Immortal Soul – Wintereich

This has been a funny album to handle, I had no idea what to expect of it when I got it. Facedown seems to be signing an increasing number of metal bands. Naturally, I’m apprehensive of this decision, but with some solid heavy bands like No Innocent Victim, War of Ages, and Bloodlined Calligraphy¸ I think that they know what they’re doing much more than I do. With that said, Immortal Souls seemed to be the next logical step a label would take when moving in a metal direction. This is Facedown’s At the Gates, although I don’t think this album has really gone about reinventing the way people see music like Slaughter of the Soul allegedly did.

Anyways, the album starts off interestingly enough, with effects and riffing you’d expect from a Dragon Force song. Unlike Dragon Force, I’ve got a feeling that these guys not only are playing their instruments at the pace they’re recorded at (that’s right, the sham is up Dragon Force, we all know you’re not really playing your instruments that fast, I’ve seen the live videos on YouTube, quarter-the-recorded-speed guitar solos, you should all be ashamed of yourselves for misleading the public), but they probably do it while dressed up in crazy Scandinavian death-metal outfits (these guys are from Finland just in case that reference didn’t make much sense). Regardless of their appearances, the songs they’ve put out are quite fantastic. The songs all flow together really well and this band is unbelievably talented, as I said previously, imagine At the Gates except with vocals reminiscent of Zao (Funeral of God, not the recent or older stuff). The music is all layered seamlessly, with a fully functioning rhythm section to complement the leads.

I really can’t think of anything that bothered me as far as the songs go. This whole “melodic death-metal” thing is fairly easy to listen to. It completely lacks any abrasive metal-core breakdowns, or the overdone vocals seen in half the bands on the Metalblade roster, not to mention any of the bitchy “melodic” vocals that ruined decent bands like All That Remains. The one thing that I can’t seem to get over is this album falls right into the metal-cliché perpetuated by the likes of every band from northern Europe. They’ve got the angry looking press pictures and they’re album is organized like a saga instead of a collective of songs; it came off fairly pretentious to me.

Nonetheless, despite what I say, this is still a very good album. As I listened to it, it never faded into the background and constantly kept my attention, a rare thing for a band to do. Usually I’m lost after the first four-ish songs, but this music never really got boring. So if you’ve got a craving for some good metal music and some fantastic instrumental work, this CD might be just what you’re looking for.