Texas songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard pushed life to the margin and lived to sing about it. In the process, his songs now possess the tenderness of a poet, the empathy of a historian, and the raw nerve of a card shark. On 2009’s A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C), he adds "mythmaker" to his songwriting qualities. Hubbard strips his music to the bone here, and uses the Mississippi Delta blues tradition to his own ends. His music is raw yet utterly contemporary and crafted. Snarling acoustic, slide, and electric guitars played bottleneck style, dirty mandolins, pots, pans, stomp boxes, basses, organs, harmoniums, drums, rattles, shakers, and tambourines are the instruments that fuel this impressive collection.
Like fine wine, progressive rock bands normally require years of careful fermentation before maturing into a great vintage, so it's shocking, bordering on unbelievable, when a brand new group hits the scene so fully formed as did Britain's Haken. Indeed, Haken's 2010 debut, Aquarius, landed just two years after the sextet's initial creation, and yet the breathtaking scope of its ambitions, stylistic hybridization, and sheer instrumental skill suggest entire decades of accumulated experience between those involved. Just picture Dream Theater dabbling in harsher heavy metal ingredients (death metal vocals, mainly), as well as the fearless excess of poetic ‘70s prog rock originals Genesis and the classically inclined Kansas, and let the music flesh out the resulting mental canvas…