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For quite some time now, we have seen Soilwork slip farther and farther away from their earlier Melodic Death Metal roots for a more lighter sound that could be considered more radio friendly. Well, The Panic Broadcast has it's share of tracks much like the previous two efforts, and in some instances feel a bit worse. However, The Panic Broadcast, the group's eigth full-length venture since their debut in 1998 is more then just another copy and paste job while trying to mature their sound. In a sense, some of the material here marks a revisiting of the band's roots and pulls the album from the repetitive mediocrity that Soilwork had found themselves stuck in. Too bad it's really on an EP length's worth of visitation. After listening to the lead single, "Let This River Flow", approaching This release came with great caution. Luckily, there were some exceptional tracks that showed Soilwork hasn't forgotten how to really tear things up musically. The primary example of this is "Late for the Kill, Early for the Slaughter" which makes for a fantastic kick start to the album and sounds like something taken off their The Chainheart Machine album due to it's fast paced music and lack of the band's reoccuring staple plague of having screamed verses and cleanly sung choruses. With this song, it's just straight forward screaming, holding that signature Soilwork sound, but still retains that impact that At The Gates would have had if they composed the track instead. After that, the material does behin to get a bit stereotypical and resorts to that same structuring virus (i.e. scream verse, sing chorus), starting with "Two Lives Worth of Reckoning", which has already been available for a little while as the b-side track from the Let This River Flow single. This song, as well as "The Thrill" feature essentially the same thing, with the latter being much lighter but not weak enough to be considered for mainstream radio appeal, and both still being heavy and catchy enough to hold the listener's attention before bringing things back to all screaming, though with two cleanly sung lines pre-chorus, on "Deliverance is Mine", confirming that Soilwork have clearly realized they have neglected their old, career-long fans, and gave them the blood that they crave. In the end, there winds up being a good amount of songs that actually violate the traditional song structuring that the band had been stuck to scattered about this release, which is a fantastic shock. However, the track that really proves to be a bit of a shocker would be the single "Let This River Flow". While the song is still just a well done generic song that won't have much of an impact on the listener past a few listens and simly feels like a song composed to draw in more fans through your general radio stations that play anything with a slight kick, this ballad/Melodic Death track winds up working out, but mostly due to the overall feeling of the album and the variety brought into it. However, it doesn't really stop there. You also have "Epitome", which is another ballad-based track except with heavier guitars, that really don't do much and just sounds like a filler track with more effort then usual when it comes to filler material as far as the performance of the song goes. It's about this point that The Panic Broadcast starts slipping at a rather fast paced, which is pretty sad as it really has a good run up to "Let This River Flow". The last four tracks that compose this album, with "Epitome" already being covered", don't really do much and seem to just try to eat up time. While the other tracks are often heavy and catchy, the latter are much slower and almost act as a kind of climax for the album in a sense. "Enter Dog of Pavlov" winds up being a heavier track in the end, but has a more Mallcore feel to it once you drag through the well over one minute slower aspect of the song that feels as though it drags on and on, even when it does finally pick up. Of course, the deluxe edition of this release features a bonus track entitled "Sweet Demise", and much like "Enter Dog of Pavlov", it's just not all that impressive. You can hear some distortion in the vocals that reallyd oesn't appear anywhere else on the album, and comes across more as an experimental track with how slow it is, as well as the oddly sung moment in the track about three fourth's of the way through when the music slows down for pretty much no reason whatsoever, leaving this song to also leave the listening wishing more focus was put on this, as well as the other closing tracks to the release, such as effort and variety, as all but "Enter Dog of Pavlov" are essentially the same style of song writing, and actually have a very similar structure that will leave the listener simply bored to tears instead of feeling complete like the music being played makes you believe you should be. All in all, The Panic Broadcast is really a step in the right direction. It's sad that the closing tracks on this album really don't hold a candle to the rest of the material here considering how heavy and/or catchy the tracks can be. From going back to the band's earlier career writing style, to bringing heavier and more solid catchy releases that often to tiptoe near the boundaries of generic Rock chords played to sound heavier then they should, this release features six of the best Soilwork songs to be recorded in a long while, and the die hard fans who have stuck with this band will be very happy to hear some heavier, faster songs compared to nothing but repetition to the point of exhausted boredom. It's just sad to see that the impressive material only lasts about twenty seven minutes, leaving a little more then twenty four additional minutes as generic and/or filler material to push it into the grounds of a full-length release. Hopefully, for the band's sake, the much slower ballad-like tracks will be in great moderation on future releases, as these tracks really wound up being the only things holding this album back from being comparable to their more notable earlier releases, but either way, The Panic Broadcast sure is a good building block to regaining their former glory. |
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