Label - Unique Leader
Release Date - 10 June 2022
Words - Tony Bliss
As tech-death continues to find new and exciting ways to combine superhuman musicianship with limb-lopping brutality, the shred ‘n’ groove ethos of Swedish terror-squad Soreption has always seen them standing slightly left of field. With the arrival of ‘Jord’ (the bands fourth full-length record), there is little denying that their sound is still akin to the work of some impossibly dexterous muso-robots, yet aside from being an eight-track exhibition of absurdly great riffs, there is a constant ebb and flow between hyper-speed ability and various, often surprising songwriting avenues that few of their showboating peers could hope to compete with.
Opening with the merciless, scalpel-keen power of ‘The Artificial North’, longtime fans will soon be beaming as a familiar avalanche of mechanistic carnage erupts from their speakers. Indeed, as the Sundsvall crew blitz through ‘Jord’s shrewdly succinct thirty-minute run time, it becomes clear that this is Soreption at their sleek and streamlined best, the likes of ‘The Forever Born’ and a more than slightly schizo ‘Prophet’ managing to be at the same time both concisely slamming AND working at the very brink of death metals cutting edge.
Make no mistake however, beyond its sonically pristine and precise pummeling, ‘Jord’, somewhat remarkably, still sounds tethered to the old-school even as these songs maintain that warped, futuristic undercurrent of surreal violence. Shades of ‘Domination’-era Morbid Angel abound in the otherworldly, key-led intro of ‘The Nether Realm’s Machinery’ and the arcane weirdness filtering through the cracks of ‘A Story Never Told’, these spiritual links to the extreme metal elder-gods only helping to slam home the creative and technical brilliance of these tracks. Hell, ‘Each Death More Follow’ could even be said to be doffing its cap to UK tech-metal godfathers SiKth with its funk ‘n’ blast approach (it still sounds like an army of marauding cyborgs laying waste to some far-off city, mind you). There is little more satisfying than well-executed tech-death, and on this evidence, Soreption remains the standard against which all precision-tooled fret-wranglers should be measured.
8/10
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