Timeless Haunt – Dark for Life Review

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Every time I pick up a new Prog Metal band’s release in my hands the question that always pops up in my mind is what makes a Prog Metal band? I don’t have to tell you, my fan, that it took me some real time to guess what Prog Metal was. I mean I didn’t get what the Prog stood for. Really. I mean it. In the early 1990’s I got a little away from the Metal world and those new labels didn’t really come to me. When I started reviewing here the question got even stronger as I got some new material and lots of Prog Metal bands appeared.

I was kind of a fan of Progressive Rock in my teens. I really knew some important bands and had an idea what Prog Rock was. Pink Floyd (the one I like the most), Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer – though I dislike that more classical prone they have – Genesis, and, of course, Marillion, a band that many metalheads used to like in the 1980s due to their heavier facete. I’ll put Kansas in this tally. Even though I’ve met the band for some time I only thought of them as a Prog Rock band when I bought their compilation and heard some songs that I used to listen to on the radio, but never knew who it was. Things got a little weird, though, when I read a magazine article where Geedy Lee told that he like it better to consider Rush a Prog Rock band than a Metal one. My mind got spinning, I confess. Then came Queensrÿsche which to many is one of the pioneers of the Prog Metal labeling. Well, I love their first album “The Warning,” but I’ve never though about it as a Prog Metal album.

Forgive me, my child of the night, but I write a review as if I were writing a chronicle. That’s why sometimes I make a long digression before coming to the subject.

Ok, then. Here we are. We got to the point. The remembrance of the name Queensrÿsche rang a bell and I finally got with the help of Timeless Haunt and “Dark for Life” what a Prog Metal is as the band keeps the right balance between heavyness and melody, but not the easy melody, that melody that requires a little more to get. Exactly what Queensrÿsche and “The Warning” meant to me. Timeless Haunt were able to boil in their cauldron the elements that made “Dark for Life” an album to be reminded as a good example of what Prog Metal is. “526,” for instance has a frentic passage by the third minute that may make the fan think we’re talking about a Death Metal band. Ah, almost forgot. The use of the keyboards. Timeless Haunt think of them organically in a song. Not to be prominent, not to embellish, but to be part. That’s something different and that makes a hell of a difference. Take a look at “Not for Me” and you’ll get a good example of what I’m talking about.

Great album with a guitar work. Listen to the first guitar solo in the opening track “Geisterton” and upscale guitarist Tommy “The Electric” Eye does. For the ones that know the same as the unforgetable guitar duo K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton do in the opening of “Painkiller.” Amazing.

Timeless Haunt “Dark for Life” was released on March 05th via Stormspell Records.

Track Listing:

  1. Geisterton
  2. Embrace the Haunt
  3. Dark For Life
  4. Sinful Girl
  5. Pain
  6. 526
  7. Not For Me
  8. Wicked Game

Watch “526” official video here.