(Not long ago Nuclear Blast released the second album by the Swedish melodic death metal band The Halo Effect, and today we have DGR‘s review of the record.)
We are now a couple weeks removed from the release of The Halo Effect‘s newest album March Of The Unheard and the one thought that keeps rattling around the ole’ brainpan is a discussion of what exactly you might come to music for.
This can seem repetitive of course because everyone has a chosen purpose that music might fulfill for them, whether it’s simple enjoyment or some deeper resonance with the artist. I am more often part of the second club, which is why you’ll see many screeds penned that spend more time pontificating about why a specific piece of art might have arisen versus the actual general quality of it. Yet in the case of a group like The Halo Effect I’ve found myself firmly in the former camp.
When it comes to The Halo Effect, I’m not seeking anything deeper and I’m present for the simple enjoyment of whatever the band are creating, and it seems that largely, the band feel the same way. There’s nothing deeper here. No inner quest, nothing revealing itself, and no long-lasting message with which we can walk away from March Of The Unheard feeling fulfilled, with our lives changed. March Of The Unheard is musical red-meat at its finest and, for lack of better term, a perfectly fine ‘pop’ album.
Which brings us back to the discussion of what we come to a particular band for and what reasons those might be in the case of The Halo Effect. I am a melodeath fan at heart and admittedly much of that comes from nostalgia for the era that was my gateway into the deeper world of heavy metal. To this day, I still argue that many of the melodeath groups of the late ’90s and early-aughts when the genre had truly codified into its own thing are perfect as gateway groups for people just starting to get into the genre.
A large part of that is for the evil or heaviness espoused by such bands; the formula they followed over time eventually became heavy metal’s version of pop music. Perfectly digestible, just heavy enough but still gentle that people aren’t immediately defensive, and with enough hooks that they were more or less built to be earworms. Even basic guitar riffs or leads over time took on a sing-song flavor. There is a power to the real quick one-two tempo and short song riffage that melodeath became the vanguard of during that time.
This being a real long way of saying that I come to a band like The Halo Effect and an album like March Of The Unheard for songs like “Detonate”. Which is a damn shame since there’s maybe one song on March Of The Unheard that is done in the style of “Detonate” and that is… “Detonate”.
So why then did I keep cycling back around to March Of The Unheard?
At risk of sounding like a total fool – a first, I know – the (mundane and the) magic then, lay in the “key change.”
Many moons ago I once listened to a podcast in which the host posited that the final part of Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” is one of the best moments in music simply based off the fact that the final part had “the best key change in music”. Even jokingly, it was the first time I’d ever heard someone seriously describe how a song I otherwise had viewed as a cartoon earworm actually worked, like a veil lifted from my eyes.
Those of you familiar with music will recognize it immediately as the sudden stop within the song that leads to the final reprise of the chorus, just a little bit higher than it had been sung before. It is a very common pop music trick, and to be honest with you, once you’ve learned to look for it in music you almost never stop noticing it afterward. In fact, it may be why certain songs just seem to work while others seem to just fall apart in a flurry of mass-market-tested and watered-down beats.
Case in point: There is a fast-food teryaki place near my house – one of the virtues of living in the area I’ve often referred to as Sacramento’s strip mall made suburb – that I visit every once in a blue moon to grab takeout. In the fifteen or so minutes from order to food receipt and leaving, I’m often exposed to the top forty of whatever’s popular at the moment. It’s a strange sort of cultural anthropology at this point because even I will recognize I’ve fallen so far up my own rear end musically that I could describe to you what my tonsils look like from the back, so anything that crosses my path is often met with a bemused shrug and a ‘you kids have your fun’.
But recently there was a song playing that I could not figure out why it didn’t stick, because it followed the holy musical formula of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus out to the letter, but otherwise felt like a garbled mess of sounds thrown in a blender, a bridge building towards a limp noodle of an EDM-break and a hook that had about as much lifting strength as week-old roadkill. It was missing something and the best I could figure is that the one thing it didn’t have was the goddamned higher-sung and higher-played reprise of the chorus to close the song out. Instead, it chose to fade like white noise into a static wash.
So how does this relate to March Of The Unheard? Simple: The Halo Effect use this exact trick six or seven times over the course of the album, and if that doesn’t lay out everything about the band’s songwriting style in the sun, who knows what will. It is the most unassuming, straightforward, and pretense-less approach to music possible.
There is a show on TV where they drop two wannabe-survivalist dipshits into the woods with basically nothing on and almost no gear entitled “Naked And Afraid”. The Halo Effect are the near opposite of this; musically they are naked, shameless, unafraid, and most imporantly, extremely fucking proud of it. They are confident in the turn they’ve taken and the fact that they are making musical red-meat. For all the imagined rivalries that don’t exist, for all the imagined shots fired, and for all the grandoise atmosphere and uplifting approach that The Halo Effect are pitching on March Of The Unheard they are still by and large just some dudes who happen to know how to make really good melodeath music written around a strong lead guitar and immense chorus hook… even when this time around it seems like the band wanted to see what would happen if you took In Flames‘ Reroute To Remain and Dark Tranquillity‘s Projector and tossed them in a blender with a more modern production job.
Compared to their first album, March Of The Unheard is a much more staid release. It’s less scrappy and ready for a fight than The Halo Effect seemed to be before, which is why this time around it seems like “Detonate” is such an outlier in the overall discography. Songs like “March Of The Unheard”, “Cruel Perception”, and “Our Channel To The Darkness” are much more the flavor of the album as a whole, so those who like the real bouncy and martial one-two might find their attentions quickly flittering elsewhere.
Yet the ability for March Of The Unheard to drag someone back in over time is ridiculously strong, due in large part to the group’s aforementioned songwriting strengths, of just being able to get their claws deep in you, so much so that you’re willing to forgive the fact that this release is less of a throwback to the quick-moving glory-era of the late ’90s and early-aughts of melodeath like their first one was and is instead, weirdly enough, like a modern-day hybrid of what The Halo Effect would otherwise be doing with their current bands and the synth-line-happy melodeath of the mid-aughts.
That is why, in the long run, I think that any discussion of the merits of March Of The Unheard is likely going to be reflective of what exactly you might come to The Halo Effect for and what purpose they serve for you – because it is pretty clear that this crew is more interested in playing together and playing what strikes their fancy than producing any honest to god concrete statement. What they’re doing instead – and fittingly since some of these guys are restaurateurs in their spare time – is showing that they know how to cook a solid meal, and they’re doing so over and over again with this release.
These are songs that are best described as just that, songs. They follow a pretty rigid blueprint and format and they do a pretty good job of it as well. To mix the metaphors, a well-built building can sometimes just be a well-built building. You recognize it for the purpose that it serves moreso than the eye-catching nature of it or the grander statement on society it seeks to make by the materials used or whatever strange and twisted curves it has that will in no way, shape, or form prove to be an architectural disaster come the first earthquake it experiences.
March Of The Unheard is two instrumentals and a pretty solid batch of songs to follow, perfectly fitting to go alongside the three singles that The Halo Effect put out between this and its previous release, a pretty solid batch of songs to follow and headbang along to. Which may just be their final place in history so far — purveyors of pretty good songs to sing and headbang along to.
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