ALBUM REVIEW: SORA – Soul Dissolution

It certainly took its time this year, but as autumn starts to roll in here in the northern hemisphere you’ll find few more fitting soundtracks than a good old chunk of atmospheric black metal. No doubt we’ll soon be spoiled for choice with all kinds of records drawing inspiration from nature, the elements and whatever else the genre has thankfully shifted its focus to after getting all the church burning out of its system. Eager to get their entry in nice and early however are Belgium’s SOUL DISSOLUTION, whose third full-length SORA arrives this Friday via Viridian Flame Records.

With a title that translates from Japanese to ‘sky’, SORA finds the band focused on exactly that. A five-track conceptual work, the record sets itself the ambitious task of exploring the sky and its many facets. It would be easy enough to roll an eye or two at that, but if you can get over a hint of pretentiousness you’ll soon find that SOUL DISSOLUTION have delivered something suitably expansive here. Like the sky itself – and admittedly like a lot of atmo-black records – SORA is at times thunderous and imposing, and at others broad and breathtakingly beautiful.

It’s also a relatively un-abrasive record, rarely working its way into the kind of blasting maelstroms you might expect from the likes of WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, for example, and instead leaning heavily on many of the more uplifting intricacies and melodies perhaps most obviously associated with post-rock. Opener SORA I – the first of a three-part title track – pulls at the heartstrings from the off. It breathes the first signs of life into the record with a gentle melodic guitar line that’s gradually surrounded by swirling atmospherics and cymbal swells before striking up a mournful blackened groove replete with harsh vocals which vary nicely between lower bellows and higher rasps. These screams are surely the fiercest aspect of SOUL DISSOLUTION’s sound, juxtaposing against the track and record’s persisting beauty with a powerful sense of pain and sadness.

It’s arguably this sense of light and shade which defines SORA more than anything, and while it shouldn’t sound wildly out of left-field to anyone familiar with the works of AGALLOCH or ALCEST, for example, the record never really fails to captivate across a well-judged 39-minute runtime. SORA II blasts a little harder after its more stirring predecessor, while part III plays even more with dynamics as the band scream of “celestial vessels” in a twilight-centred overall highlight. The Absolving Tide’s thunderous double kicks and staple tremolo-picked guitars are wonderfully evocative of the stormier imagery of its lyrics, and lastly With Open Heart brings the album full-circle with rich E-bow work and another legato lead line that feels like something of a callback to that which opened the record.

With the album wrapped up as neatly as it is, there isn’t much room to poke holes in it. Perhaps the drums could do with being turned down a notch in the mix at points, but other than that this is a record rich in detail, emotion and careful and patient songcraft. SOUL DISSOLUTION might not stand too wildly apart from the rest of the atmospheric black metal pack, but as long as they keep making records like this they run no risk of falling behind either.

Rating: 8/10

SORA is set for release on September 30th via Viridian Flame Records.

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