Heretic Soul – Born Into this Plague (2010)

In this modern age finding good Death Metal can become quite a hard thing to do, you have all the ‘classic’ bands still releasing good shit like Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, Malevolent Creation, etc. But finding a new band that is worthy to be added to such an impressive Death Metal lineup is hard to so, especially because of all the shitty Deathcore influences that many bands have these days.

Today we have from Rotting Corpse Records, the first full-length release of the Turkish band Heretic Soul. “Born Into this Plague” is a release that can surely be called extremely ‘traditional’ and nothing out of the ordinary, but who cares, if you are looking for catchy Death Metal, then look no further since Heretic Soul is the band for you.

The band starts things with the song “The Truth Dwells in your Head”, a catchy tunes that quickly shows that Heretic Soul is not an original band, but rather a very nice mixture of older DM influences. The riffing is pretty solid and the hooks are very effective in this song, the drumming is fast paced and very well executed. The overall head banging feeling of this song is of the hook and will surely get your head spinning after a few minutes.

The rest of the album pretty much follows the traditional Death Metal pattern, chugging riffs, meaty hooks, relentless drumming, deranged vocals, and nice tempo changes to gather energy for the next head banging onslaught. There is nothing bad in particular with “Born Into this Plague”, and we don’t understand why other reviewers have ripped them a new one because of their lack of originality. The band has good musical skills and can write solid DM songs, and this is all we care about.

Most songs come and go in this release and the overall USDM feeling is very present in them, however, the track that we found very interesting is “Twenty One Grams”. In this track the band starts as usual with their traditional sound, but at the end goes full on Melodic Death Metal, something that felt very fresh in this release. We clearly see potential in this band and maybe if they start developing their own sound a bit more will surely get noticed in the future, the skills are there, is just a matter of finding a somewhat fresh sound.

Release: February 23rd, 2010

Country: Turkey