Nuclear Blast Americ
2001
A Predator's Portrait
About This Album
Soilwork is a unique brand of coalesced Swedish metal. Crafting melodies as dangerous as Dark Tranquillity and In Flames, godly solos as effortless as Arch Enemy and Armageddon, aggression as damn beautiful as At the Gates, and clean vocals as soaring as Opeth, Soilwork combines these elements together with the band's own rare compositional skills and clever use of keyboards. Adding layers of atmospheric texture, rather than racing along with the guitars, the keyboards appear as translucent nuances, never clouding, only accentuating. Each song flows with a compositional sleight of hand, sounding thick and complex, but without any great exertion (similar to At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul) from the band. The album simply makes sense, like a natural flow of the band's conscience, with its dense, '80s thrash-driven guitars, tighter than thou rhythm section, and split vocal approach. A Predator's Portrait makes their prior efforts, Chainheart Machine and Steelbath Suicide, look childish in a way. Both are still fantastic albums, but neither has even half the ambition this new album violently contains. Songs like "Needlefeast" and "B**tard Chain" dance through chugging, syncopated melodies, with delicious Tomas Lindberg vocal lines reminiscent of early-'90s Swedish death and early-'80s New Wave of British Heavy Metal choruses.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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