RESTORATION

After the considerably overrated "The Mountain", Haken released their second EP, "Restoration". It basically sounds the exact same as The Mountain and I'm not joking, all three tracks could've been in that album.

Darkest Light is a generic prog metal tracks that copies Dream Theater WAAAAY too much. Please make something that makes you say "That's Haken!" not "That's Dream Theater!". I simply don't care at all about that track.

Earthlings is a truly beautiful song, it has an amazing build up and, pay attention to what I'm about to say: It's just as long as it deserves to be. I ended up really liking this track and I feel like it's the best work from the album.

That's something I can't say about Crystallized! The closing "epic" is hailed by many as Haken's master work. To me it just proves (along with Visions' title track) that Haken doesn't know how to make epics. An epic is a track that is +20 minutes long because it *needs* to be of that length, otherwise many aspects and sections of the track would go to waste if it got trimmed. Crystallized is a ten minute song overextended to almost twice its length. And I'm very sorry but it just doesn't work. You can tell they had a good concept behind it but was unfortunately ruined when they bloated it. Just, not good.

One Star.