Soen - Lotus

I honestly did not expect another Soen album so soon after Lykaia, especially with the bar the band had set for themselves to live up to with that album. But hey, now Soen has just as many studio albums under their belt as the band they’re so regularly compared with who just can’t seem to get that fifth album finished. I’m still hoping and staying optimistic about finally getting that new Tool album this year; it honestly doesn’t eat away at my soul the way at lot of die-hard Tool fans at least act like it does, but I’d still love to hear it after the decade of teasing. And even then, there’s a part of me that just thinks about just how funny it would be if Soen managed to get their fifth album out first and surpass the size and length of Tool’s studio album discography in half the time we’ve all been waiting for Tool to get their shit together.

But Tool and their artistic/logistic troubles are beside the point; this is about Soen’s fourth album, Lotus. I feel like growing into my appreciation for this album took a lot of time but only a little distance to cover from the ground on which I started with it. I did not like this one at all at first, and I was so disappointed that it had me questioning what I even liked about Soen in the first place. While it’s not too stylistically different from Lykaia, Lotus hits a lot of different high points in its appeal. As varied as Lykaia was, Lotus is able to match that diversity, but somehow without marching the excitement of its predecessor. The album’s adventurousness takes mostly until the second half of the record to show up, and when it does it’s still only minimally, which is part of what left me with such a bad first impression of the album. Before working out the finer details and hearing the album at simply and aesthetic level at first, the first half of it especially sounded so disappointingly recycled, but even with repeated listens, so much of Lotus is just average Soen. Of course, while further time spent with the album gave me a better picture of what was there and helped me fully appreciate it, I’m still left doubting that it was worth it. Lotus isn’t any huge expansion upon Soen’s established Tool-y/Opeth-y sound, and while it is another fine enough example of what the band are capable of doing with the smooth, proggy, classically metallic sound they work with, it really felt like it needed more adventurousness to make it a worthy follow-up to Lykaia.

The opening song, “Opponent”, is a pretty standard cut for the band as far as the structure, melodies, and dynamic shifts used are concerned. It’s a bit of a dry start to the album, but serves well enough as an atmosphere setter for the rest to follow. The next of those songs to follow, “Lascivious”, ups the energy a bit with a tasty little bass groove making the most prominence in the verses and a more soaring vocal melody taking the choruses to those more transcendent heights that Soen do so well with. The song “Covenant” also features some groovy bass work and integration with the tom drum beats, as well as some very Maynard-esque whispered vocals to spice things up with an element of spookiness. I like the increased speed and instumental heaviness of the song “Martyrs” as well, though I wish it was more consistent with it and didn’t fall so frequently back into the band’s typical pacing and mellowness.

The title track is also a bit of a drag of a prog ballad; the restrictive vocal melody and minimal guitar flair do little for me, and the band later do much better with the more soulful ballad “River”. The classic rock styling of the title track really only feels effective when the solo rolls around, and more of timesuck throughout the rest of the song’s duration. The song “Penance” is also a bit of a predictable mellower cut, and one that feels so unnecessary and redundant by the time it arrives. “Rivers”, though, is a much more soulful and ethereal ballad that pulls so much at the heartstrings in an overt way that Soen don’t usually go for, and it actually works pretty magnificently and gets right to all my feelings of self-doubt, uncertainty about my future, and frustration with my life that are just being so wonderfully present right now. Anyway, the song “Rival” is good, heavier change of pace even if it is not the most unique moment on the album.

The closing song, “Lunacy”, ups the prog quite a bit structurally, with a long, more ambient section lengthening the song to eight minutes, but it’s really just another by-the-numbers Soen song after the several preceding it, just stretched out a little farther.

I wanted to like this album a lot more because I like the harder edge Soen can balance with the silky prog rock they play that ushers so many comparisons to Opeth (whose 70’s prog rock fascinations this decade have been quite the frustrating and confusing root of some unnecessary, lackluster work), and in the end I’m disappointed that Soen played this album so safe, but even moreso that this album sounds so cloned. Yes, it has its few moments when the band try something new and off the beaten path, but most of Lotus is that beaten path, and it feels like a familiar trudge down that path more than an exciting revisiting of well-known sounds with which the group show their expertise. That said, even a meh Soen album is still enjoyable enough, but this one sounds like either a rushed project that didn’t get the touching up of finer details it needed or a project without much artistic investment to begin with.

Stranger danger/10