You recorded Övergivenheten AND COMPLETELY REDEEMED YOURSELVES! However, guys, don’t start patting yourselves on the back quite yet. SIT BACK DOWN. We’re going to do a little exercise called the “Compliment Sandwich,” which means we’ll have some nice buns. Stop snickering, David! Yeah, I know… “Buns” is a synonym for butt. I get it. We’ll have some meat in the middle… God damn it, Rasmus! Not that kind of meat! Some fine buns sandwiching the meat. I don’t see what’s funny, guys. Anyway, we’ll start with the bottom bun, the logical one with which to start to build a sandwich.

So, the first bun is the good, maybe even great. These are some of the catchiest songs and refrains you gentleman have ever written. The title track is the first one, which has an extended intro, including some banjo (I think), and when the verse melody comes in the guitar sort of mimics it. The chorus here is quite good as your range, Bjorn, continues to improve. Stop bowing.

In track 3, “Electric Again” stands out as possibly the best chorus in the first half of the album, until “Is It in Your Darkness,” track 5 usurps it. This chorus has more of a half sung/half screamed hook, as well as some screams. It’s also comparatively short to several other numbers and therefore has an urgency to it. This feels like an album of the year contender, and we’re not even halfway it, but then…

Here’s, however, that not-so-tasty meat in the center. This album is slightly over an hour long. 14 tracks, although two are interludes, and guys, it’s just unnecessary. You caught lightning in a bottle with a double album in The Living Infinite, despite the fact that none of it was what you would call incredibly adventurous, it somehow WORKED. A couple albums later, the formula, gentlemen, remains the same, which makes me think we don’t need an hour of it.

However, the second half of the album kicks off with an absolute banger called “Death, I Hear You Calling.” We’ll call the second half the top bun. With some excellent chorus vocals, including a falsetto in the background, I really like this track. It does have some vibes before the solo like this could be a The Night Flight Orchestra song, and the solo itself doesn’t exactly change that.

After a brief piano intro, “This Godless Universe,” which is the next track, kicks off with a mellow death melody (get it). This is quite possibly the heaviest track on the album with blasts in the pre-chorus, as well as the chorus itself. There’s a little experimentation here as some strings pop up in the background, but aren’t greatly emphasized, which is a shame.

Since this is running long, much like the entire album, I’ll speak of the closing track, which of course is the longest, “On the Wings of a Goddess Through Flaming Sheets of Rain.” It begins with some light keys and some female spoken word vocals, which I can’t understand because I don’t speak the language. Once again, some orchestral elements pop up in the background throughout but are difficult to catch. In the last 2 minutes, they take hold and are prominent before slower bridge, which could be mistaken for doom. With a minute left, the keys fade out and it sounds like the end, but the music comes back for one final solo.

Despite my musings, this is a banger, but not necessarily a return to form because they never strayed. Sure, we don’t exactly need 65 minutes of new material and a couple of tracks could be cut. However, this 65-minutes doesn’t all feel long, which is an achievement in this day and age with poor attention spans, myself included. However, I keep coming back to the album and listening. I pre-ordered it, and if you’re into Soilwork even a little, I have a difficult time believing you’ll find fault with this one. Go pick it up! Now, guys, let’s talk about that “Grilling the Drama” merch collection…

Soilwork themselves call this EP their “most daring and pretentious release to this date.” Pretentious, huh? If you search out the philosophical concepts of the lyrics, you can decide for yourself (though I will say that spelling the title with “Whisp” instead of “Wisp” is odd). Musically though, it’s not pretentious at all – but it is a grander canvas and more diverse palette than we’ve heard from the band before.

Now, it’s too easy to just say that the 16-minute title track automatically qualifies as prog. Not quite. It doesn’t feature a lot of the noodly time-signature gymnastics that usually come with the genre, but “A Whisp of the Atlantic” is a multi-part composition. It’s got shifting moods and pacing and textures – everything from blistering battery to lurching stomp to moody interludes. It’s just less Yes, and more Alan Parsons Project (side B of The Turn of a Friendly Card, in particular).

Onto those new elements: I love the wistful piano-driven intro, later repeated in the song’s final moments. Piano also continues on through much of the song as a pounding heartbeat, and it works well to offset the more muscular guitars. Speed also explores a variety of vocals, with a more theatrical and varied delivery than usual. There’s a restrained croon, a hoarse rasp, and a growl that’s more layered and guttural than his normal roars. I think some of these new tricks are more successful than others, but thankfully his powerful cleans are as rousing as ever.

