Review Summary: The Ride Majestic hits higher highs than its predecessor, but ends up as a slightly less satisfying complete package.
Following the second departure of Peter Wichers and the ensuing surprise at the band's effective comeback double album, The Living Infinite, there was naturally some degree of pressure on Soilwork for preparing an album that could compete with its scale and consistency. After all, a double album with arguably the band's catchiest overall writing and their heaviest material since The Chainheart Machine is a massive feat on paper. 2015's The Ride Majestic manages to take something of a step sideways this time, and hits higher highs than its predecessor but ends up lagging behind slightly as a complete package.
Soilwork are still on top form as musicians, with vocalist Bjorn Strid and Dirk Verbeuren being the band's main standout features; Strid's voice seems to have lost little range over the years and is just as refined as on their last album, and Dirk's dense drumming patterns are faster than previously and have an even greater emphasis on blast beats. However, the songwriting style has changed up across the board. The songs themselves are faster and more aggressive on average than the most extreme cuts off The Living Infinite:
Alight in the Aftermath showcases a more dissonant style than on the previous album and perhaps is the real tone setter for the album. The hooks of the tracks are generally more sparsely placed, with most of the choruses being the usual catchy fare but with the verses emphasizing a more complex writing style and heavier riffs. There are also more clean sections in the tracks, in contrast to a lot of Soilwork's other heavy material where the band instead favored chugging grooves and layers of harmonized leads in the verses and pre-choruses.
This leads to mixed pay offs. The consistency of the album is extremely strong and each song has its own highlights, with no real filler on the album. Particular highlights include
Petrichor by Sulphur, with its harmonized lead guitar intro and extremely groovy verse, and the closer
Father and Son, Watching the World Go Down, which features some of the clearest prog influences on the album. This consistency does come at a cost to the overall quality of the album however, and it's largely due to a lack of tonal variation which takes from its pacing. The tracks are all "epic" and feature some of the most grand melodies and extensive dynamic changes from across the band's whole discography, but this leads to the album blending together and lacking any moments of down time. The progressions through the songs are also fairly repetitive and the album never really feels as upbeat and energetic as previously even though the tempos are ramped up considerably.
The lack of variation through the album leads to surprising pacing problems when compared to its predecessor, which had a considerably longer overall runtime and managed to be a more accessible release, largely due to the greater diversity of styles present. In spite of these issues, it's easy to see that Soilwork has the ambition to build on what was already a very strong songwriting foundation, but in order to fully realize it there needs to be a more diverse overall package. Thankfully these are issues that are quite easy to fix, and as such The Ride Majestic leaves a very promising outlook for the band's future in spite of its flaws.
