Soilwork - Verkligheten

The first release by one of the more long-standing bands in metal this year, Soilwork return after nearly four years to remind the world of their significance and mastery of the proggier side of Swedish melodeath with Verkligheten. It’s the band’s eleventh album, and one that comes after a string of confident, strong albums, especially the likes of the massive, The Living Infinite, and even after the understandably long nap following the creation of some of the best work of their career, the band sound as though they are simply tired still. It did really seem like Soilwork put a lot of work into their most recent albums, and Verkligheten plays like the valiant, yet exhausted breaths of a climber coming down from the summit.

Soilwork don’t really bring too much to the table in the way of surprises on Verkligheten, and in terms of style, that’s completely fine; they’ve found their niche and it works well for them. But in terms of structures and writing, it leaves the album feeling much too by-the-numbers much of the time. There are the odd upbeat rockers like the annoyingly poppy choruses of “Witan”, “The Wolves Are Back in Town” and the blast-beat-laden “When the Universe Spoke” to serve as momentary novelty, but these moments only serve to paste Björn Strid’s angelic cleans against the most unfitting melodies and juxtapose them against autopiloted guitar leads until more visceral sections kick in, which never last long enough.

The album’s high points, like the more traditionally melodic and NWOBHM-flavored “The Nurturing Glance” with its slightly more emotive vocal lines on the chorus, or “Needles and Kin” (which sounds like a cross between old-school thrash and Opeth), are enough to save the album from being a grotesque blemish on their creatively vibrant late stage of their career, but little more. The album is caught in either a creative limbo or drought, as little of the album even comes close to the level of majesty that their last few albums have carried. I’d say this is serviceable if it weren’t so patchy, but there’s so much more bland, formulaic songwriting on here to outweigh the band’s fire when it does show up. And when it does, it’s either in small doses or misfired into something that definitely does not compliment their sound and their style. Overall, I just felt so unamused with the strange cobbling together of the band’s sonic staples over structures so predictable that it sounded more like background noise than anything else, and there were just too few songs on here with musical ideas pieced together in a way I could consider kind of enjoyable to look at this album in a positive light. At best it is full of well-performed, but stale melodic death metal with a more upbeat prog side, but at worst it’s a cavalcade of poorly smashed together puzzle pieces that don’t go together thay make for an unflattering portrait of Soilwork.

Chef Boyardee ice cream/10