And then there’s the brooding jazz-noir midsection, easily the most adventurous and surprising thing we’ve heard from the band. There’ve been saxophones in metal before (avant-garde black metal from Oblomov, Ihsahn, and Leprous), but a trumpet solo? That’s new. The only thing here that’s really jarring is the skrawky guitar solo around the 5 minute mark – I find that whole passage to be jangly and cacophonous, but it’s also short-lived and we move back into a smoother section before long.

As for the other tracks, they’re all good solid modern Soilwork tracks: heavy and melodic and well-crafted and it’s great to have them all packaged up together. “The Nothingness and the Devil” is a propulsive burner with a slightly mournful screamed chorus that could have been included on The Ride Majestic. It’s also noteworthy for its moody Pink Floyd-inspired outro, with long, sustained guitar notes that could have come from a David Gilmour guest spot.

“Feverish” is ragged and relentless, the most aggressive thing here. The hyperspeed, blastbeating pace – which continues even below the hooky chorus – gives drummer Bastian Thusgaard a chance to really stretch his legs. However, the repeated bellowing of “Feverish like this!” throughout the verses and choruses grates on my nerves. (It’s probably going to get skipped more often than not when I put this EP on.)

I like “Desperado” a hell of a lot better – it’s got a killer central riff, a memorable chorus, and a faintly detectable but still furious undercurrent of strings. Nice touch. And finally, we have a great closer in “Death Diviner” – it’s more mid-paced than the others, but I love the interplay of Speeds’s clean verses and the hypnotic, repeating circular riff. Another huge heroic chorus too. Would not have been out of place on Verkligheten, in fact I prefer it to a few of that album’s cuts (and that was my #1 album of 2019, so that’s saying something). 

So all in all, shit year in general, unexpectedly good year for Soilwork fans. Their expanded palette shows real creativity and ingenuity in an often staid genre, and I hope that the ambitious, multi-part title track is a portent of things to come in 2021 and beyond.  

Soilwork has made that look easy once again. The Living Infinite was a quantum leap forward for the band, and The Ride Majestic was equally as incredible. And now here’s Verkligheten (Swedish for ‘reality’), and it’s so good, you’d think it just emerged from the band’s hands, throat, and instruments fully-formed and flawless.

Take the first single “Arrival,” easily one of the fastest and most relentless things Soilwork has ever done, and a perfectly balanced exercise of excess and control. Shimmering notes ring through thunderous double-bass, guitar fragments twist and shine through the wreckage, and Speed attacks the verses with snarls and growls before soaring to a monster chorus. Cap it off with some synth-led grandeur in the bridge and then two glorious back-to-back solos and you’ve got one of Soilwork’s all-time best and brightest songs. 

The blazing speed continues later with “When the Universe Spoke,” and then if you want to hear something really fast, check out the second half of the album’s sole ‘ballad,’ “Full Moon Shoals.” It starts as a mid-tempo crooner like “Death in General” from The Ride Majestic or “Antidote in Passing” from The Living Infinite II, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. That supersonic speed, by the way, comes courtesy of Soilwork’s new drummer, 26-year old Bastian Thusgaard. Dirk Verbeuren was fantastic, and it will be interesting to see what he brings to Megadeth now, but this new guy is superhuman and Soilwork has definitely put him to excellent use.

As on the past three albums, the band is unafraid to change their approach from track to track, and yet it’s all 100% Soilwork. Sometimes you get propulsive, driving rhythms and aching, anthemic choruses, as on “The Ageless Whisper” or “Stålfågel,” with guest cleans and snarls from Arch Enemy‘s Alissa White-Gluz. Other tracks like “Bleeder/Despoiler” and “Witan” have big, swinging riffs, screamed verses, but their choruses are clean-sung and rousing. We get more guest roars on the muscular and melancholy “Needles and Kin” – yep, that’s Tomi Joutsen from Amorphis (hopefully he joins in on that song during their co-headlining European tour with Soilwork). Both “The Wolves are Back in Town” and “You Aquiver” are the most pop-friendly and accessible, while “The Nurturing Glance” is the best of both worlds. It combines hard rock groove and jamming piano with growls and melodeath – it’s basically Soilwork doing The Night Flight Orchestra (Speed’s other band), and I’d love a whole album just like it.  There’s not an off moment on all of Verkligheten, and the addictive melodies and frequent switch-ups keep things exciting and entertaining. 

