Soilwork – Verkligheten (2019) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

SOILWORK has been around, in one form or another, for twenty years now. Some people say that they haven’t made anything worth listening to after “Steelbath Suicide”. Some have only heard “Stabbing The Drama. Some think “The Living Infinite”, the band’s 2013 double disc release, was quite epic. It’s all good. At this point in a band’s career, you can either choose the nostalgia route, playing old albums in their entirety, because that makes an easy package for promoters to sell. Verkligheten, the title of Soilwork’s latest offering, is the Swedish word for reality, the entity that we’re all trying to escape from. Verkligheten is their attempt to try and go somewhere else, to express all those things that are born in between hypnagogic states and frenzies of hyperrealism. SOILWORK is a band that has been through a lot. They don’t have to try and tidy things up by using clichés like personal and/or musical differences. It has been hell. They are not young anymore, and their reality these days is the hellhounds on their tails, the ghosts in their subconscious and the coldness of existence that starts eating at the soul the very day that you leave the womb. We can no longer escape the fact that we’re vulnerable to the shortcomings of life itself.

The veteran Swedish metal group’s tenth studio long-player, Verkligheten arrives via its cinematic title track, a slow-burn instrumental that evokes Bring Me the Horizon by way of Ennio Morricone. Soilwork have been infusing punishing Gothenburg-style death metal with European power metal majesty since the mid-’90s, and Verkligheten doesn’t disappoint on the latter end of the equation, delivering a meaty 12-track set that’s spilling over with soaring guitarmonies and horned hand-soliciting choruses. While vocalist Bjorn Strid and guitarist David Andersson’s retro hard rock side project Night Flight Orchestra looms large over the proceedings, the band can still turn out unholy slabs of seismic Scandinavian melodic death metal, as evidenced by the terrific blastbeat-basted “When the Universe Spoke” and the sleek groove metal banger “Bleeder Despoiler.” That said, Verkligheten leans significantly harder on the AOR side of the hard rock spectrum, with only cursory nods to the band’s metalcore-leaning sixth full-length effort — and biggest commercial success — Stabbing the Drama. Embracing the pomp of power and neo-classical metal via stadium-ready rockers like “Full Moon Shoals,” the Tomi Joutsen- (Amorphis) assisted “Needles and Kin,” and the powerhouse “Nurturing Glance,” Soilwork have crystallized their sound into something unapologetically familiar and over the top, yet refreshingly sanguine. ~ James Christopher Monger

Tracklist
1. Verkligheten
2. Arrival
3. Bleeder Despoiler
4. Full Moon Shoals
5. The Nurturing Glance
6. When the Universe Spoke
7. Stålfågel
8. The Wolves Are Back in Town
9. Witan
10. The Ageless Whisper
11. Needles and Kin (feat. Tomi Joutsen)
12. You Aquiver (feat. Dave Sheldon)

Download:

mqs.link_S0ilw0rkVerkligheten20192444.1.rar

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