Released: 2008
I'm not sure what happened to Max Cavalera this year but he seems to have got some of his mojo back. The Cavalera Conspiracy album from a few months back was a nice return to the aggression of his earlier days and Conquer is the best Soulfly album yet.
Soulfly's past output has been patchy at best: one or two good songs per album, surrounded by self-indulgent and self-important excursions into "world" music, pointless colloborations that do no one any favours, throw-away jump-metal anthems, an over-reliance on the word "motherfucker" and way too much regurgitation of ideas, themes and riffs. They've been able to get away with this mainly because their core audience has been made up of people who think that Korn are "classic" metal and that Hatebreed invented hardcore, mostly trend-jumping kids with goldfish-like attention spans who don't care if ten songs all sound alike as long as they can mosh. But as most of those fans move into their mid-20s now and former trends give way to new ones, it could be that Max has had a good hard think about longevity and legitimacy. Let's face it, I can't think of anyone who still listens to Soulfly on a regular basis, even people who thought it was awesome when it came out.
Conquer doesn't redeem all of Soulfly's past sins, but it is far more consistent, aggressive and heavy than anything that has borne the name before. There are still those tell-tale Soulfly touches like the jumpy-jump, written-with-the-pit-in-mind "Enemy Ghost" and its string of obscenitites and the predictable-sounding, cliche-titled "Blood Fire War Hate" that opens the piece. A much-vaunted team-up with Morbid Angel's Dave Vincent, it sounds like dozens of Cavalera's songs and the guest vocals could have been done by anyone. "Unleash" however mixes the groove metal with tribal beats better than usual and the guest spot from Dave Peters (of Throwdown) gels pretty well and "Rough" presents a cool Nailbomb-type sound with some industrial flavouring. "Touching the Void" is shameless Black Sabbath worship, but given Cavalera's fondness for the Godfathers of All Things Metal is strongly respectful.
The highlights however are "Warmageddon" and "For Those About to Rot" where the band plunges into furious, aggressive thrash mode. Marc Rizzo comes into his own on these tracks and his playing across Conquer is sterling. "...Rot" ends with an Eastern-flavoured section that isn't overplayed the way such things have been by this band in the past and there's a genuine feel about both of these tracks that makes them probably the coolest songs Soulfly has ever done. In fact the same vibe can be felt from the album as a whole. It isn't brilliant or earth-shattering, but it is by far the most satisfying recording from Soulfly thus far.
- Blood Fire War Hate
- Unleash
- Paranoia
- Warmageddon
- Enemy Ghost
- Rough
- Fall of the Sycophants
- Doom
- For Those About to Rot
- Touching the Void
- Soulfly VI
Rating: 69%
No comments:
Post a Comment