Soilwork – The Living Infinite

February 27, 2013 • Nuclear Blast

Soilwork is a band I've been listening to for a long time (comparatively), since my days as a young metalhead in high school, so they're one of those bands that I'll probably always keep up-to-date with. Like most of their peers in the melodeath scene in the late 2000s, they had a bit of a falling off with some boring and generic releases (though I do still kind of like Stabbing the Drama). Since then melodeath has been more or less a dead horse genre, so I was just as surprised as anyone to hear Soilwork putting out a double album—a bold move for sure. And it's surprisingly pretty good, at that.

Anyone who's heard the band before won't be surprised; their sound is still the same typical melodic death metal they've pretty much always had—intense and fast guitar riffing, cleanly-sung and anthemic choruses, catchy melodies, the occasional blasting away. The real difference between this and the last couple albums is that it sounds like they're actually conscious about the direction they were going in and made a huge effort to turn that around—and it worked. While it's true that there are some slightly weak tracks here (just a couple, though), there's hardly a moment wasted and just about every track is interesting in its own way. While they never stray far from the verse-chorus structure, the riffs themselves are quite satisfying and only rarely sound generic or played-out.

I'm still not a huge fan of their drummer (I almost said "new drummer", but then I realized he's been in the band nearly ten years by now), as he can be a bit overzealous to the point where sometimes it doesn't really fit the style (such as the weird blastbeat and clean vocals section in "Tongue"). And no matter how good your songs are, twenty of them a row can get a bit fatiguing; consequently the album drags a bit near the end. But these are minor complaints, I suppose.

Undoubtedly, part of the reason I enjoy this band is that Soilwork helped considerably to shape my taste in metal music eight or nine years ago, so it comes with a hesitant recommendation. For Soilwork fans, this is definitely a godsend. For general metal fans, it's probably still pretty good. Anyone else understandably won't see a lot of value in it; regardless, for what it's worth, it's an album for the band to be proud of.

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