Natural Born Chaos

This is my first encounter with Soilwork… and it's a hell of a great encounter ! What I know about this band is that they come from Sweden, they have a great following and this time they have teamed up with Devin Towsend (Strapping Yound Lad, Ocean Machine) as producer. After visiting their homepage, I just found out that it's actually their fourth album, the second one on Nuclear Blast. I want to say that I bought this album for myself (since we don't get much from Nuclear Blast) because of their great following. I have to mention also that I have not listened to a single song before buying this record, so believe me that if this album was not good, I would not miss them.

This album is indeed great, full of catchy and melodic stuff, alternating intense vocals and great choruses made of clean vocals. All the songs are relentless and have a very nice flow from one to another. The tempo on much of the songs are a quite slow, which allows songs room to breath, but on some parts of them it gets quite frantic. All songs have very melodic guitars, even some catchy twin guitar parts, and crunchy riffing parts with this typical Swedish trademark. The band still have this particular Swedish touch, but they have managed to develop it a bit further.

There are definitely two things that make this album great, which are the high quality level of the songwriting that is constant on this album and the killer production done by Devin Townsend. It's not gonna be my album of the year, but it has great chances to rank among my top ten.