Album Review: Soen - Reliance

I have long had a theory that every listener has a limit at which a certain sound will lose its impact, because we have already heard and absorbed it. That would explain why long-running bands get accused of losing steam, and not making albums as good as their 'classic days', even as they keep gathering new fans to replace the old ones. The bands aren't always (ok, sometimes they are) making music that is inferior, they are playing to an audience that is less receptive to more of the same thing. It's natural to seek out new highs, both for artists and the audience.

Soen has carved out a niche for themselves in the metal world, establishing a sound that it entirely their own. They have honed this across their last four records, sharpening their writing on each successive album. They have mastered the blend of heavy, complicated rhythms and emotional melodies. That those records have finished #1, #1, #1, and #2 on my year-end lists speaks to how fond I am of what Soen does.

That's why I started this review off as I did. Soen is not doing anything different on this album than they have on the last few, but I wonder if I am perhaps different than I was when "Memorial" came out. Since then, the world has been upended yet again, and there are multiple ways of reacting to those events. Soen has put their anger into the music, writing songs about how they think we are straying from the path. I have mostly resigned myself to understanding there are far more people who perhaps don't deserve respect or empathy than I ever believed. Soen is still fighting, while I have lost a lot of hope.

This is embodied by "Primal", a surging cascade of metallic riffs that ebb and flow with Joel's passionate vocal to warn us about the destruction technology is setting upon our lives. I would like to think we have lived with these things long enough now to know how to use them in the proper way, that does not seem to be the case. We become addicted to the information itself, needing more and more to fill the time our minds are no longer capable of filling with thought and contemplation. It's a worthwhile message, but delivered with a bit of clumsiness as the lyric turns to warning about "violent pornography". Compared to "Mercenary" warning us about "turning vultures into kings", the language is stilted, and one of those moments that snaps me out of the immersion.

I have always struggled with visualizing music as math, which means rhythms often blend together. Soen's music relies on chunky, muted bursts of guitar, some of which are becoming difficult for me to distinguish from the rest. There are a few riffs that pop up through the album that my brain tries to fill in with bits from earlier albums. That's a 'me problem', not an indication of the quality of the songs. "Discordia" and "Axis" still hit hard, and admirably fill the roles songs like "Covenant" established.

"How does someone become so heartless," Joel asks in "Indifferent", which is the question of our time. We have leaders explicitly telling us that empathy is a weakness, and that anything short of brutalizing those who aren't on 'your team' is a character flaw. The 'zero sum game' only adds up to zero if you want it to, and somehow we have trained ourselves into believing anyone else succeeding means we must have failed.

In that same spirit, we should not treat art as a competition either. We are guilty of comparing everything to everything else, creating hierarchies where any album that doesn't measure up to the absolute best begins to feel like a failure. That is as ridiculous as thinking that a rainbow drawn with seven markers is an accurate representation of the color spectrum. Nuance is difficult, but without it we will only see the extremes, and miss the majority of existence.

That is to say; "Reliance" is an album I need to keep perspective on. Soen is still operating at a high level, and hasn't lost any of the vim and vigor that has propelled them to the elite of modern metal bands. That being said, this album has not hit me as hard nor as fast as "Lotus" or "Imperial" did. I believe that is because Soen is hitting a spot that has already been bruised and scarred over, so the next impact cannot be felt in the same way. There is a degree of being inured involved, and again, that is entirely on me and not the band. "Reliance" is Soen being as good as they've ever been. I imagine it will dig in deeper as the year goes on, and much of what I've written will be an honest moment in time that is not frozen as such.