Soul Embraced-Dead Alive(2008)

First post!!

Here's a review I wrote for Soul Embraced's Dead Alive.

Out of 100%, I'm giving it a 70%(That's a generous mark!)

I embraced this with my soul!!!


Crush all evil! Satan falls onto his knees as he bows onto Jesus! Yes, metalcore and Christianity seemed to be a match made in heaven (Doing that for the laughs). Soul Embraced truly is a Christian Metalcore band that stands out amongst their genre mates. Why do I say that? It’s because compared to many other Christian and metalcore this one is pure gold. Yet this album still does not surpass the standards of classic metal albums because of some bits of failure in the music. At least it’s not so bad.


How would I describe this band’s music? It’s different from most Metalcore bands out there. The music seems to a mixture of all kinds of genre. Think nu metal band Soulfly esque music, only with more talent but with black metal-ish vocals and topped up with good old Swedish metal. Yeah, you read that right, Soulfly esque music. I’m saying that because there are some stop start riffs mashed up with Swedish metal. Did I mention the Southern rock influences? Okay, they’re tiny but they do give nice bluesy touches during the solos.


The drums are pretty mallcore influenced which pretty much minuses a lot marks in this review. However, there is some good drumming when the double pedals kicks in. There are some bas attempts to sound scary (or maybe to sound sad, which still fails) when acoustic guitars and organs collide in the track “In Memory”. While most of the tracks do not have clean singing but the track Crawl, clean singing makes an appearance. Yes, you read that right. Clean vocals. The vocals sort of resembles Breaking Benjamin’s vocalist and I can’t believe I enjoyed it. This is probably because the vocal suits the atmosphere of the song.


As a conclusion, this album is a combination of the best elements of a dying genre (mallcore and metalcore) and succeeded in combining the idea of solos into their music. This whole thing makes them stand out of other metalcore bands. However, I do not recommend this to an elitist but to a metalhead would like to forgive the wrongdoings of metalcore; nice chunks of bluesy solos are waiting for you. Should I close this with a prayer?