If you’re some sort of masochist, perhaps you relished the searing agony of reading through the inane scattered ramblings of my 2022 best-of list. It wouldn’t take you long to get to the part where I start discussing Bloodborne, the game which became my greatest obsession of the year. In fact, my obsession went so deep that I themed my whole top 20 after it. To this day, I regularly think about shirking the 30 or so other games in my backlog to do one more run. One more chance to do a delicate dance of swords with the triple threat Shadows of Yharnam or wander in a land of madness while trying to figure out where the sounds of a crying baby are coming from.
The first track released for Let Us Pray was “Beneath the Lake,” which is about that grub-like spider monster pictured above. It opens with a teary-eyed melodic riff and slow drums sure to make Swallow the Sun fans swoon. The opening section continually adds layers to the music while the drums get faster and more complex, showing off Brett Windnagle’s (all instruments and production) songwriting chops. Just as you think the song is about to hit a wild crescendo, the band averts expectations and opts for a caveman battering. The knuckle-dragging approach is a perfect pairing for introducing Lux Edward’s vocals, which sit somewhere between Mother of Graves‘ Brandon Howe and Primitive Man‘s Ethan Lee McCarthy. The song relishes in the dramatic across its nearly 10-minute runtime with a particularly killer moment where a staccato gallop is punctuated with synth notes that could be the soundtrack to a massive demon cracking the earth open and clambering up from the depths to stand before you like a lumbering building making you quake in your boots.
With that introduction, it would be fair to think that Soulmass would spend all of its time in the realm of the slow and low; fortunately, that’s not the case. Album opener “A Call Beyond” leverages marching drums and a killer OSDM riff with a modern sheen to bring listeners into the fold with a death metal burner. Even within that context, however, they utilize melodic notes in the chorus that make it feel at once triumphant and downtrodden. “Sympathy’s Desire” opens with a quiet 80’s synth that screams of dim neons emanating from a dungeon cellar before the guitars come in, following the same pattern and turning that synth into a classic Candlemass-style doom riff. It also features one hell of a fist-pumping chorus and a perfect piano outro that captures Bloodborne‘s gothic tone. “Vile Executioner” is the album’s shortest track tearing through the ear with a modern death metal riff dripping with so much swagger it’s impossible not to make a stank face too.
The mix of styles and song lengths is well-balanced throughout the majority of Let Us Pray‘s 51-minute runtime. The first two tracks bring high-energy and speed to hook the listener, while the two that follow are more expansive and lean into the dramatic. That longer two-song run is followed by the uppercut of “Vile Executioner” before the album unleashes back-to-back roughly 10-minute tracks to close things out. “Where The Crow Feathers Fall” has the album’s most exploratory opening with some piano, whose bleak black-and-white keys are eventually treated to a bit of color from light guitar work that meanders more than it riffs. “Nightmares Reign” bites and fights while the guitars do more wailing and moaning than the songs prior. Pairing two of Let Us Pray’s longest tracks to close the album does risk some people feeling the album drags a bit toward the end. Mileage may vary, but ultimately, the album closes on a strong note.
When a band has such explicitly stated source material, the lyrics always take on a bit more scrutiny. From Software is infamous for obscuring the plots of their games and requiring the player to dig for information to put the story together on their own. Edwards does justice to this approach with their lyrics. Each song provides killer death metal lyrics that can stand on their own, but also provide glimmers of the Bloodborne story that may ignite curiosity and drive some to read between the lines or start digging for the full tale. “Ominous Prayer” and “Where The Crow Feathers Fall” do an excellent job of giving the history of Yharnam and how the city fell to its current state of ruin, while other tracks focus in a particular creature or tale that resides in the game’s current time. As with the samples, spoken-word passages and music, you needn’t be a Bloodborne nerd to enjoy Edwards’ lyrics. As you can see here, they’re solid death metal fun all on their own:
“The scourge descends in pestilence
Our fight is lost
Must cut the cost
Burn it all down
Seal the old town
Comrades abuse the blood to heal
A stirring madness leaves little doubt
Their wretched drunkenness reveals
The enemy is within and without
I must shoulder this burden
A curse to cull my own kind
This is the path that I’ve chosen
A hunter of hunters maligned”
In order to find the previously mentioned Rom, The Vacuous Spider, you must walk to the edge of a stone walkway high above a still lake. With little information, you’ll look down and blindly leap to see what happens; that blind leap rewards players with one of the eeriest atmospheres and skin-crawling boss fights of the game. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Soulmass until now, so I encourage you to take a similar leap of faith into their deathly waters. You may just find the death-doom boss fight you’ve been looking for.
