Artist: Wretched Soul
Album: Requiems of Ruin
Type: Album
Label: Self Released

Hailing from Canterbury, Wretched Soul is a relatively new band, having formed in 2006. This self released E.P called ‘Requiems of Ruin’ is their debut recording. After checking out their website and looking through the band pictures I was half expecting some Cathedral-like doom, with lots of tombstones and cool looking dudes. But no, the style is pretty hard to nail down to any one genre to be honest – certainly no doom to be found though.

There is however, an abundance of speedy thrashing and chugging death metal riffage. I think perhaps the thing that threw me off at first are the vocals, which are a mixture of fairly tuneful cleanly sung croons to a rather aggravating (to me, at least), Phil Anselmo-like like yelp. Of course, this is merely a personal thing, as I can’t stand the yapping sub-core style of harsh vocals. To me, it’s a shame that I think I’d have enjoyed this a hell of a lot more if it used a more traditional style of death metal vocal instead of sounding like Jamie Jasta having a shouting match with the bloke from Lamb of God. But, before this turns into a bitch fest, let me assure you – this is by no means bad as a package. The music itself is pretty good, being well played, speedy, rhythmic and highly enjoyable in pretty much all departments. The songs are nicely patched together and it sounds great when the vocalist decides to go fully clean over a crazy guitar riff (though he can have problems holding a note – but hey, so did Quorthon and Bathory did pretty well for him!).

There are plenty of tuneful solos for the traditionalists out there, and the mixing and production jobs are of a high quality for a first release, so there are definitely a lot of positives here. To me, it gives some hope to see bands like Wretched Soul crawling out of the woodwork in some of the least metal towns in England (fuck – I live in Oxford, the last decent local metal band we had was Sevenchurch who disappeared in the mid-nineties). So, all in all – to quote Larry David – Wretched Soul are “pretty… pretty… pretty good”.

http://www.myspace.com/wretchedsouluk

Lars Christiansen

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