Another day, another review, and again, another band from Norway. I currently reside in Scotland, a nation with a very similar population, but nothing like the remarkable output of rock and metal of that land across the North Sea. Why that is, I don’t know. However, unlike the Lewis Capaldi I recently heard live (don’t judge me, I live near enough to where an outdoor show was staged that his own brand of melodic blandness drifted into the house like an unwelcome fart), Hex A.D. is something I’ll happily listen to again, and unlike the insipid and utterly unchallenging three minutes slices of pop of said Scottish performer, these Norwegian musicians are taking on the subject of genocide in a concept double album of three movements. Try and imagine a field of teens brainwashed by cookie cutter TV music “talent” shows singing along to that whilst watching the show through their phones if you can?
‘The Memory Division’ sets the epic tone of the album, a sound bite of a voice snatched from an old 78rpm recording giving way to a massively layered combination of bass, guitar, drums and keyboards supporting clean sustained vocals, invoking the best of eighties progressive metal in delivery, a feel further enhanced by the different time changes and contrasting heavy and delicate sections of the track. In true concept album form this merges seamlessly into ‘Murder in Slow Motion’, a far simpler number with beats to have heads banging and fists pumping, assuming you were to just listen to the music and ignore the lyrics of The Final Solution that is. I even imagined the band created such a catchy marching beat to show how easily the masses could be swept along unthinkingly as many were under Nazism, an underlying darkness hidden by pomp and glory. This pomp is revisited in ‘…By a Thread’, the initial quiet vocals giving way to a triumphant fanfare of guitar, a slight dissonance foreshadowing the shadows that grows in ‘Når Herren Tar Deg I Nakken’ (When The Master Takes You By The Neck), the sound of a steam train departing to carry its passengers to a terrible fate narrated by Big Brother style tannoy announcements.
Part two of this opus commences with ‘Radio Terror’, the almost pastoral opening of chirruping insects and gentle keyboards being an all too brief respite to the tale told by the lyrics, lyrics of the power of lies and propaganda that play such a horrible role in the justification of the dehumanisation of people that supports mass murder and killing. Whilst the band may have had the terrors of Rwanda when they wrote this song, it is something that could easily be applied to any of the jingoism that still permeates civilisation, from state sponsored news channels to online polemicists, the spirit of ‘Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Colline’ sadly can still be found everywhere. After the short instrumental break of ‘St. Francis’ the band continues their quest to shine a light on the tools of terror, namely the use of religion as justification in the rock thud of ‘Throwing Down The Gauntlet’ and early Genesis Prog noodling of ‘The Burmese Python’, a logic as sound as a playground argument between two children as to who has the better imaginary friend.
Part three has ‘Hell Today’ bracketted by two short instrumental numbers, namely ‘Beyond The Venom Trail’ and ‘Gone Tomorrow’, the first of which has the feel the bridging pieces from ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ that allowed Peter Gabriel to swap costumes, and with the PR that came with the CD promising an epic stage production on a forthcoming tour, that could well be the case. The centre piece however, ‘Hell Today’, whilst not necessarily telling the tale of a single event, this heaviest of tracks on the album uses its rock pomp to warn of the dangers of spreading and promoting disinformation to stir up hatred, be it far right, far left, MAGA or ISIL, for all the supposedly contrasting ideologies, all trade on fear of what is different to justify their own ends.
Musically and conceptually, ‘Delightful Sharp Edges’ has much in common with the likes of ‘Operation: Mindcrime’ or ‘The Wall’, with the band regularly making respectful nods in the direction of their Prog forebears. That they are willing to take on such a weighty subject, reminding the listener that such actions are not a part of our dim and distant past, but rather part of humanity’s continuing cycle of inhumanity is only to be commended. There are no radio friendly stand alone tracks on the album, and it deserves to be listened to in full. Time restraints of getting this review in meant I could only give it so many spins before having to knuckle down and type, but I can only imagine that with more listens the score could well go up, and likely find the album riding high in my end of year list.
(8/10 Spenny)
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