Soilwork – Natural Born Chaos

March 25, 2002 • Nuclear Blast

Time for another trip down memory lane, this time all the way back to high school in 2004 or maybe 2005. I was finally starting to expand my metal horizons besides whatever garbage was on the radio (okay, yes, it was a slow process) and I had a friend or two who were into some good stuff (what passed for good stuff at the time). Natural Born Chaos blew my little mind at the time—or maybe that was just because of how loud my friend played it in his car.

Anyway.

Like every melodic death metal band who was around in the mid-2000s, Soilwork was a very silly band and this is some pretty silly music. The melodic-ness is laid on really thick for the most part—lots of harmonized vocal hooks, cheesy synths, relatively cliché chord progressions and such. That said, they do manage to write a few good riffs and when they decide to get actually heavy (e.g. "Follow the Hollow") it's actually some pretty good material. Maybe not enough actually-good material to fill ten songs, but it gets close. And even I have to admit that the technical aspect of this album is pretty good. The drumming is satisfying, the mix is nice and punchy—heck, even the guitar solos are pretty good and I usually don't care much about guitar solos.

Then again, there's a big nostalgia factor here. When I first heard this album, it was when I actually had time to read and remember the lyrics, and quite a few of these songs I still know how to play on bass. These melodies and riffs are etched in my brain forever. Had I first heard of this album today, I probably would be entertained for a while and then forget it shortly after, but as it stands I can't not enjoy it.

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.

7

Ära Krâ – Ferne Tage

April 15, 2011 • self-released

Ära Krâ is a tough band to review—they're another group I really don't know much about, just another 2012 metal release on my radar and I have tons of those. This one doesn't impress me terribly much, though it isn't horrible.

Ferne Tage has a very interesting sound—it's definitely metal of some sort, but takes influences from all over the map: melodic death metal and black metal are most prominent. They manage to fuse them pretty effectively, and sound decent while doing so. The drumming ranges from slow deliberate beats to blasting, sometimes in the same song; the guitars are very expressive and have a lot of really nice riffs. I dislike the vocals though; the vocalist is always doing this mid-range scream (that sounds a bit like the Dillinger Escape Plan) no matter what the rest of the band is doing. It gets old fast.

It's an interesting album and, if nothing else, relatively unique. However it's not terribly interesting to me—at least, after several listens I'm not really inclined to ever hear it again. It's just another metal album, really.

5