Anyway, with HIDDEN the first thing that absolutely captured me was the beautiful cover by Jean-Pascal Fournier. For "Spectral Magnitude" he has gone space on us and even though purple is not really my colour, the artwork displays a kind of majestic beauty that has to be beheld…

Ok, cover is fine, but only too often the music contained cannot compete with this and in the case of HIDDEN we get Black Metal with really spacy lyrics. No, it is not spacy Black Metal, because musically this, ehm, well, I will just call it "band", offers us at times pretty technical, sometimes doomy Black Metal that has quite a wide range of melodies, never drifting into Gothic Black though or anything, but keeping a good amount of heaviness in it still, especially the vocals being the definitive link to it.

The songs, as said, always are Black Metal, but the influences that shine through, here it is almost BLACK SABBATH-y Doom (like on "Formation Of The Universe"), there traditional Heavy Metal riffing (especially the beginning of "Spectral Magnitude" sounds as if it came straight from the Eighties), then a really calm and atmospheric passage, everything interspersed with fast to very fast parts. The only thing that does not vary is the voice, which always is a pure, raspy Black Metal croak, staying close to the foundation of HIDDEN's sound.

The basics are there, no question, the potential is showing within the compositions, but there still is quite some room for improvement, but we should still keep in mind that this is the debut of HIDDEN, so with some time there should be quite something to be expected from the guys (or are they girls? I hate it, when I do not know anything about a band…). (Online December 21, 2002)