With a sound that combines a myriad of metallic styles, it's been quite difficult to link
Soilent Green
to one specific subgenre -- one minute they're riffing and roaring away a la
Pantera
, the next they're offering up
death metal
tempos. So despite their sonic melting pot, it's widely agreed that the group has been a champion of extreme
metal
for some time, as evidenced by any of their brutal releases for
Relapse
. On their fifth release overall, 2005's
Confrontation
, the group are still out to slay the competition, and from front to back, few could keep pace with
. But whereas two of the group's top influences,
Slayer
and the aforementioned
, break things up musically from time to time,
keep things cranked up to ten (for the most part). As a result, if you're not a die-hard fan of extreme
, songs start blending into each other very quickly. A few exceptions turn out to be the tracks
"Liquor and Cigarettes"
and
"Paper Cut,"
which both start off (gasp) in a mellow mode before, of course, collapsing into more over the top rage. ~ Greg Prato