ALBUM REVIEW: Eden In Reverse – Hail Spirit Noir

When each of your previous three albums are essentially instant classics, anything you produce is sure to have huge expectations around it. Luckily, Greece’s HAIL SPIRIT NOIR are more than capable of rising to, and overcoming,m those expectations. Every single album the band have released has been fantastic in its own right, with 2016’s Mayhem In Blue taking the band to an international audience and cementing their status as one of the more creative acts out there. Their latest album, Eden In Reverse sees the band lean more heavily into their progressive and psychedelic influences, resulting in yet another classic and enduring record.

Darwinian Beasts is a short, but brilliant, introduction for the album, with electronic elements and excellent, varied vocals providing a punchy, powerful way to draw the listener in and set the bar for the music that is to come. Incense Swirls blends glorious vocals, powerful synth hooks, airy guitars and thunderous drum hooks to build a solid, hypnotic slab of premier psychedelic rock with a slight, sombre edge to it. As the song progresses, and the music begins to gather momentum and intensity, gliding flawlessly into proggy territories, it morphs into a robust and intricate offering, with a bubbling bass line adding even more depth to the sound, making for a brilliant, imaginative track.

Alien Lip Reading leans more towards the progressive rock side of the bands sound, carrying forward the beguiling atmosphere of the previous track and starting to slowly expand the sound even further, until it’s truly epic and gargantuan proportions, due in no small part to the bombastic approach of the synths, which carry the music at many points. Crossroads has a great, choral feel to the vocals that bears comparison with the records opener, producing some incredibly hair-raising results. The much more traditional metal approach of the guitars, drums and bass allow these fantastic vocals, and the ever present synths, to do a lot of the heavy lifting on this track, which is far from a downside, as this choice ultimately makes this one of the most memorable and enduring tracks on the album.

The Devil’s Blind Spot is a brief, but effective slab of noisy, ambience inflected psychedelic rock with a crisp, precise sound that is at odds with the more chaotic and experimental nature of the music. This extremely cinematic instrumental piece that does an excellent job of both breaking up, and adding to, the albums eclectic sound. The First Ape on New Earth allows the band’s black metal flavour to take a more dominant role, without completely shedding the progressive flourishes that have characterised the music thus far. The jarring motif that starts the track, along with some frenzied moments, gives this song a darker, noticeably more aggressive side that is nowhere near as prevalent earlier on. It’s a magnificent blend of styles that works really well, with a few shards of ferocity creeping into the music.

Automata 1980 takes the progressive side of the band’s sound to its natural conclusion, with some demented synths and denser, doom-laden guitars setting a brooding, dramatic tone fairly quickly, with most of the music being much more rhythmic and primitive, allowing the synths to take centre stage, injecting a plethora of atmosphere to the proceedings, with not a dull moment on display. It’s a great, climactic end to the album, leaving the listener eager to hear more.

In many ways, this album is very much HAIL SPIRIT NOIR‘s Dark Side of the Moon. This isn’t just in terms of the quality of the music that’s on offer here, but also in terms of the scope of the sound and the cinematic approach to the production and songwriting. With the slightly off putting overuse of synths at various points aside, there’s not a dull moment on this record, and there’s not much to be overly critical about. Each of this band’s albums is brilliant in its own right, and for very different reasons, and Eden Is Reverse is easily one of the band’s best, and indeed most imaginative, to date, at least as far as their more progressive leanings go. With this album, they’ve not only managed to match Mayhem In Blue with this music, in quite a few ways, they’ve more than surpassed it.

Rating: 9/10

Eden In Reverse is out now via Agonia Records.

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