Darkthrone - Soulside Journey

As death metal came to fruition in the early 1990, dissenting voices attempted to add melodic texture where most bands focused solely on rhythmic and tonal interaction between different riffs. While Darkthrone's first album Soulside Journey clearly comes from the death metal genre somewhere between other Scandinavian - Swedish, specifically - classics like Dark Recollections and Like an Everflowing Stream, the path Darkthrone chose was in the breakdown of the rigid structuralism of death metal with a nihilistic and yet melodic sound, integrating the elements of Bathory's music that relied on heavy atmosphere to invoke different moods in the listener.

Though musically simple in that its riffs are cut from strings of scalar measurement, Darkthrone's Soulside Journey maintains interest by contrasting pieces forcefully, oftentimes via alternating melodic lines, as songs reveal an evasively addictive cyclic rhythm underneath their composition, where the linear structure espoused by early Suffocation was more common at the time of this album's release.

Soulside Journey might just be, in fact, Darkthrone's first black metal album.

Back to Darkthrone