Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Soulless, The
Label: Earache
Release: 2011
Length: 32:54
Rating: 1/5
What the hell has gone wrong in the land of make-believe, that bands give up on any deeper substance and would rather sink into the gray average of a worn-out crowd of clones offering nothing new? That very thought is the guiding light, blinking away like a traffic light in the healthy corner of the brain while you listen to the debut by British outfit The Soulless. The soullessness and shallowness can be tied to plenty of factors that midwifed both the band and the record Isolated. The Soulless were, only the year before last, still tripping on the death metal tradition under the not exactly melodious name Ignominious Incarcreation, but they ditched it pretty quickly and took the commercially more convenient shortcut of metalcore. And that change of name and direction is exactly where the fiasco begins. They gave up the foundations of something that could have been original, or at least less restrictive and pigeonholing. The lads from Bath decided, in true merchant fashion, on a more prostituting form of marketing, which, at least judging by the global rise of such “phenomena”, is hardly a heavy burden or responsibility to hold against them. Well, at least at first glance. That is, unless you’re allergic to someone being ready to sell their soul and everything else for that illusory moment of apparent success, which is so tragic in the Faustian way, and in its endlessly repeating sameness also so damn ridiculous and unnecessary.
The record Isolated proves that something has indeed rotted in the land of illusions and musical magic, something that won’t be easy to forgive and forget. The potency of eagerness to please and vanity shows already with the opening track Unaltered, on which the British quintet, with predictability (both rhythmic and melodic), serves up every stereotype and cliché on the metalcore menu. Talent and know-how got channeled into performing a musical farce on an overcrowded field of totally pointless, totally interchangeable bands. Monotone vocals, idealess guitar lines with predictable breaks that leave you cold, and music as frigid as an aging virgin who can’t or doesn’t know how to use lubricants properly are the standard by which a seemingly well-oiled machine destroys everything that got you electrified and fired up about real music in the very first moment. There’s no passion or meaning in this sea of ballast, and paddling through the shallows of the metalcore swamp has lately been closer to the perfect definition of wasting time than anything else, let alone anything more sensible and necessary. Metalcore has become a standard and a template for stamping out the exact same tunes on an assembly line.
But let’s get back to The Soulless! Unaltered, from the very first moment of bombastic penetration into your auditory spectrum, immediately calls up memories of better bands like Australian entertainers Parkway Drive, or the younger crowd’s favorites August Burns Red,Bring Me The Horizon, while I personally can’t shake the otherwise elegant moves from tracks by Unearth and As I Lay Dying. This time it’s like outright theft of fragments, which the quintet glues into a mosaic of predictable colors and contours, and recycling, ecological reasons aside, is in the musical world closer to words like theft, re-creation and worn-outness. And there are eleven such gray kids on Isolated! The seemingly muscle-bound music becomes, in its steroidal degeneracy, a painful and, in its banal way, sadomasochistic experience, since from the first moment of Unaltered you expect a lift to a higher level, but if the flight over the dry pastures of bare idealess-ness starts with an immediate climb right up to the vault of a claustrophobically closed universe, there’s precious little room for variation! Somewhere around the middle of the record, which, hand on heart, sounds like the continuation of one single song, you find yourself in the world of Clones, a little further on, thank the gods at the very end of the agony, Without Heart roars out and you think it’s an autobiographical outpouring of emotions, a collage of feigned anger that’s really a parody. But apparently not, since this record was conjured up and produced by John Mitchell – a man who proved himself with quality work and collaboration with bands like Enter Shikari, Funeral For A Friend and Architects. Even a production wizard can do nothing but produce a sonically perfect, pumped-up record that offers precious little new! If it’s a joke, it was an incredibly expensive one, and in the age of recession labels (Earache included) can’t afford such lapses into extravagance.
Sadly this is no isolated case, so in the end we can only draw a line under this really simple sum with the following conclusions: Isolated is a record that, in its swagger of sound, is thin and undernourished, and the two-dimensional narrow-mindedness of stampeding rhythms and repeating forms is ripe for euthanasia. Where there’s no lift and no hope of waking up from the musical coma, it’s time to take pity on the suffering soulless little beast, since the soul-robbed carcass already reeks heavily of the decay of the basic particles of sense. The Soulless are just a victim of delusions. Who knows – maybe next year we’ll get another rebranding and a switch to some new, trendier genre than this, like djent … You know how it goes: money rules the world …
Lineup
Andy Wardle – vocals
Steve Brown – guitar
Chris Ball – bass
Dan Wilding – drums
Kristan Dawson – guitar
Production
John Mitchell & The Soulless
Tracklist
1. Unaltered
2. The Path
3. Earthbound
4. 13th Morning
5. New Perspective
6. Clones
7. Revelation
8. Our Return
9. Unite Us
10. You Are Nothing to Me
11. Without Heart
