INK

It's not often that I come across an album of this length and can listen to it all the way through without getting bored. This is one of the very few that stay interesting and fascinating from beginning to end for a duration of 2 hours and almost 18 minutes.

I suppose it's not often that you come across an album of this length, period.

This makes it all the more surprising then that there are no excessive lengths here at all, in which you might wish that they'd finish one section and go onto the next. It just doesn't happen. It's almost as if this band has got an almost supernatural ability to tell when something might possibly get slightly tedious and move on before this can occur. In fact, this is possibly the only album I know that manages to avoid this trap completely.

These guys certainly have a distinctive metal style and manage to produce an incredible amount of variations in themes and arrangements without sounding as if they've strayed away from what makes their sound their own. This doesn't apply just to the individual tracks, but also to the sections within these tracks. The variety is incredible, and it fits simply everywhere.

A while back we had a period of time in which the band Haken was apparently the bee's knees. Now, I can't say I ever agreed to this opinion because I actually find them quite dull, especially after reading the rave reviews, which you can find on this site. I feel that Pervy Perkin (cripes, what a terrible name!) actually fulfills all the hype that I expected to hear from those reviews I read about Haken.

This is a debut album we have here. I'm not usually into expressing such a drastic opinion and I hope I'm not coming across as exaggerating (my alcohol intake at this point in time is zero), but I find this to be among my personal top three debut albums ever, and that's going back a few decades.

But as always, there is one slight fly in the ointment (isn't there always!), and that's the vocals. Well, perhaps not the vocals themselves, it's hard to tell, but something sounds off in places, and sometimes distinctly. It's almost as if the recording of the music was done at the highest professional level, while the vocals were recorded somewhere else by a producer who possibly lacked experience? Sometimes they just lack body and strength and seem buried too far in the mix and sometimes the harmonies just don't quite gel.

But this is hardly relevant, bringing my overall rating down from an unquestionable 5 stars down to perhaps 4.7 or 4.8. As if it mattered! These guys are great!