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SOILWORK - THE PANIC BROADCASTLabel: Nuclear Blast RecordsRelease: 2010 Review Author: Captain Rattlehead |
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I’d once said that of all the bands I ended up checking out on a whim (that is, never hearing of them before and getting one of their albums without any preconceived notions), one of the biggest success stories was SOILWORK. Upon first listen of “Steelbath Suicide” I was more than titillated, but it wasn’t until procurement of “A Predator’s Portrait” and subsequent listens of “The Chainheart Machine” came to be that I’d fully realized the band’s musical brilliance. But as time progressed, variously-sized shits would hit their respective fans, as then came “Natural Born Chaos”, which was great but it would nevertheless signify the band’s creative downfall. The albums that followed started sinking deeper and deeper into the swampy depths of metalcore mediocrity, coming to an absolute point with Peter Wichers’ departure from the group (once you lose one of your best songwriters you know things would end up going to Hell) and the fermented dullness that was “Sworn to a Great Divide”. But now he’s back, and hopefully as a result, good things could come to pass, with this being their first, potential example… One thing is for certain…the modernization that’s been in such high quantities in the albums prior to this is here to stay, it seems, which I understand (but don’t have to like), but thankfully, the UNEARTH rip-off fest that’s envenomed those earlier recordings hasn’t left a lasting effect…at least, as far as I can hear in “The Panic Broadcast”. Instead, all that melody that’s been sadly absent is back, brighter than ever, but in a more progressive way. Like any good Swedish metal act of their caliber, SOILWORK this time around unleash torrents of monstrous and heavy-as-hell thrash riffs that build a strong foundation for the blistering drum beats, goosebumps-inducing harmonic leads, under-mixed keyboards and Speed’s increasingly hardcore shouts and powerful choruses to augment for the better, giving us quite possibly SOILWORK’s best album in these modern years. Taking a big handful of the present-day accessibility of “Figure Number Five” with a few dashes of the tasty melodic tendencies of “Natural Born Chaos” and still being able to showcase that the SOILWORK of old is still in there somewhere, the addictive factor and ability to once again exude unpredictability with the songwriting ensnare the listener from head to toe in those aforementioned positive aspects, with the potential to possibly satisfy the most snarky of one-time Gothenburg aficionados. Rest assured, this will TOTALLY get plenty of listens on my end, as the chaotic likes of “Late for the Kill, Early for the Slaughter”, “Deliverance is Mine” and “King of the Threshold” shove more compositional ideas in their singular forms than many of their contemporaries could in full length albums. In the end this totally blew away all expectations on my end. And now that Mr. Wichers says that there will be “no more line-up changes” (we’ll see about that…), I can only hope that this stylistic trend will continue for as long as they’ll allow it. HIGHLY recommended. http://www.myspace.com/soilwork http://www.nuclearblastusa.com |
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