Soulburn
Earthless Pagan Spirit
(Century Media Records)
These gentlemen seem to have had a tough time deciding exactly what kind of moniker they wanted to play music under. They started as Asphyx, then became Soulburn, then went back to Asphyx and back to Soulburn, then they played as To The Gallows before finally separating into both Asphyx and Soulburn (respectively). However, I am not here to review the new Asphyx album Incoming Death even though I thought it was quite strong and would recommend it. As the review marker indicates, I am here to review the new Soulburn and no, they are not the same thing. Soulburn have explicitly separated themselves from the death metal material that these guys perform in Asphyx and have even gone at unexpected great lengths to separate themselves from the black and thrash metal mixtures heavily prevalent on the band’s previous release, The Suffocating Darkness. So what kind of band are you getting this time around, listener? A very different one, willing to add more texture and flair to their tunes than with the previous, which was quite an awesome record in retrospect.
While a bit shorter than the last one, the seven songs that appear here are quite longer than those on the previous record, three of which sit either close to or just past the seven minute mark. The opener “When Splendid Corpses Are Towering Towards The Sun” certainly gives us a performance similar to The Suffocating Darkness and would feel right at home there, for sure. So you can rest easy there. “The Blood Ascendant” changes the whole formula up however, to introduce some fierce bouts of blackened/doom which I certainly won’t say no to. Yeah, I know – black metal purists, right? But this is a rather heavy and incredibly grim track that captures the spirit of blackened doom at it’s apex. You even get some black/thrash infusions that sound far better than anything Metallica has done on the new record thus far. These guys are hugely fond of early Bathory and I’m still getting that here, so hold your horses before you fire off complaints. With the third track in, we’re still getting everything that I feel black metal is and should be, mixed with the right amounts of death and doom metal (Twan Van Geel’s vocal performance alone makes me want to up my own game, that’s how memorable it is) in order to craft a mixture that I feel is the genuine expression of the genre. Alright, I know what you’re saying. So far this sounds rather intriguing. It sounds like a “bad ass” black metal album. Well, it is. The next two tracks don’t sway from the intended approach either, even though the hint of a solo on “Withering Nights” makes me scratch my head a little. It sounds like there was going to be a solo, but Eric Daniels decided to give up on it at the last minute and they didn’t take it out of the mix for some reason. You also get a real pounder in “The Torch” which nearly takes us back to ’96. Listen to Bob Bagchus’s drumwork there and you’ll feel like you’ve been thrown back in time to the days of inverted pentagrams and burning churches. I don’t know about you, but that’s black metal to me.
Instead of sticking to a straight-forward approach, the guys decided to add a bit more doom and death to the mixture, but there’s not so much that I can say in terms of what seem to be sprinkled hints of solo throughout the mix. Again, I have no idea what either Daniels or Remco Kreft were thinking, but if you don’t want to play a guitar solo, then don’t psych me out throughout the record in order to make me assume that you’re going to. There’s even a weird acoustic piece on “Spirited Asunder” that feels like it’s going to erupt into a rather tasteful little solo number, but it never really does and that’s unfortunate. The album also has a filler in it’s three-minute atmosphere/electronic outro that none of us ever asked for, especially some of the elite black metal hordes out there. Some of these guys literally damn synthesizers in black metal, so if you’re one of those guys, just turn the album off after the seventh cut in order to retain your sanity. As not only a reviewer, but a musician; I can say that Earthless Pagan Spirit is an incredible black metal record and it definitely crawled it’s way into the ranks of my favorite black metal albums of the year. If you’re trying to capture a truly grim and evil black metal atmosphere, this is definitely how to do it.
