One of the obvious and important aspects of starting a new band is of course what you decide to call yourselves. It doesn’t really matter what your name is as long as your fan base are able to both remember and to a certain degree spell it. In a previous existence, The Soulless were known as the cryptic sounding Ignominious Incarceration. Yes, quite something. A few years down the line and a few mixed interpretations across the web, the Bath-based five-piece decided a change was in order: “we wanted a new name which was easy to remember and say […] The name has a dark, edgy feel to it, but is not instantly recognisable as metal and it’s easy to say. We feel this represents us a lot better, as well as our new music.”

For their debut Winter Born, Ignominious Incarceration played controlled and death-heavy riffs similar to Decapitated and At The Gates, with a few leads, licks and solos that looked towards Necrophagist and In Flames. Essentially it concentrated on pushing the heaviness through the mid-to-low end in a way that pleased quite a lot of punters. For Isolated, the band climb the upper scales of their intricate playing, with stop/start deathcore breakdowns laying a base for the twiddling of harmoniously entwined guitars and rampant shredding riffs. With tracks such as ‘New Perspective’ the band also mix a little aggressive thrash and current Brit metal such as Malefice into the album. On ‘Unaltered’, ‘Earthbound’ and ‘Without Heart’ the band bring out the fluid melodic side of some death metal, but in some ways it sounds similar to August Burns Red or even the metalcore of As I Lay Dying. It certainly is different, and in some respects you definitely can’t blame the band for wanting to try new sounds and experiment a little. The talent in guitarists Steve Brown and Kristan Dawson is obvious, and their particular pairing complements each other well — listen to ‘Clones’ and ‘Unite Us’.

The downside of this is that if you don’t push things far enough you will be engulfed by the bands you tour with or who have been on the scene a lot longer. The only difference from some of the current crop of bands such as August Burns Red is that there is no vocal melody along with the throaty roars. And so if you don’t like that “emo” voice “ruining” your metal, then check out this album.

[Originally published on Onemetal]

Municipal Waste “Wolves of Chernobyl”