Album Review: The Haunted - Songs Of Last Resort
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
I’ll be honest with you, but my hopes of hearing a new album from The Haunted were pretty low until Damnation announced the 2006 headliners would be back for the festival’s twentieth anniversary in November. It has been eight years since the Strength in Numbers album had been released and most of the band’s members seemed to be otherwise occupied with the likes of Witchery and At the Gates.
Even though Songs of Last Resort is The Haunted’s tenth record and comes nearly thirty-years after their formation there feels something fresh and invigorated about the album. All the motifs we hope and expect from the Gothenburg legends are present: thrashing riffs, some melodic death passages and a host of grooving rhythms can all be ticked off during the forty-minute runtime, but this is not a record that’s predictable.
Hell is Wasted on the Dead and Through the Fire are both built around rampaging riffs and Marco’s barked vocals; Unbound leans more into the deathy side of the band with thrashing choruses tailor made for the live show. Outlier, To Bleed Out, is the album’s longest track and harkens back to Made Me Do It’s Hollow Ground, with its groove and melody.
If Songs of Last Resort has a unifying theme it is war and the abuse of power. More than half the record’s dozen tunes acquaint themselves in some way with this idea. From the opening tracks – and lead singles – Warhead and In Fire Reborn, the first of which begins the whole album with a launch sequence initiated, through Death to the Crown, with its thrashing speed and meaty breakdowns, to the slower atmospherics of Labyrinth of Lies, itself reminiscent of rEVOLVEr’s My Shadow with its oozing progression, these tracks are peppered across the running order, as though the threats of which they speak are ever-present.
The final song is a play on the title: Songs of Last Resort and is inspired by a newspaper article in which it was revealed the British Prime Minister had handwritten letters to the commanders of the UK’s four ballistic missile submarines with instructions on what to do if the British government was wiped out in a nuclear attack. Letter of Last Resort is a real turn to leftfield as the pedal to the metal speed of the rest of the record is replaced by a far slower, almost doomy, progression of heavy bass and grinding guitars.
If I had to pick an album highlight it would be Collateral Carnage, with its crashing, near-industrial riffs and choppy guitars, it’s everything that is good about The Haunted on an album that shows the band’s skills off to a tee. Big, in your face, bombast, catchy main riffs and blistering solos give this one an instant re-listenability.
That sixty-percent of The Haunted are original members speaks volumes for their consistency since 1996; extra-curricular activities aside, the guitar of Patrik Jensen and his partnership with Ola Englund produces some unmistakeably The Haunted riffs and solos; Jonas Björler has been thundering away on the bass since the get-go and rekindled his rhythm section relationship with sometime Cradle of Filth / Paradise Lost / At the Gates’ sticksman, Adrian Erlandsson, back in 2013.
Song of Last Resort also sees Marco as frontman on his fifth of the band’s records, bringing him into line with Pete Dolving’s five The Haunted albums. Although both vocalists have their distinct styles, it’ll be great to see the band play live again in November, mixing the old and the new.
Sometimes, you hear a record and are reminded just how much you’ve missed a band. This is one of those times.
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