In fact, in the 25 years since the dawn of melodic death metal (those first screaming sonatas by In Flames, At the Gates, and Dark Tranquillity), I don’t know of any other band who has taken the genre quite as far. Or who’s figured out how to deftly straddle the divide between underground extremity and mainstream melodic appeal without losing their identity in the process. And if you go by the aggressive, ambitious, and hugely satisfying collection of songs on this album, Soilwork has done so while somehow raising the intensity at the same time. 

Like I said. Masters of their craft.

Well, now the rest of us get to hear that EP, plus a bunch of other hidden gems. Two of the tracks on Death Resonance, including the title track, are brand-new. Then we work backwards through bonus tracks (again, mostly from Japan-only releases) from The Ride Majestic back through Stabbing the Drama.

“Helsinki” starts off lurching and speedy, crests to a huge, soaring chorus, and boasts a sparkling bridge and solo. Yeah that’s pretty much modern-day Soilwork in a nutshell, but it’s so good it could have easily been included on The Ride Majestic. There are also some buried synths/orchestration throughout “Helsinki” that might just be an experiment, or a hint at a broader palette for the next album. “Death Resonance” is a slower, more swinging track with some nifty organs as background coloration. Good chorus and big crescendoes too, so it’s another keeper. There’s also one more add-on from TRM, a bonus track called “The End Begins Below the Surface.” I’m actually fine with this having been Japan-only, as it’s a weird one. The thrashy verses and clipped shouts sound like a throwback to the early albums, but the lurching and unappealing melody in the chorus makes this a skipper for me.

Luckily, Beyond the Infinite’s five tracks are all entertaining and pummelling, and two of them are so good, like “Helsinki,” that they also should have been on their parent album, The Living Infinite. Seriously, either the band wrote “Forever Lost in Vain” after TLI was already wrapped, or someone had to lobby really hard for it to stay off the double album, which was already jam-packed with incredible material. The second half of that song alone is the best thing on “Death Resonance” and one of my favorite Soilwork moments ever. (Hell, it’s the best Tool anything you’ve heard in over a decade.) “My Nerves, Your Everyday Tool,” with its ear-candy chorus, is pretty damn amazing as well.

After the Beyond the Infinite tracks, we move back to The Panic Broadcast, and if you are a longtime Soilwork fan, you may share my opinion that this is when the band got good again. Sworn to a Great Divide and Stabbing the Drama are fine now that I go back to them, but at the time I was disappointed – they weren’t as arresting, catchy, or fun as Natural Born Chaos or Figure Number Five (let alone their classic melodeath sound from the late 90s). It wasn’t until The Panic Broadcast that I felt a revived energy in Soilwork’s writing and sound again, and bonus track “Sweet Demise” is another strong case for that. It’s also particularly notable for its dreamy bridge, with Speed affecting a breathy murmur that I haven’t really heard since. The other TPB bonus track, “Sadistic Lullabye” isn’t new at all, but a re-recording of the second track off of Steelbath Suicide. As such, it’s rapid-fire melodic death with a shouted chorus that is different and less colorful than what the band writes now, but it’s still a killer example of their early sound.

The final five tracks come from Stabbing and Sworn, and as I hinted at before, they are a bit of a mixed bag. I tend to expect great choruses from everything that Soilwork do these days – guess we’ve been spoiled. So tracks like the shouty “Sovereign,” with its flat, forgettable chorus, or the vaguely nu-metal “Wherever Thorns May Grow,” just pass into one ear and out the other. “Martyr” and “Killed by Ignition” fare much better, with compelling melodies and good choruses. “Martyr” even flirts with some spacey synths, which I haven’t heard much in later material but would welcome again.

If you’re even a casual Soilwork fan, this is a must-listen, as there’s enough strong material to make a melodic death album that an average band would be thrilled to have produced. “Forever Lost in Vain” and “Helsinki” are also worth the entry fee alone, giving me continued hope for the next amazing album – but let’s face it, given the stellar streak that Soilwork has been on for the past 5 years, I hadn’t lost any in the first place.

Soilwork have returned with their strongest release to date, and they’ve done it with a double album. This means they’ve just topped themselves – and likely the rest of the entire melodeath genre – twice. These two albums coalesce everything that’s always been dazzling about Soilwork, from the early shredfest barrage of Steelbath Suicide and The Chainheart Machine, to their prescient inclusion of soaring and anthemic clean choruses on A Predator’s Portrait, Natural Born Chaos and Figure Number Five. Those albums are considered by many to be the band’s peak, but not so anymore – The Living Infinite exists in some rarified heavenly plane far above that. It’s a culmination of everything the band has learned so far, clarified into two discs of brilliant songwriting, vicious energy and virtuoso musicianship.

