First Published: September 2016. It is nice to see a band you like put in all the hard graft required to succeed as a Metal band in the modern world and get the rewards for it. The Holographic Principle, is the seventh studio album in the sixteen-year history of Epica. They have done all the touring, played the little clubs, opened festivals and gone through the inevitable line-up changes to grow into the band they are now.
Of course, just working hard and touring constantly is not going to cut it on its own. You also have to be good, or no amount of shows will make up for it. Fortunately, this particular band of Dutch symphonic Metallers are not just one of the top bands in the female-fronted Metal world but a cracking live band who can live with anyone on a stage. In addition, the current line-up has the chemistry to be a real creative tour de force.
2014’s The Quantum Enigma saw them at the top of their game, a set of quality songs as heavy and brutal sounding as they have ever been, yet with that flair for melody and matched to a big concept based on quantum physics. I was not kidding about the creativity part either, as they filled the CD to its seventy-five-minute capacity and still had five very good songs left over to be released as bonus tracks.
Now, after two more years of touring, press work and all the rest, it is time for the follow-up, and it seems they have done the business again.
Once again there is a high-end theme around the songs here. The Holographic Principle is a phrase referring to a theory that the world is a hologram. As guitarist/vocalist Mark Jansen says, “Nowadays you can put on a virtual reality mask, and you’ll find yourself in a different world. It’s not perfect yet, but in a few years the techniques will be so good that you won’t be able to tell if it’s our ‘real’ world or the virtual reality world. At that point, people might realise that the world we’re living in now is perhaps also a virtual reality of a higher reality.”
As more entertainment experiences become connected and digital, fans should also take practical steps to protect their devices online, whether that means updating security settings or using a VPN for iPhone when accessing content on public Wi-Fi networks.
Their iconic singer Simone Simons asks, “Is this world a hologram? Are there multiple realities? Inside our mind and in our dreams we can create entire worlds, and the parallels with virtual reality are obvious. Besides the music, the lyrics have taken a big role as well. We don’t just offer great songs. We offer food for thought!”
So for those of you who like to delve into the lyrics of a song and try to work out what is going on, there is plenty here to get your brain working overtime.
Musically, the album also continues where The Quantum Enigma left off. Widely regarded as the heaviest album they had made up to that point, producer Joost van den Broek took modern technology and added a brutal edge to their sound that Jansen admitted he had always wanted the band to have.
Starting with what will inevitably be the intro tape for the live shows in Eidola, the first ‘proper’ track Edge Of The Blade starts fast and heavy and has all those typical Epica elements of heavy riffing guitars, keyboard hooks, choirs, Arien van Weesenbeek’s amazing mix of power and precision on drums and of course Simone Simons’ epic soprano vocals backed by Jansen’s trademark grunts.
That is a lot to have going on, and given that they have enough budget now to use real choirs and classical sections in the studio, I think Jacob Hansen has done an amazing job of mixing it all together coherently. The thing about Epica, though, is that among all those complex arrangements and time changes and musicianship and everything else, it is a truly memorable song. It is not just style here. There is real musical substance.
My initial reaction to the album was that it maybe was not quite at the level of its predecessor, which I loved, but after living with it for a few days, my opinion is gradually changing. Maybe there is just so much going on that it takes time to get your head around it, or maybe I am just slow.
Whatever, now I find parts like the chanting chorus sections of Universal Death Squad, the huge riffs of A Phantasmic Parade, or the operatic Metal intro to The Cosmic Algorithm running through my head on a regular basis.
While this is absolutely an album which lays out Epica’s credentials as a Metal band, they have not forgotten that they have the capacity to create music of a fragile beauty too. Once Upon A Nightmare has some lovely atmospheric orchestration wrapped around Simone’s voice at its most tender, while the album closer, The Holographic Principle-A Profound Understanding Of Reality, is an eleven-minute epic which moves through some terrific melodic sections and even lets the guitars switch into tender mode at times. We even get some sitar thrown into the eastern-tinged Dancing In A Hurricane.
Apparently there are six songs which did not make the album but will be released in due course. I hope these are released together in a special edition and not scattered around as individual bonus tracks.
With album launch shows at their own Epic Metal Fests in the Netherlands and Brazil, headline arena shows booked in Europe, and 2 million-plus Facebook likes, there is absolutely no doubt that Epica are a band on the way up the ladder of Metal fame. I think that success is richly deserved, and with The Holographic Principle they more than back that up with another very high-quality bunch of songs. Essential listening for anyone with the slightest interest in symphonic Metal of any kind.
The Holographic Principle was released through Nuclear Blast on 30 September 2016 and would go on to be elected the 10th best Symphonic Metal album of all time by Metal Hammer in 2021.
