How do you keep things sounding exciting eleven albums into your career? Do you go down the In Flames route and take stab at what you think the kids like these days with the resulting product looking much like you’ve tried to build a house opposite a boat on a river that keeps moving? Or maybe you take the Cannibal Corpse route and release the same album every three years and hope no-one notices? Or do you just create something unapologetically awful born out of obligation and apathy, or a blatant need to line a pocket?
What you should actually do is what Soilwork do. Take the elements that worked for you in the past, combine them with new influences, experience and ideas and release something actually memorable, interesting and enjoyable. Amorphis and Dark Tranquillity fit rather snugly into this bracket too.
Soilwork have evolved constantly and consistently since their inception in the mid-nineties. Emerging at first with a fast-tempo thrashy approach to melodic death metal, transitioning to more palatable alternative metal leaning tropes in the early 2000’s, garnering the band a significant following to continuing to pioneer the same path as In Flames around the same time. 2013’s The Living Infinite saw a reinvigorated line-up and entirely new approach to the classic Soilwork sound; centering on unpredictable song structures, genre-blending antics, contrasting vocals, top-tier musicianship and crisp production, leading it and it’s follow-up, the stunning The Ride Majestic to sound like a bizarre blend of old-school anthemic hard rock, modern progressive metal and old-school thrash-death metal.
I and many others would agree that Soilwork have been creating their best material in recent years. So where does Verkligheten; the bands much anticipated release and longest gap between releases fit on this Swedish flavoured line-graph?
Verkligheten in many ways strikes a resemblance to its two predecessors. The songwriting is fluid and dynamic; the vocals soaring, sing-a-long and catchy as fuck; the chorus’ epic; the solo’s gorgeous; the riffing progressive tinged and anthemic. All the elements that made The Ride Majestic are there, mostly.
I feel that Verkligheten lends itself more heavily towards the ‘hard rock’ vibe of latter-day Soilwork than the progressive melodeath side, and that’s fine because the balance is still just about in check, it’s really up to you as to whether you prefer your Soilwork with more blast beats and tremolo than almost AC/DC reminiscent rock riffs and vice versa. Tracks like “Bleeder Despoiler” and “When the Universe Spoke” are past paced melodeath offerings whilst “Full Moon Shoals” dances through multiple styles and ideas over the course of its run-time. “Stalfagel” introduces synth-edge to the melting pot while late album highlights – the strings dominated “Needles and Kin” and the pop oriented “You Aquiver” add further spice to the eclectic Soilwork pot.
The instrumentation is on fine form as ever, however I feel morally obliged to mentioned new drummer Bastian Thusgaard – whose work with The Arcane Order I particularly enjoy). I feel like he’s tried to distance himself from his predecessors style as much as possible and has played it fairly safe. It’s all there in theory but lacks flair I suppose. I will admit a lot of the criticism of the drumming wouldn’t even be an issue if Thusgaard didn’t have to be compared note for note to Dirk Verbeuren – but one can’t overlook the over-reliance on plodding 16th note kick patterns and find it somewhat grating. It’s by no means a deal-breaker but certainly worth mentioning.
Refined and Consistent would be two words I’d use to sum up the sound Soilwork have opted for on this outing. It’s not necessarily a progression, and in some ways it doesn’t need to be. It does just enough different to work and an abundance of what already made Soilwork great. I doubt it’ll make any news fans but I’m an established fan I think Verkligheten is a beautiful addition to an extensive catalogue of a band producing its finest material twenty years after the first record. 8/10
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