Remember when you first heard that keyboard-fueled clean chorus in “As We Speak” (from 2002’s Natural Born Chaos)? It was simultaneously aggressive and gorgeous, and I still recall a mixture of awe and excitement because it wasn’t just fresh, it was transcendent. Well, this pair of albums captures that lightning in a bottle and then uses it to flash-fry your ears again and again with a rhapsodic blend of melodic death and progressive metal, purified and crystallized into hyper-addictive ear candy.

Disc 1 is more muscular and groove-oriented, and disc 2 is a bit more progressive and layered, and each features 10 catchy, twisty Soilwork scorchers. No fat, no filler, just solid muscle. (Well, all but the last track on disc 2 which is kind of a downer, but still, 19/20 is a hell of a score for any band).

“Spectrum of Eternity” starts the assault with an exhilarating blastbeat and equally thrilling chorus. Ultra-melodic monsters like “This Momentary Bliss,” “Long Live the Misanthrope,” “Drowning with Sorrow,” “Vesta,” “Realm of the Wasted” and “Rise Above the Sentiment” take hold with gleaming, hook-filled singalong choruses, each designed to burrow into your brain and erase anything you’ve ever heard from other bands like Scar Symmetry or Arch Enemy, let alone In Flames (now a shadow of a shadow of their former selves). Knuckle-breaking gallops exchange rhythms with massive grooves in “Leech,” “Let the First Wave Rise,” “Parasite Blues” and “Tongue.” Both of the title tracks are just flat-out amazing. There’s even a gorgeous, mellotron-infused ballad in “Antidotes in Passing,” which is the best Opeth track I’ve heard since “Burden” off of Watershed (yes, that includes the entirety of Heritage). I’ve been listening to the albums non-stop for the past week and I still can’t really pick favorites. They’re all just so damn fantastic.

Each member of the band sounds as if he’s been lit from within by divine inspiration. Guitars (Sylvain Coudret and newcomer David Andersson) are full of bluesy and bludgeoning power, with leadwork and soloing that’s near-baroque in its intricacy. Longtime bassist Ola Flink and drummer Dirk Verbeuren handle their rhythmic battery with grace and fluidity – the equivalent of steering a locomotive like a high-performance sportscar. And Sven Karlsson has been completely unleashed on this album, from tasteful up-front synth lines on many of the tracks to rippling, progressive duets with the guitar solos to a near-constant foundation of glorious Hammond organ throughout both discs.

As always, the songs’ main vocals are an endless eruption of Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid’s throaty growls, roars, shouts and screams, but now these are layered beneath many of the clean choruses as well. There are even stunning cleans against pummeling blastbeats in “Let the First Wave Ride,” more of that please. Almost every track features a massive hooky clean chorus, but many have equally delicious pre-choruses as well. These songs are so dynamic and varied that Speed has many opportunities to stretch, play and soar, and he charges every moment full of passion and fury. It’s a career-topping performance, and although Speed was already one of my favorite metal vocalists, The Living Infinite cements him as one of the best and most versatile metal vocalists on the planet. Christian Alvestam who?

The big question here is what, if any, involvement Peter Wichers had with the creation of this masterpiece. Wichers was one of Soilwork‘s chief songwriters, and after the Wichers-less Sworn to a Great Divide, I had to assume his return was a big part of why The Panic Broadcast was such a promising return to form. However, he left again – this time, for good – before The Living Infinite, citing family concerns and “creative differences.” Whatever he had in mind, I can’t see how it could have been better for the band than what they’ve turned out in his absence. I’m not as confident with this guess as I was when Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater, which (in my estimation) gave the band a creative reset and resulted in their finest hour in more than a decade (A Dramatic Turn of Events). Still, it does make you wonder where the disconnect was behind the band’s closed doors.

No matter though, as any discord there resulted in an absolute treat for the rest of us. The songwriting is so effortless and excellent on The Living Infinite, so elevated above their previous output, it’s almost as if the band traveled far into the future and returned with Soilwork‘s Greatest Hits to share with you now in 2013. Or rather, given the stellar output of the band’s earlier releases, The Living Infinite could be considered their Greatest Hits 2 and 3.

I just recently went through the exercise of picking my top metal albums of 2012, and although there were a ton of high-quality, exciting and artistically respectable albums, nothing really set me on fire the way The Living Infinite does. I love these albums. They’re a double-dose of pure metal pleasure, and a phenomenal leap forward for the band. At this point, they’re also the two albums to beat at the end of the year.

