Day: June 6, 2017

The return after two years of Soijl, the band founded by former Saturnus guitarist Mattias Svensson, can only be good news for all lovers of melodic death doom. As written at the time, in relation to the debut album Endless Elysian Fields, those who were involved in the creation of a masterpiece like Saturn In Ascension can not certainly ignore or repudiate the contents, so that Soijl‘s is an interpretation of the genre that is close to that of the Danish masters, without adhering slavishly. In fact, the sound that the Swedish guitarist continues to offer is, in some ways, less immediate than that of Saturnus, thanks to a gait at times more sullen and that, however, does not come less even certain influences from the overseas scene.
That’s why As The Sun Sets On Life is an album that leaves some doubts during the first two or three listening sessions, and then finally shows its true features, those of an excellent example of painful and exciting music. Compared to the previous full length, Svensson didn’t take care of all the instruments, entrusting the drums to the young Malphas and confirming, instead, the excellent Henrik Kindvall at the voice: in essence, little changes, both in the characteristics of a sound that has clear and unequivocal coordinates, and in the quality with which these are followed. As The Sun Sets On Life develops for a little more than an hour, offering a death doom in which the influences of the main schools are reworked in the best possible way, returning them impeccably with personality and brilliance, with a special mention for the trio Weapon Of Primordial Chaos, Salvation, Deception and Spiritual Asphyxiation, tracks that one after the other demonstrate without any doubt the goodness of Svensson’s compositional work. Maybe we don’t find a clear progress compared to the previous work, also because the starting base was already consistent, but we are certainly in the presence of a remarkable test, able to reaffirm a prominent position of Soijl in the scale of values of the scene, and it’s not little.

2017 – Solitude Productions