hailing glorious victory. Some get battleworn and take a few blows along the way, and unfortunately for the new adventurism that takes hold within Anatomy Of Darkness and the appreciated quicker tempo on most of the songs here, the album does get a little faceless as the layers get stripped away. It’s clear that Haliphron favor that quicker tempo throughout most of this release, which means that instead of the more cinematic-in-scope style, a la their first release, we have one that mainlines its way through one particular tunnel and dips into dynamics on rare dalliance.
We weren’t kidding when we said Anatomy Of Darkness was straight-shooting by comparison, because the rhythm section does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memorability this time around. If they’re not in a quicker-moving segment that allows the backing orchestration to hog the spotlight for a bit – usually in the tone of ominous ambience and large, malevolent swells – then they’re favoring a big, chugging guitar riff. Due to that, Anatomy of Darkness has a lot of bounce to it but that becomes the main method of transportation rather quickly in Haliphron‘s case, which tends to make even the most exciting thing start to get a little mundane.
That was likely always going to be the struggle with an album done on quick turnaround the way Haliphron have with their latest release. A stable lineup – save for a drummer swap – at the very least means that the band had consistency available to them as a back-pocket “break glass in case of emergency” songwriting weapon from the start.
Anatomy of Darkness has Haliphron experimenting with a lot of different approaches for their second go-around. If Prey could be treated as once dense block that if it were made physical and fired out of a cannon could easily sail through multiple buildings and land in a field the next city over, then Anatomy Of Darkness is a big shrapnel blast instead. It’s got that awkward fits-and-starts pacing that many “throw everything at the wall, see what sticks” style of albums do, and really, if you had to pick a throughline, at the very least Haliphron have got the sinister and turbulent atmospherics down. They continue to reach their tendrils into symphonic black and symphonic death metal worlds in about equal measure and emerge sounding like someone dancing on a very, very fine line of trying to make such an ugly two-headed beast approachable.
Anatomy Of Darkness doesn’t fully succeed on that front but in combination with its only album sibling it still shows that Haliphron could grow into something far greater from what they’re starting with here. Right now, it’s a case of seeing if the songwriting ambition and scope available to them eventually line up, because the moment those particular stars manage to align, Haliphron are going to unleash one hell of an impressive album.
https://listenable-records.bandcamp.com/album/anatomy-of-darkness
https://www.facebook.com/haliphronofficialband
https://www.instagram.com/haliphron_metal/