In 2021, Hundred Headless Horsemen released their debut album, ‘Apokalepsia’, and then in 2022 released an additional version as an audio book. Apparently this is a prequel to the full album, and the spoken words were originally presented as text. The result is a science fiction tale, set at some point in the future. It is reminiscent in many ways of the albums of Hibernal, with music which is intertwined with the words so that together the form a cogent whole and it is difficult to imagine one without the other. However, here the synths are performed in such a way that while the words could stand on their own it is difficult to imagine the music being able to do so. They manage to capture the dystopian feeling which is so prevalent in the works of Gridfailure, yet the storytelling is not nearly as powerful as I would have liked it to be.
It contains eight songs, and is just 25 minutes in length, and feels incomplete in many ways. Capturing a story in this format is incredibly difficult, as the word count is so small, and this Finnish band have not managed to bring in enough detail to make it interesting. They describe their music as Psychedelic death metal, and I am not sure exactly what that means, but I would have thought we have heard some devastating guitars, but they appear to be missing altogether. Overall this is an interlude, a taster, but there means to be far more substance for it to be something to which I will return.
Rating: 6/10
