Soulcage - Soul for Sale (2.5/5)

01. Flaming Flowers (Send in the Clowns) 03:10 02. I See 03:01 03. My Canvas, My Skin 03:18 04. Ride On 02:53 05. Until You Find Me 04:15 06. Satellite Children 03:33 07. Bleeding 03:10 08. Origin 04:03 09. Stranger In You 03:01 10. You Get So Alone 03:36 11. MIA 05:28

‘Soul for Sale’ doesn’t present what I would call the greatest first impression. Finnish “rock and roll machine” Soulcage choose to open their debut album with “Flaming Flowers (Send in the Clowns)”, and indeed a sort of group-vocal harmony cry of “Send in the clowns!”. For one enormously cringe-induced moment, I was worried that they really had. I’m not averse to a slice of cheese with my metal, but “Flaming Flowers” is…it‘s…it‘s not even good cheese. Something like old-school Sonata Arctica or Rhapsody, that’s good cheese; an aged camembert, perhaps. By comparison, this is more like that hellish cheese-in-a-can you get in America. It’s Cheez Whiz.

However, with your expectations firmly fixed at absolute zero, Soulcage cunningly flip the script and proceed to actually be quite good. From the piano harmony leading “I See”, things proceed in an altogether more pleasing fashion; “My Canvas My Skin” is actually a very good song, despite the lyrics verging back toward “processed dairy product” territory - you can certainly tell why it was released as the album’s first single. Soulcage exhibit musicianship and an ear for both riffs and harmonies that saves this album and indeed their music from the predictable tedium of the lyrics.

Keyboard player Markus Hellas and guitarist Teppo Parviainen can take the credit for much of this. While they’re hardly breaking any new ground, they put together a combination that you can nod your head and tap your foot to. Hellas is guilty of occasionally using keyboard settings that sound suspiciously like those in the theme music for Streets Of Rage on the Mega Drive (that’s aimed at “Stranger In You” in particular), but I guess that kind of comes with the cheese-metal territory. Teppo even gets his guitar solo on successfully enough during the mid-tempo power-ballad “Until You Find Me” and closer “MIA” that you wonder why Soulcage don’t employ his noodling more often. Aleksi Parviainen’s vocals provide a good melodic release point, and you might even be tempted, when no-one else is in and you‘ve had one drink too many, to mutter along to some of the lines which don’t leave you feeling lactose intolerant.

There are some points where things swing back towards the form suggested on the opening track, such as on second single “Satellite Children”, which sounds like the soundtrack to a love scene in a crap 80s action film. Or perhaps over the end-credits of a film starring a heroic dog. It’s a proper 80s ballad, like Aerosmith‘s “I Don‘t Wanna Miss A Thing” (yes, the one from Armageddon) complete with choral “oooh” backing vocals…the video is on Youtube, go have have a look. It looks exactly like it sounds…mercifully without my implied involvement of Aerosmith, so you won’t have to look at Steven Tyler’s terrifying excuse for a face.

Thankfully, the driving beats of “Bleeding” and then “Origin” quickly get things back on track, the sinister-sounding breakdown in the latter in particular doing a lot to reassure you as to what decade it is. The album actually very nearly finishes quite strongly, with both “You Get So Alone” and “MIA” featuring a driving beat, good riffs, and the latter even another rare guitar solo. However, as always with Soulcage, they temper the good things with more questionable ones, and “MIA” loses momentum halfway through, sacrificing its more up-tempo guitar riff for a sort of “fade out with weird keyboard effects” ending.

Alright, ‘Soul for Sale’ is by no means album-of-the-year material, it’s not fantastic, world-beating stuff…but it’s not dreadful, as “Flaming Flowers” might lead you to expect. I think Soulcage might have chucked that in at the start to lower listener expectations, so that the rest - what is really an album that hovers somewhere just about above average - sounds comparatively good. You’re tempted to quite like it, just out of sheer relief at what it could have been, and I think that’s my epitaph for ‘Soul for Sale’. “Well…it could have been worse”.

Genre : Metal / Power Metal

Article by Phil Sim