Soulsick – Symptoms of a Dying World

Picking your first review back from holiday should be hard. The selection should be endless and the competition stiff. All of that was the case, but in the end, the choice was easy. I didn’t feel like going the safe route, I felt like challenging myself. Enter Soulsick.

I’ve got a soft spot for Northern Norway, and these guys from Tromsø and Honningsvåg bring a lot of creative excitement to the table. I’ve not, however, got a soft spot for any type of core-music, whether that’s math, death, grind or metal. All the screaming, all the hyperactive noise, only to squeeze in some cheesy pop vocals? What’s the point? That’s a solid intro for the metalcore band you’re about to read about, right?

Because that is what’s in front of us today: metalcore. The “home” of Converge, The Dillinger Escape Plan and a host of bands that never lived up to the hype. Great metalcore is inventive, intense and chaotic in the best way possible. Mediocre metalcore is worse than radio music.

Soulsick have yet to establish themselves, but these guys actively state that they draw from various core-genres, as well as prog, techno and Norwegian Black Metal and that’s eclectic enough to have me really excited. They open up their debut album Symptoms of a Dying World with an atmospheric electro piece that lasts little over a minute. It creates anticipation, and it sows the seeds of Slipknot and the Prodigy before moving on to “VIOLENCE > REASON”. Suddenly, Rammstein gets thrown into the mix of influences that Soulsick are drawing from. There’s melody, as well as strong and nasty vocals that never flirt with pop or emo. To top it all off, the main riff is pure headbanging glory.

Song number 3, “stabwound”, introduces a lighter, dance-track inspired mood that makes you feel like you’re playing Cyberpunk. It’s “difficult” metal, you know, the kind of stuff with time-signature changes that music-nerds can’t get enough of – think Meshuggah – but it’s also catchy, groovy and quite accessible, without being too accessible. Until track number 4, that is.

I’m not planning to go song-for-song throughout the whole 10-track album, but so far, we’re off to a fantastic start, and we’re about to hit a crucial point, so bear with me. “Big Blue Sad Rock” starts off feeling like a much-needed break from the madness and noise. It’s immediately atmospheric, but quickly settles into Meshuggah-inspired djent territory. It’s a progressive, avant-garde, piece until it suddenly, and entirely uncalled for, becomes a pop-ballad for about 10 seconds. Clean, polished vocals carrying a poppy melody. Then it fades, the djent is back and the rest of the song is proper, heavy metalcore with sprinkles of prog and personality.

My question is this: why include the operatic, poppy, and quite frankly cheap chorus? Why is it needed? Why do metalcore bands always do this? This is not about gatekeeping or keeping metal pure. You can play metal without growling, screaming or pig squeels. But why always include that section where the vocals go clean, soaring and almost preachy? Why does the crescendo of what you’ve built up have to be packaged in something resembling Justin Bieber?

Luckily, the interruption is short and not enough to ruin the song, even for me. Rant over, but I do believe it is a rant worth having. If you do metal and prog as well as Soulsick, you don’t need to sprinkle pop on top. You’re good.

The rest of the album is, for the most part, marvelous. There are short moments where these pop-laden vocals are introduced and I start hating it all, but again: they’re very short. So short, they might at some point even contribute to the music… I don’t know, but none of the remaining tracks are low points. In fact, they are almost exclusively high points, the title track especially so.

“Symptoms of a Dying World” is controlled djent with a noisy electro backdrop. The strong, shouted vocals add to the testosterone-filled glory and make it a proggy, bone crushingly heavy headbanger driven by breakdowns. This track isn’t overly complicated, it’s just a masterful, near perfect modern-day metal classic.

We keep driving in the same stuttered, electro-interrupting metal groove that we’ve been in for the rest of the album, and the last song I’d like to discuss before it’s all over is the album ender, “Black Rain”. We’ve been through a chaotic, well-crafted, noisy, atmospheric and perfectly executed album, all it needs is a great end. “Black Rain” is the perfect end.

This song is melancholic. Beautiful. Loud and quiet at the same time. takes exactly one minute for the double pedals, screams, growls and chugging string instruments to enter, but the underlying melancholic melody stays. It’s grand and slightly operatic, but really beautiful. This is Black Dahlia Murderer meets Rammstein, Gojira and Meshuggah, it’s everything coming together.

“Black Rain” feels like the perfect summation of all of the best parts of this record. If there’s one song from this album that I’d play for someone who never heard Soulsick before, it would definitely be this song, which says a lot because there’s several really strong tracks on Symptoms of a Dying World.

And that’s it. 35 minutes, 10 tracks. It’s pure metalcore chaos, but it’s absolutely beautiful. I was trying to think of a sort of metal fan that would not appreciate this album, but it’s not coming to me. If you like metal, if you enjoy loud, abrasive music: give this one a spin because it might be album of the year. What a debut.

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