Heretic Soul
Born Into This Plague
6.3
I appreciate it when a band gives it to you straight, as Heretic Soul does with this quote from its Myspace page: “Heretic Soul combines death metal with killer mosh parts of deathcore.” And that is essentially what you get on this Turkish act’s debut full-length, Born into this Plague. To the band’s credit, however, its music is not as crudely sewn together nor as mindlessly brutal as such a description might suggest. Though Born into this Plague provides plenty of opportunities to practice your windmills and spin-kicks, Heretic Soul does make an effort to craft an actual song on occasion.
Like many of its modern death metal peers, Heretic Soul’s music features intense, mechanically precise drumming, and as such, its music strongly favors rhythm over melody. Unlike many of its peers, Heretic Soul’s music proceeds at a comparatively moderate pace, giving the music’s limited threads of melody room to breathe, as exemplified by the hints of a theme that emerge from the semi-clean interlude in “Life Becomes Our Grave” and the elegant coda of “Twenty One Grams.” It is, however, the pummeling grooves for which Born into this Plague will be remembered. The band seems to have made a great study of the breakdown and mastered it in all its forms, from the old-school trudge of Incantation and the classic brutality of Suffocation to the modern, staccato stomp of Lamb of God. This chameleon-like ability is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword in that it leaves Heretic Soul little room to develop an identity of its own, rendering the band’s music rather faceless (which, in an odd coincidence, is actually the title of the album’s fifth track).
Heretic Soul can certainly throw down, but the band has not yet become more than the sum of its influences. So, while Born into this Plague is a respectable recording, it is a far cry from essential.
Related
Heretic SoulLife Becomes Our Grave
12/1/2007