Review Summary: The titans finally return. This album is surprisingly and astonishingly good, as though it were a different band altogether playing. Easily their best effort since A Predator's Portrait.
What can I start with? Everyone knows Soilwork, the sellout melodic death metal band gone bad (or nu, your preference). First there was the promising, superheavy debut Steelbath Suicide, then came their peak with The Chainheart Machine. A Predator's Portrait followed, introducing clean vocals but maintaining the overall feel of the music. And then it began, the downward slope, with the terribly overrated yet clearly inferior album Natural Born Chaos. Its followup, Figure Number Five, was their biggest abomination, an ungodly piece of excrement with no right to exist. The next albums, Stabbing the Drama and Sworn to a Great Divide were both a step up from that monster, but still bland, boring, weak and mediocre.
So here we find ourselves, in the year 2010, and Soilwork has just now released their eighth opus, The Panic Broadcast. What are you thinking when you hear that name? Panic? Like Panic! at the disco? Meeh, that's gotta be some metalcore ***, even worse than before. Broadcast? Like on the radio? So they're expecting to play this album on the radio a lot, don't they?
Nothing more incorrect!
I honestly have no idea how could this album have turned out so good, so astonishingly good. Everything that limited Soilwork in the past is gone with the wind - the lack of tempo alterations, gone! The crappy radio-friendly "hit" songs like Stabbing the Drama or Exile - gone! Atmospheric stagnancy and lack of variety - gone! Formulaicness - gone with the wind. Every of these damaging factors has been rejected, making way for an album that screams "inspired" from the very first time you listen to it.
I may be wrong, but my theory is that Peter Wichers returned to the band under the condition "we're not making any more ***ty, mediocre mallcore crap and we're making real quality metal from now on". That has to be the only explanation, well it could also be that the band sold out on purpose to make enough money and fame and just returned to making good music when they thought they were jaded with their artistic prostitution. Whatever the reason was, this album is so much better than anything after A Predator's Portrait it hurts. So much better.
First of all, the songs no longer follow the boring and painfully overused formula of intro, verse, chorus, verse, solo, chorus, outro that plagued Soilwork's creativity for over 8 years now. The songs seem much smoother, at times even kinda Scar Symmetry'ish. Wichers must have been listening to the current MDM scene a lot and I'm getting a strong impression that he sought inspiration in projects featuring Christian Älvestam. This is evident by the absolutely beautiful vocal melodies that riddle this album. Now the slower songs aren't half-assed filler material, they're plain beautiful and interesting like Scar Symmetry's Oscillation Point or Dark Tranquillity's The Mundane And The Magic, to name a few examples.
Now for the astonishment factors.
Factor number one: Strid's vocals. His harshes are more or less back to how they sounded back in A Predator's Portrait days - not exactly growls but not quite the unbearable metalcore screaming he's been doing on FNF-STAGD. A definite plus there. However, the real wonder are his cleans and the melodies that they deliver. Just listen to Two Lives Worth Of Reckoning, Let This River Flow or Night Comes Clean and you'll know what I mean. Strid is still practicing his cleans and his range is steadily expanding, while the voice itself sounds more powerful, full and beautiful than ever. The new guy Lars from Scar Symmetry falls miles short, even Christian himself appeals to me less than Speed did on this album.
Factor number two: The drums. Everybody knows that drums are the thing that make the difference between a sellout metalcore album and a true metal album. Blast beats are featured here and I think it's the first time EVER (the only instance I remember Soilwork using them before was in Blind Eye Halo from Stabbing the Drama, which was kind of a "we made one heavy song on the album, listen and shut up fans" song anyway). The drums are simply astonishing, extra-rapid double bass lines riddle even the slower songs, blast beats surprise you when least expected (their most apparent display is in the opening song, Late For The Kill, Early For The Slaughter) and fills are quite inventive (one from Let This River Flow kinda reminded me of the wicked drumwork from Nonhuman Era from Scar Symmetry's latest album). This, my friends, is metal.
Factor number three: The variety in melodies and tempos. Damn, I swear these guys have been listening to many, many great bands for inspiration. I've never, ever heard riffs like those in e.g. Let This River Flow from Soilwork yet. The album projects an atmosphere that is entirely different from what it was on their previous albums. You just want to listen to this album over and over again, it isn't boring! Sounds like i'm saying banalities here, but isn't that what really matters? Just compare the intro track to the song Epitome. I've never yet heard a slow AND heavy song by Soilwork with a beautiful chorus melody to boot. This time they've made eleven unique and interesting tracks instead of 2 "hit" tracks and 9 fillers.
Factor number four: Guitar shredding. Dirk Verbeuren and Peter Wichers return to some insane shredding on this album. Although not as flamboyant as Per Nilsson's shredding, the solos are of Chainheart Machine quality. 'Nuff said.
Ok, to summarize I'd like to apologize for making Scar Symmetry a benchmark for Soilwork at every step. I'm a great fan of that band and I've considered them vastly superior to Soilwork's mediocre late efforts. But this album has seriously made me think that Soilwork can now be fairly compared to Scar Symmetry and even draw a positive comparison. As an entirety, The Panic Broadcast is definitely a better album than Dark Matter Dimensions by Scar Symmetry and For Aeons Past by Solution .45. Yes, that's how good it is. The form of this review is a testament to my astonishment and surprise, as normally I'm not as emotional about music. But these guys have finally made a "good" album. Not a mediocre one, but a damn good one. Really, really good. And what is the most important - metal. This deserves applause. You need to buy this album.
PROS:
- Finally there's variety, the thing that Soilwork was always lacking. Melodic, rhytmic and atmospheric variety.
- Clearly an inspired album.
- Absolutely beautiful melodic and vocal lines. "Beautiful" Soilwork? Believe it!
- Top notch musicianship, especially the guitar leads not falling short to those from The Chainheart Machine.
- Prolific intense metal drumming which keeps this album heavy as it should be.
- Keyboards are limited to making backgrounds again.
- No radio-friendly songs like urgh... Exile. Fast songs ain't half-assed and slow songs don't lose the heavy.
CONS:
NONE
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