THE HALO EFFECT – March Of The Unheard

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8.0

• Bands:
  THE HALO EFFECT
• Duration: 00:44:14
• Available from: 10/01/2025
• Label:

• Nuclear Blast

Streaming not yet available

Two and a half years after their debut “Days Of The Lost”, The Halo Effect are back, probably one of the most discussed so-called all-star bands in the metal scene. For those who are not aware, we are talking about one of the classic In Flames lineups, with Strömblad, Iwers and Svensson, plus Niclas Engelin (In Flames – replacing Strömblad himself – Gardenian, Passenger, Engel) and Mikael Stanne (Dark Tranquility ).
To be a little concise and also a little crafty, we could lengthen the content of this review by listing all the various changes, exchanges, grafts and crossovers in musical and real life that make The Halo Effect a sort of complementary paradigm to In Flames contemporaries, in turn still led only by Anders Fridén and Björn Gelotte. However, let's leave the task of doing so to the readers and focus on the album: we liked the debut mainly because, as much as we could shout at fan-service and the pre-packaged product, playing melodic Swedish death like this at the moment is no longer many, it must be admitted.
Of course, there are certainly some obvious nods to the past out there, given that both the latest In Flames and the latest Dark Tranquility are records that are anything but despicable; there's also a whole host of groups who want to take the clock back to the true dawn of the genre, like the Majesties or people who never give up like Night In Gales. Yet, in our opinion, we haven't heard any other manifesto-discs as brazen and cunningly out of time as “Days Of The Lost”. Rightly, “March Of The Unheard” does not move an inch from this type of coordinates and once again Niclas Engelin creates a dozen pieces with considerable commercial appeal.
The model is mainly one: In Flames from “Whoracle” to “Clayman”, plus a splash of Dark Tranquility in the melodies of Stanne's voice, for a true paradigm of the genre, recognizable by anyone with at least a handful of metal records in collection. At this point we could stop here already, because the product is already well and truly sold for those interested, who certainly won't be disappointed. However, let's do our job by observing how in this new chapter Engelin takes away a few more compositional whims, increasing the chorality of the choruses (“This Curse Of Silence” which then flows into “March Of The Unheard”), and inserts a little of that easy electronic music that he has always liked since the days of Gardenian and Engel (“Conspire To Deceive”, “Coda”).
The rest is very phoned in: a clone of “Pinball Map” (“Detonate”), acoustic guitars (“Our Channel To The Darkness”, “Cruel Perception”), dives even a little further back in time (“Forever Astray”) and a desire for symphonicity here and there that explodes both in “Between Directions” and in the final “Coda”, placed there as if Engelin wanted to further crystallize a genre now consigned to history.
“March Of The Unheard”, essentially, is out of time, perhaps spiritually prepared, but remains formally beautiful. We closed our eyes and what year it was, for forty-five minutes, didn't really matter. Maybe the solution is really all here, to enjoy The Halo Effect and not rationalize too much.