THE HAUNTED: The Dead Eye

Produced by Tue Madsen and The Haunted

Released: 2006

When this fifh album by The Haunted first lobbed there was a lot of conflicting opinion and almost immediately, when the band slowed down during "The Flood" and Peter Dolving started crooning like Eddie Vedder, I knew why The Dead Eye had polarised opinion. On the one hand, this is a remarkable album so different from anything The Haunted had ever done that the band should be applauded for even attempting it. On the flipside, it's so different from anything they'd done before that you're left wondering what the hell they were thinking. Had this been their first album it could well have been a different story, but The Dead Eye is The Haunted's fifth. After four albums, a band's fanbase can reasonably expect any album that follows to be reasonably similar to the ones before. After all, that's usually why people like a particular artist in the first place. Throwing out a curve ball can be a career-damaging move.

Throughout The Dead Eye, Peter Dolving wears a variety of vocal guises and more than once proves himself to be a fairly noteworthy mimic. There's the aforementioned Vedder reference, a hint of Aaron Stainthorpe in "The Fallout" and in the eerie coda of "The Guilt Trip" even an allusion to Thom Yorke. This is assuredly the most noticeable aspect of the album and it certainly feels as if this is very much Dolving's record, with the song structures deliberately determined by his varying voices, be it a rasping scream, a mellow croon or a frantic whisper. Musically there's a clear emphasis on riffing over soloing, something that many would undoubtedly suggest puts this into the dreaded realm of metalcore, but The Dead Eye is simply too diverse and interesting for that. Past albums have shown that this band is more than able to do the standard Swedish melodic death/thrash thing rather well; The Dead Eye shows that they can also do other things.

This is still very much a metal record, and was perhaps one of the best metal releases of 2006, but its unexpected direction and progressive and experimental nature caused a lot of people who just wanted The Haunted to stay as they were to accuse them of all kinds of things from selling-out to band-wagon jumping. Like all bands that change horses midstream, The Haunted found themselves in the interesting quandary of having made an excellent album that much of their fanbase - rather unfairly - hated.

Whatever one thinks of it The Dead Eye removed any preconceptions about The Haunted, possibly for good.

1. The Premonition


2. The Flood


3. The Medication


4. The Drowning


5. The Reflection


6. The Prosecution


7. The Fallout


8. The Medusa


9. The Shifter


10. The Cynic


11. The Failure


12. The Stain


13. The Guilt Trip

Rating: 93%