Band:	Haken
Album:	Visions
Style:	Progressive metal
Release date:	October 2011

01. Premonition
02. Nocturnal Conspiracy
03. Insomnia
04. The Mind's Eye
05. Portals
06. Shapeshifter
07. Deathless
08. Visions

Visions, the sophomore effort by the up-and-coming UK proggers Haken is a bitter-sweet deal. After the break-through debut, Visions had a lot to live up to, and to a certain extent this new album can be considered a success due to some positive developments in songwriting and retention of the elements that made Aquarius so great, like the palpable heaviness, signature wacky, "avantgarde" passages, and very impressive musicianship. Nevertheless, not everything shines out on Visions, but let us start this analysis from the end, the title track.

It baffles me how Haken managed to write such a monumental track (22 minutes) and make it interesting from start to finish while they could not accomplish that with many shorter ones. The title track exhibits all sorts of ideas, which flow from one to another without much ado: simply and elegantly. "Visions" takes almost a third of the album, and during its changing themes, it never gets tiresome. Maybe that should not have surprised me so much since Aquarius ended with a great 17-minute-long epic, but I guess, in the context of long songs, the simultaneity of sheer eclecticism and truly prodigious cohesion is just too overwhelming.

Most other songs took so much time to settle in that I started thinking very seriously what it was that marred a seemingly great prog album when it finally clicked that the answer was the vocals. While instrumentally Visions is quite worth one's listening time (for example, see what a progressive tour de force the instrumental "Portals" is), Ross Jennings's voice simply cannot hold a candle to everything that happens at the background. It is not that the vocal lines are boring - no, those are very fitting and at times quite original; the real problem is in the execution. I don't want to be an asshole, but from whichever perspective you look at those vocals, they are weak, and "weak" is very literal: both on calm parts, like the sentimental "Deathless," and especially on heavier ones. It often sounds like Ross Jennings's voice is just about to falter, as if he could not confidently control it, and this fact is even more perplexing because he sounded quite good on the debut (although many would disagree).

The bottom line is Visions offers enough meat to feed demanding prog fans, especially due to its great instrumentation and phenomenal title track, but fails to quench the thirst quite completely due to the underwhelming vocals.