Soilent Green’s history is about as full of tragedy and misfortune as any band you care to name, which may explain the bleak nihilism of their new album Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction.
Musically, Soilent Green stand poised between two tags. Their origins in New Orleans can be heard in the sludgy Southern doom component of their sound – thick beefy riffs, like the blues kept in a bear-pit for decades and fed nothing but raw meat, steroids and whisky.
This low-slung groove is faced off against a grinding thrash pace; Inevitable Collapse In The Face Of Conviction is defined by the almost schizoid seamless leaps between the two styles, and that seems to have upset a lot of reviewers more accustomed to Soilent Green’s earlier material.
The facts of the matter are that today’s Soilent Green are not the same band that started with that name, and the current line-up features a handful of musicians who are best known for their work on the Southern/sludge scene in bands such as Eyehategod and Goatwhore.
I’m not familiar with the band’s early work, so I can’t respond to the accusations that they’ve watered down their original sound. All I can do is call it how I hear it - and Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction is, for my money, a great piece of work.
Soilent Green also deploy more ideas in a single song than a lot of bands manage to fit into an album. The rapid stylistic switching has a large part to play in this, as does their seeming disregard for traditional song structures.
You’ll rarely hear the same riff twice, and if you do it’ll be mangled somehow, the last half bar ramping up to double-time or dropping out to half-pace before crashing into the next section. Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction is an album that keeps the listener on their toes, and dispels the common criticism of grindcore as being short of ideas beyond volume and velocity - even though it seems to be the lack of the latter that everyone else is disappointed by.
As its title suggests, Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction has a rather bleak lyrical outlook, emphasised by the verbose song titles like “Superstition Aimed At One’s Skull” and “All This Good Intention Wasted In The Wake Of Apathy”. This stands in strange contrast to not just the striking and rather excellent cover art but the feel of Soilent Green’s music itself.
While the songs may be about the way the world wears us down, the riffs and rhythms show no sign of collapsing in the presence of anyone or anything. Even the pseudo-banjo opening of “In The Same Breath” and the bluesy acoustic four-bar intro of “Lovesick” have a solidity at their centre that ensures they don’t feel awkward or out of place next to the ferocity of the tunes they introduce.
Soilent Green may not be the band they once were - but given the loss of one band member to a murder and another to Hurricane Katrina, a change of sound and outlook isn’t entirely surprising. And I prefer to judge each album on its own merits, as far as possible; as a stand-alone album Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction holds its position at the junction of sludge and grind metal with a sound that draws on both while pandering to neither.
Fast and powerful with an undercurrent of bluesy groove, Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction is a step toward the more savage stuff for a listener more accustomed to the Southern metal sound; Soilent Green will be lurking on my mp3 player for some time to come.
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Tags: grind, Inevitable Collapse In The Presence Of Conviction, sludge, Soilent Green, Southern metal
