Haken, The Mountain
Sure, I'll review an album. Why not.
Man. What an album. Let me start by saying that I am a sucker for music with a concept. Almost all of my favorite albums are concept albums, all of my favorite songs are the ones long enough to have stories, and all of my favorite orchestral music is Romantic program symphonies. It's no coincidence that I just wrote my Music History paper on program symphonies. I love concept. It gives extra levels of meaning to the music, and I love finding meaning.
So this album. I did not initially know it was a concept album. I didn't know enough of the lyrics to know what the songs were about, or how they were connected. So I finally looked them up. Confused, I googled something to the effect of "haken the mountain meaning," and I am blown away. Most simply put, the album follows the course of a man's life: a man driven by ambition, which gradually turns into illusion.
The first track is "The Path." It's a soft, beautiful song that gives an outline of a life in it's short 2 minutes and 47 seconds, as well as the outline of the concepts in the album. "Our nightmare in birth/ Our struggle for worth/ In vain, we carry on/ Our mission to become..." Become what? He does not say, I suppose because we don't know. The last line is "We'll play our hand": we'll do the best we can with what we're given.
"Atlas Stone" is the next track. It is about ambition, the character's drive to succeed, no matter what the cost. "Just to be heard, I lose my voice." "Carry the weight of the world on my shoulders./ Rise to the challenge I set myself." "The blood drawn from the Atlas Stone/ It draws a path from Hell to home." I can't say exactly, but I believe this line is about the cost (blood) of our ambition (the Atlas Stone) draws a path (which I'll equate to The Path, the course of a life) from our struggles to comfort in our achievement (from Hell to home)." It is also the first track to reference Icarus ("I fight to fly with much to prove"), a theme that returns in several tracks. Icarus was a Greek mythical character who made wings of feathers and wax, but he flew too close to the sun, so his wings melted, and he was killed.
"Cockroach King" was the song of theirs that made me think, "Ok, I like these guys," long before I had the slightest clue what it was about. It also is about blind ambition, specifically greed. The Cockroach King- perhaps representing another person, perhaps representing the character's greed itself- convinces the character that rewards await him, bringing back the flying metaphor. "Tantalized by the cockroach and its promise,/ I fantasized about soaring with golden wings./ Hypnotized by the cockroach and its promise/ I was compromised by a treasure/ That was fit for fools." The character learns this is folly, though. "The Great Gatsby whispered in my ear/ The road from rags to riches leads nowhere." Finally, "Thankfully when the mirage finally melted/ The impurity of the cockroach was revealed to me."
"In Memoriam" appears, to me, to be about the narrator realizing that he will not always be ascending, that he will eventually grow old and die. "Take a step put one foot in the grave," "Medicate to alleviate the pressure," "Shed a tear as memories start to falter," "It's the game that everybody loses." It brings back the analogy from The Path of a card game: "Show your cards and accept/ What you've been dealt". But still, he continues upward "Father of invention/ Please guide my ascension."
There is beauty in simplicity, and there is beauty in complexity. And when music tastefully blends simplicity and complexity, I really love it. That is exactly what "Because It's There" does. It starts by quoting "The Path." The next section is an encouragement to persevere in the face of failure and death. "Don't be afraid/ It [the tunnel's light] burns your eyes, but you persevere. (Obscures the path) You must adapt because it's there." This is the high point of the character's journey, the peak of the mountain, when he is still ascending on the wings he has made for himself. "Climb, find your way/ Scale high, don't look back/ With hope you will find/ The life you seek." In the last section, during this hopeful chorus (using the Path theme), the background vocals are outlining the whole life, from birth, to ascension, to failure, to death by taking quotes from the lyrics of the other songs on the album dealing with those stages.
In "Falling Back to Earth," the character is sure he will continue to proceed upwards, and proudly tells his critics he will prove them wrong "You have been standing in my way/ You won't believe it when I'm/ (Chorus) Soaring through the sky/ Free from your burden/ Say your last goodbyes/ I won't be back again." But it is when he fails. Here is the Icarus analogy. "Too close to the flame/ Ambition has burned me/ With my wings ablaze/ I'm falling back to earth." He knows shame ("Now that my feathers are broken/ Crestfallen my head is bowed").
"As Death Embraces" is the shortest, lyrically. In it, he appears to recognize his failings ("Forgive my daily sins/ Seal them under my skin"), and come to grips with his life taking a downward turn ("The path of fate has gone astray/ The brightest skies have turned to grey").
"Pareidolia" is when ambition gives way to delusion. I had to google what the word meant. It is our tendency to see patterns in things where there really is none (for example, the "man on the moon"). It seems to be a metaphor for searching for meaning in life, in places where it won't be found. In his disillusionment, the narrator begins losing his mind ("All my kingdom's gone/ It's burning to the ground/ Reason leaves me"). He searches for patterns where there aren't any: "See the stars begin to swarm/ Read the writings in the stone." I believe that "stone" here might refer to the Atlas Stone from earlier, the embodiment of the man's hard word and ambition. He searches for meaning in it, but there is none. "The ocean took away/ My fears and dreams but they/ Never returned." This is the ocean from "Falling Back to Earth," in which he lands after his catastrophic failure.
A fun tidbit: I really hoped that I would find the shape of a face in the mountain on the album artwork. I didn't, and I was at first disappointed. I thought, "Man, they could have made it extra deep by referencing that on the cover." Then I thought... it is so much more profound that I searched for a message in the mountain on the front ("See the writings in the stone") and found none. It is only as I wrote this paragraph that I realized that the stone in that line could refer to the mountain itself, one of the metaphors for the man's life course.
"Somebody" is a tragic song. The man is angry with whatever has caused his downfall, but he still dreams of the same success he dreamed of when he was younger. There is a long section where the only lyrics are "I wish I could have been somebody." The man still hoping he can win, the last lyrics are "Give me back my right/ To prove that I can fight/ Let me show them all/ Tonight will be my night."
The two bonus tracks are arrangements of earlier songs. "The Path Unbeaten" is an instrumental version of "The Path," with a french horn playing the melody. I think it's the perfect instrument for it. I realized how similar the timbre of Ross Jennings' voice is to a french horn. I read another analysis that said that the title refers to the fact that the life/death cycle remains unbeaten by human ambition, which makes a lot of sense to me.
The other bonus track is "Nobody," which is an acoustic version, with the same lyrics, of "Somebody." I suppose it means that the man died a nobody, not having achieved what he dreamed he would. But maybe there's another meaning. I think that the man died at the end of the regular album, and the two bonus tracks take place after his death. If "The Path Unbeaten" represents the unbreakable cycle of life and death, maybe death is what turned him from Somebody into Nobody.
So that's the album. In retrospect, this has been less of a review, and more of me just geeking out about it because it is so cool. Because... man, this is just so cool. There are so many different metaphors, but they don't get in the way of each other. That is not easy to do. And the concept is so thorough. The story progresses naturally: the climax falls two thirds of the way through the album. Every time I think about it, I find some new level of meaning.
But, after all this, I am left wondering... what if I'm finding meaning that isn't there? That idea is, itself, one of the themes of the album ("Pareidolia"). And if it is the intention that the listener will look for meaning where there is none, is that not a form of meaning itself?
All in all, one of my favorite albums ever. There are other albums whose music I generally like better, but very few others I've heard that are so meaningful, and so masterfully crafted. Just... what an album, man.
