(DGR finally caught up with the German melodic death metal band Soul Demise via their latest album released this past March by Apostasy Records, and what follows here is his extensive review of that newest record.)
Much of what we do around these here parts is taking bands at first blush. Such is the nature of discovery; we cannot be experts in absolutely everything and were we to trot out the mighty statistics of just how many bands exist across this pale blue dot of ours it would be more of a sermon about being crushed under the weight of inevitability than anything valuable. There is a mammoth amount of music out there, and as self-cast spelunkers we are just as likely to cross a band when they are wee bairns in the musical world as we are to come across a group who are deep in their career.
When such a case does arise, we do try to make an attempt to look backward for context but that can only take one as far as one can be thrown, and the flesh is so spongy and weak these days. Instead, you get that aforementioned first glance at a group – a current-eye snapshot of a band who have enough releases to their name and a lengthy enough career that there are going to justifiably be fans of a group who are mind-boggled that we’re just getting around to them now.
And so we encounter Germany’s Soul Demise, who have existed in their Soul Demise form since 1998 and, barring some lengthy gaps in their recent two releases, were on a pretty consistent clip of music up until 2010. The group’s newest album Against The Abyss is also the first time yours truly has ever crossed paths with them.
Melodeath is a genre that has long ossified into a near crystalline form. It is one whose blueprints, simulacra, and tenets were all laid out decades ago, and since then any aspiring group has had to stretch real hard to make an impact for themselves, especially as the old leviathans have found resurrection in the last few years and eaten just as much of the pie as “newer groups which sound like their influences”. It is a genre constructed of old ghosts, and so any review is going to feel like a multi-directional seance and exorcism at the same time, with many names hovering out of the smoke as we scrye out which groups a band may be reflective of.
Sometimes you find yourself reaching deeper than you might’ve expected and old neurons that haven’t been firing since the early-aughts get to briefly flash back to life again, if not just to remind you how much you devoured a specific genre when you were first coming into your own in the world of heavy metal. Which in a roundabout way brings us to the joys of an album like Soul Demise’s latest release. There isn’t just a shiny-new factor in play here as the band pummel their way through twelve songs but also a joy to be found as Soul Demise bring forth the spirits and spectres of past contemporaries and feed them through the band’s own musical filter.
After an introduction whose main melodic line shows that sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we will unintentionally drift into the same harvesting grounds that Anathema pulled from for Alternative 4, Soul Demise slam on the activation switch as hard as they can for “Destiny’s Edge”. “Destiny’s Edge” has a rapidly picked guitar line whose rhythm turns with the radius of a Tron motorcycle. The sudden jump upwards each time grasps hard at a more grindcore and punk rock fueled era of melodeath, and working in conjunction with vocalist Roman Zimmerhackel’s mid-to-high-range scream can feel like the seven-albums deep German crew are conjuring the spirits of Dimension Zero, near eighteen years after that band’s last recorded output.
Soul Demise aren’t entirely derivative in that sense; it’s more a case of a band having run in multiple shades of the death metal genre long enough to have actual peers who have themselves gone across multiple generations. When keeping things close to the chest and playing what you have learned works best for you over the years, you can’t help but summon up the spectres of a multitude of different projects. Melodeath at this point has had its blueprint effectively laid in stone, and the evolutionary traits that happen over time in a genre seem to appear more often as happy artistic accidents than something someone aimed for when they set out. Soul Demise are not the pushing the boundary on that front. They’ve had six albums prior to Against The Abyss to learn that a solid eleven songs averaging out to a surgical four minutes is the territory in which they’re most at home.
If it isn’t clear by that initial launched salvo, Against The Abyss is going to be a release built out of melodeath staples. Soul Demise offer their own thrashed-out take on it but there’s definitely a sesne of “Hey, I recognize where this one is coming from!” that permeates the whole album. Running through not only their own back-catalog but also perusing a genre as a whole, Soul Demise are serving up a plate of modernized retro-worship that could easily find a home among those of us who have a deep and abiding love for the early-aughts era of melodeath just as the keyboards were starting to creep their way in on the fringes. An era defined just as much by its guitar lead and melody work as it was just how much of a circle-pit and two-step riff a group could serve up.
“Uncharted” and its instantly-hummable mid-tempo stomp and opening leads is a song built for that sort of thing. Soul Demise are practiced workers here and see absolutely no need to re-invent the car when you can also just make a really good version of the car. “Broken Skin” following is an even lengthier take on similar ideas that feels like it is conjuring up the ghost of Soilwork’s Stabbing The Drama release for fun and smashing it through a slightly more ferocious filter. Soul Demise take a well-known and brutal chugging guitar riff and rip it a new one on the vocal front.
That said, one does have a special sort of appreciation for a tactic like dropping a two-minute near-grindcore atom bomb of a song like “Unseen Void” halfway into the album. The efficiency with which that song hits stands in stark contrast to the more indulgent and earworm-worthy pieces that define the first half of Against The Abyss. It’s as if the band, even for all its flamethrowing and molotov cocktail launching and gentle immolation throughout the opening parts of the album, had a meeting and made the call to shock people alive halfway through.
There’s promise of moments like that throughout Against The Abyss as a whole and Soul Demise do make an effort to fold that sort of sound into a block of the songs here. But breaking it out into its own one-dimensional blast of shredded concrete is a welcome offering to carry people into the back half of the album, a part which has Soul Demise again re-establishing a thrashier and adrenaline-fueled take on the more melodic side of melodeath. It’s a song that leaves just as much of an impression as the near seven-minute epic – and granted, part of this is due to some atmospheric scene setting to close out the album – “Veil Of Solitude” at the end of the release.
Against The Abyss is a solid-good-time sort of melodeath album – something of a specialty for Apostasy Records at the moment. It is well constructed and does enough of the dance between past and present to keep you hooked in for the majority of its run time. Many a melodeath release runs the risk of falling into the mundane at times by hewing so close to their initially set-out blueprint that songs start to blur together, and Soul Demise don’t completely dodge the occasional ricochet, but the band throw enough firecrackers into the crowd to shake things up so that said feeling only starts to creep in around the edges.
Is it fathomable that Soul Demise knock down the pillars of the genre and collapse things around them to make a statement? Not really. Instead, what you have is a disk of ruthless precision, almost laser-guided in how accurately it dials in a sped-up and somewhat punk-ified by way of thrash metal version of melodeath. Against The Abyss comprises instant pit-starters as a known quantity. Soul Demise have that sixth sense for understanding what to pull from the musical aether to get people headbanging and largely do so here, in their stunningly straight-firing and excitement-tapping sixth full-length release.
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