Opener “Late for the Kill, Early for the Slaughter” is the fastest, most relentless thing they’ve done in a long time, and from that very first blastbeat, it’s clear that Soilwork wants you to forget about Sworn to a Great Divide. They want you to forget that Peter Wichers ever left the band, or that Ola Frenning pushed them towards a more mainstream-friendly and simplified sound. They want you to forget that they tried to be an American metalcore band for awhile. But most of all, they want you to remember that they’re still Swedish, which means that they can still put out some really entertaining and explosive melodic death metal.

And with the second track, “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning,” you’ll fucking remember, all right, because this is easily the best song Soilwork has written in years. Pummeling, syncopated awesomeness, gorgeous soloing and a massive, hooky and unabashedly poppy chorus that’ll get stuck in your head so deep, you’ll need a crowbar to pry it out. To be clear, this isn’t a return to the sleek, ripping sound of Steelbath Suicide or The Chainheart Machine – those of you that didn’t like the full-on embrace of clean-sung choruses on Natural Born Chaos or Figure Number Five won’t enjoy this either, but for the rest of us, crank the volume all the way up and enjoy.

The rest of the album continues in similar energetic fashion, from the ballsy, bluesy swagger of “The Thrill” to the lurching groove of “Night Comes Clean,” to the punchy attack of “Enter Dog of Pavlov.” “Let This River Flow” is another standout track that opens with a beautiful lilting melody and builds to another soaring chorus. There’s even an unexpected-but-successful experiment, a la Figure Number Five‘s “Departure Plan,” with the Alice in Chains-inspired “Epitome.”

Overall, the verses on every track are thick and groovy, but “Reckoning” aside, the choruses just aren’t as appealing as past highlights like “Rejection Role,” “Distortion Sleep” or “Follow the Hollow”. This is particularly problematic on tracks like “Late for the Kill” or “King of the Threshold,” which employ screamed choruses that make a nod to the earlier, no-clean-vox albums. I find these choruses much less successful here, though – Strid sounds unnaturally strained on “Late for the Kill,” and “Threshold” tries this odd, semi-melodic screaming thing that probably should have just been another big clean-sung melody.

I’ve been a Soilwork fan for a long time (hell, I even put the track “Natural Born Chaos” on the soundtrack of my third videogame project, Splashdown: Rides Gone Wild, for the PS2), and so it’s great to hear the band back in form after the last two unexciting albums. If I had to slot this in somewhere, I think I’d still rank A Predator’s Portait and Figure Number Five higher, and put this on par with Natural Born Chaos. Maybe if the entire album was as infectious as “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning,” I might have soiled myself a bit more. But still, many bands would be lucky to follow up a mediocre release with such an energetic return, and so that makes The Panic Broadcast worth tuning into for longtime fans and newcomers alike.

Sworn to a Great Divide marks yet another direction for the band. This record is way more melodic than anything the band has done before. Melodic in the sense of vocals, that is. Bjorn “Speed” Strid has morphed his clean sung choruses into well-written quality material. Over the years I have heard the man try to capture something with his current vocal approach, but nothing really grabbed me. What you will hear on Sworn to a Great Divide are professional, well-written choruses. Its funny this came from a man who we never knew could do anything but scream. Kudos! Speed has been determined over the past 5 records to turn his vocals into something appropriate for the times. Sworn to a great Divide showcases his efforts very nicely and makes him the standout musician of the entire release.

Although we are dealing with a totally different band these days, new drummer and guitar player, the old Soilwork guitar tone will never change. Especially when it comes to lead man Ola Frenning on guitar. There’s a flavor that has been following his fingers for years and it is drilled into their sound. Ola is showing off his better licks on this record as well. Along with main man Speed’s upper hand, Ola’s years of experience are proving not to be messed with. The band has maneuvered their sound in to a more progressive sound. We aren’t dealing with a straight melodic death band anymore. Today’s Soilwork would fit the bill with bands like Nevermore and Opeth. Songs like “Light Discovering Darkness” and “Your Beloved Scapegoat” are just some of the tunes that trend on crossover material.

The heavy is still in tack as well. Blast beats appear on numerous tracks, “The Pittsburg Syndrome,” and guttural is something Speed has only gotten better at. “I Vermin” and “As the Sleeper Awakes” both are pissed off efforts as well. The songs get better and better as the CD goes and there’s not a dull moment from what I hear.

All in all, when it comes to Soilwork they have been treading water for sometime now and it’s a breathe of fresh air to hear this type of record from them. Those looking for quality music from one of today’s heavy hitters look no further. Soilwork may not be what we once knew, but they are determined to stay on top and with a release like this we surely cannot argue.