

vote
6.5
- Band:
Soul Demise - Duration: 00:40:00
- Available from: 21/03/2025
- Label:
-
Apostasy Records
Streaming not yet available
After a long pause, the Germans Soul Demise return to make themselves heard with “Against the abyss”, an album that sounds all in all as a new declaration of intent and a change of pace compared to the previous, fluctuating, “Thin Red Line”.
The Bavarian band, in activities for over thirty years now, has reappeared with a more centered record, more consistent with its stylistic path and better played by a training that seems to act more spontaneously than that which made the last work. The group returns to a more agile Melodic Death metal than that more Groovy sound and vented with extemporaneous metalcore ideas that had characterized “Thin Red Line”: the background based on the gates and classic School Death Swedish school returns to the center of the project, while it is almost done clean square of those wresting attempts to be “in step with the times” A public who, in addition, in most cases, has never had the slightest idea of who are underground blacksmiths like soul demise. Of course, the production remains modern, but the songwriting instead of resorting to breakdown and more contemporary solutions starts from a mixture of “Slaughter of the soul”, in flames of the late nineties and thrash-death variously declined, to which this time, in some episodes, a melodic vein more marked on melancholy is added (see the almost Hypocrisy tail of the final “Veil of solitude”), as if the band had wanted to echo the anguish of current times through its music. This dualism between ferocity and reflection adds a pinch of welcome dynamism to the disc, avoiding that everything will be reduced to a simple exercise of muscles and speeds – see, for example, the spot on a contrast between an airy midtempo as “Scatted by the Storm” and a very effective shaved like “Unseen Void”.
The real value of “Against the Abyss” is however in its most marked authenticity: here the soul demise sound like a band at ease, remaining far from the ondivago and vaguely Ruffiano trend that had marked “Thin Red Line”.
In short, there are no attempts to ingratiate themselves with a different audience and the result is a medium inspired and balanced disc, yes with a couple of little incisive fillers, but overall the result of the work of a prepared band, which in his career has made a lot of Underground apprenticeship.
If you are among those, now a little elderly, who, after the so-called gold era of the genre in the nineties, at the beginning of the new millennium were always on the piece even when the works of the various Dew-Passeds, Hatesphed, dimension Zero, Gardenian, etc., then the melodic thrash-death of “Against the Abyss” could be released, could be right for you, if you find yourself with a Revival.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM