Artist: Hokum
Title: The Creation of Pain
Type: Album
Label: Good Damn Records

Colourful and aggressive artwork is the first greeting to this second album by Hokum from Germany. Nominally a Death/Thrash band, that doesn’t give anything like the story. Another version is that Hokum are “Progressive diminishing the headbanging factor”. I think you’d need a flexible neck to headbang to this. The problem, or beauty as you prefer, is that “The Creation of Pain” never stays still for any length of time, like a child getting bored with his toys. The opening title track begins robustly and treats us to a Thrashy sound, not miles away from The Haunted, but then I detected some Opeth in there too. There’s a break for a short bass solo, and I was quickly coming to realize that this album doesn’t follow a conventional pattern. The next is a meandering riff pattern that you might associate with melodic Thrash but you wouldn’t normally hear a discordant Hardcore-style chorus to go with it. Nothing is normal here. “Inexorable” mixes growls with that discordant chorus and heavy punchiness. The riff is not similar to Ephel Duath, but it’s more conventional and catchy. There’s a lot of Ephel Duath and Atrox about this in its irregularity and occasional discordance. It’s unusual but held together by a solid rhythm. What I was hearing was a series of movements and passages. “Born from Treason” takes us in some different directions. The deep-growled Rock delivery makes it dark and shadowy. There’s something altogether off-putting about it. In common with much of the album, the guitar work is highly technical and stutters on before somehow transforming itself into a flowing Opeth-style passage. Raucous screams emerge. Again it’s Ephel Duath with coherence. It goes everywhere. The vocals alternate between deep and growling. It’s interesting but you can’t afford to lose concentration in case you miss something. It’s definitely not an album to play as background music. Harshness melts into another super Opeth-style electro-acoustic dreamy passage on “Dead End into Doom” but before I’d had the chance to absorb this one, along comes the more avant-garde Jazz Metal style of “Empery”. So naturally, by the rules of this album at least, this leads into slow and feelingful Doom on “Walking Ghost Phase”. That could never be it of course as Death vocals lead into first a mellow, and then a sophisticated and engaging Prog section before transforming into Doom. “Walking Ghost Phase” is a great track and testimony to the band’s musical skill. It ends with a throbbing ambiance which merges into an acoustic and quietly atmospheric “Blacken”. Harsh vocals are not far away before it steps up in speed and heaviness. A bass solo precedes another twisting guitar section. The album stops, everything goes mad, there’s urgency, there’s a lot of harsh emotion, it’s rampaging, it’s calm, fast and furious and there are many Progressive sections on this album. The band tantalize us before going on to the next passage. There are so many disparate elements that no summary is possible. I can’t say that “Creation of Pain” is easy going but it’s certainly interesting. http://www.myspace.com/hokumheadquarter
http://www.hokum.de
http://www.gooddamnrecords.net