Utopia Reborn

What a perplexing little album this is. Ordinarily I'd cite the rather unusual cover art, with its nebula photography and wedding invitation band logo, but these sorts of things are rapidly becoming the rule rather than the exception in underground death metal anyway. Still, even with this being a death metal album in mind, the aesthetics don't really prepare you for what one finds on the disc itself. Solace of Requiem plays a rather unique blend of death metal styles that ends up sounding a great deal if Nile was staffed by New York thug types in Dying Fetus hoodies. It's at once surprisingly nuanced and almost hilariously straightforward, with complex, multilayered, melodic tremolo riffing appearing directly next to ignorant single chord breakdowns. It certainly makes for an interesting listening experience, if a somewhat uneven one.

There's a rather odd combination of styles at work here- a surprisingly nuanced and complex technical death style on one hand, and then a thuggish, substantially hardcore influenced one on the other. Jungle Rot is a readily apparent influence in the slower, simpler sections, bringing that band's channeling of pummeling NYHC to the forefront, while artists like Nile and maybe even Origin to a certain extent make up the tech side. This is substantially more oldschool-sounding than either of those, though; the Stockholm sound is apparent and filtered through a prism of US-style brooding pacing ala Deteriorot. Throughout "Utopia Reborn," the more oldschool and the more modern influences tend to fight each other for dominance through the songs, with tracks like "To Suffer Mortality" openly alternating between highly modern, almost black metal influenced tremolo riffing and sluggish midpaced passages defined by their ominous, apocalyptic melodic structures. And then there's the declaration of "Don't cast your guilt on me like I give a... FUCK!" immediately before a pure Hatebreed section kicks in. Needless to say, keeping a bead on these guys can be challenging.

Oddly enough, this album takes a big dip in quality during the middle third, where the more technical influences start superseding the album's relatively straightforward structural style. These songs come off as scattered and sort of demonstrative, where the opening and closing tracks are much stronger. But on those stronger tracks, it's legitimately surprising just how strong this polyglot style can be- songs like "Language of the Gods" are a phenomenal example of how to blend simplicity and complexity into a varied, multifaceted whole, and the band is indeed pretty talented at making each part interesting, no matter how technical (or not) it may be. While there's certain stylistic elements that I would revise (I'd prefer a more growling, less hardcore-influenced vocal edge at least some of the time,) overall, "Utopia Reborn" is an interesting and unusual release that I'd recommend without hesitation to those metalheads who are always looking for unusual, nichey styles in the music they love. There's certainly nothing else out there that sounds quite like this.