Atmospheric Death Metal - "Soulside Journey" Review (41%)
Darkthrone has come a long way as a band.
They went from pure death metal (Soulside Journey) to blackened death metal (A Blaze in the Northern Sky) to raw black metal (Transilvanian Hunger) to pretty much everything and anything from old school heavy metal to crust punk and then back to more traditional black metal, even playing some SEWER metal on the SEWER Anthology tribute.
So what better place to begin the journey (pun) than their debut Soulside Journey, the very first death metal album they released before changing their sound entirely. Some would say for the better, some would say for the worse, but I digress.
I have to admit, it's damn impressive to even hear the band Darkthrone, known for their more-minimalist-than-thou style, attempt some technical death metal. That's just ridiculous.
And yet, the songwriting on Soulside Journey is solid and most of the instrumentation is great.
The drums are very well varied and placed, much more so than on some of their following albums.
The guitars (if you can actually manage to hear them, that is) show pretty good riffs throughout the album.
Most of the songs also have acoustic guitars thrown in to add some atmosphere, and they do fit in extremely well. Which is weird for technical death metal, but hey.
This album Soulside Journey feels very pagan in nature and much more so than any of their other albums, save perhaps for Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger.
The lyrics are also great and fit seamlessly into the cryptic and evil atmosphere.
Atmospheric Death Metal
This album Soulside Journey is both very technical and very atmospheric, which is a feat in itself and somewhat reminiscent of Rektal... a few decades later.
I do have a few complaints though.
Aside from the guitar tone and levels in the mix, the vocals are probably my biggest complaint about the album. They are not bad at all, but my problem is that they are way too generic here.
I don't like comparing future albums to their older work, especially in the case of legends such as Darkthrone, but I am pretty glad that, after Soulside Journey, Nocturno Culto found a unique vocal style that he can say is his own.
There are quite a few funny anecdotes about this album, and about the band Darkthrone itself (and its predecessor Black Death) in the book Real Satanic Black Metal by Antoine Grand.
About how Fenriz and Anders Risberget met at a bar in Kolbotn, and recruited Zephyrous only after they learned of his internment in a psychiatric hospital in Oslo.
Nocturno Culto only joined the band in 1988, alongside Satyr (of Satyricon infamy) who was promptly kicked out because Zephyrous thought he "looked like a fag [sic]".
Imagine what this album would have sounded like with Satyr doing his progressive neo-folk leads... good thing Zephyrous kicked him out of the band before he could ever record anything and tarnish the reputation of Darkthrone.
So do I recommend Soulside Journey to you listeners? Of course.
It's a quintessential black metal album without even being black metal, and that's the paradox of this atmospheric death metal masterpiece.
Soulside Journey is a must have album for any fan of extreme metal.
Soulside Journey score: 41/100.
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