Haven - Causes - Metal Epidemic

Haven – Causes
Release Date: 24th January 2025
Label: Argonauta Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Post-Metal, Alternative, Sludge, Hardcore, Post-Rock.
FFO: Neurosis, The Ocean, Tool, Lavalanche.
Review By: Mark Young

All told, this was a fairly hard album to review. I just couldn’t get a handle on it at all, other than I found it to be neither one thing nor another. It felt like the end result of a meeting where everyone puts in their ideas and there is no one ruthless or strong enough to mould it into a consistent form. I appreciate that it is labelled as being Post-Metal and alternative, so there is a strong possibility that I wouldn’t get it any way, given that I lean more into the heavy, aggressive material. My problem is that as each song unfolded, there was nothing I could take from it in order to give my review a base to kick off from.

And this is not from the want of trying. Idol is our starting point, and it is a good one, too. Aggressive vocals, a solid low-end and some double bass getting us going. It has an almost militaristic measure to it. The cleans are subtle and powerful at the same time when they come in and don’t feel out of place. As songs go to kick off an album, it’s pretty good, but they don’t carry that through. Title track Causes shows them going down the clean/grit route which in itself is pretty good but the riffs behind it don’t do enough to grab you. This is probably due to my personal leanings, but I felt it needed more oomph. Leash is next, and this one scorches its way in, and suddenly I’m engaged until they decide that it’s time to slow and then break out the cleans. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the song then follows a pattern of: rapid / slow with cleans / melodic with cleans (very good, it has to be said) and whilst there are bands who can change lanes with ease, on here it feels as though they thought that squeezing as many differing ideas as possible in one song was the way to go.

Wesen, with its spoken passage and gentle backing, gives the cleans that follow the room to come in and dominate. Despite it being half the length of the songs that precede, it has a life to it which I would have liked to have heard more of. Rue follows this and has a satisfying chunk to it, but its run time does it a disservice and by saying that I’ve put my finger on it. Long songs are good when there is something there that grabs you and drags you along with it. With Rue, it’s perfectly fine, but it’s just that and doesn’t need to be that long. Had they been a little ruthless with this and shortened it, then it would have been a stormer.

As we close in on the end, Theia comes and goes, and gives a solid account of how having shorter songs would work so much better with this material, and final track Ankou has some good stuff in it, with a clubbing riff build but also falls foul of them wanting to feature cleans within it, and then we are done. My final take is that it needed a firm hand and be ruthless with it, but that is just me.