Style: Progressive Metal, Metalcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for Fans of: Between the Buried and Me, Alkaloid
Review by: Ryan
Country: Louisiana, United States
Release date: September 1, 2023
For a beast of such massive stature, Soul Giant was hiding right under my nose. While I’ve been living my normal life, this four-piece cryptid has been lurking in the shadows of our shared swamp city. Since February of 2022, there have been numerous sightings here in Louisiana, as well as in neighboring states. I only recently discovered their debut self-produced album, New Wave, while trudging through new prog metal releases on Bandcamp. I quickly sent a Spotify link to other local prog nerd friends who all seemed to have the same thing to say: “Yeah, I know Soul Giant. Wait, YOU didn’t know about Soul Giant?” I even called my wife into my home office to show her, to which she responded, “Yeah, that’s Soul Giant.” Clearly, this conspiracy runs quite deep. The album even shares a name with my air fryer that I still haven’t figured out how to clean properly. Based on the album artwork, I initially expected New Wave to be a very Spawn of Possession-esque tech-death experience, but that doesn’t paint the full picture.
One of my favorite categories of prog metal is what I like to call “adventure prog”: music that just sounds like an adventure itself. It’s an unofficial tag, but I find it an apt title for such albums as Cormorant’s Metazoa, Son of Aurelius’s Under a Western Sun, and Parius’s The Signal Heard Throughout Space. Aside from being melodic and theatrical, “adventure prog” doesn’t really have many specific parameters, but I know it when I hear it. I’m happy to formally induct Soul Giant’s New Wave into this niche echelon to the sound of my own dopamine receptors’ applause.
New Wave begins with a very famous Carl Sagan quote from Pale Blue Dot reminding us of our insignificance and simultaneous self-importance. “The Departure” starts with a very upbeat Omega Experiment or Astronoid style riff dancing across the fretboard, and a pounding rhythm section juxtaposed against the elongated soaring clean vocals creates a very heavy yet uplifting atmosphere that wouldn’t feel out of place on Lantlos’s Melting Suns. The instrumentation throughout New Wave shows that Soul Giant must certainly be influenced by technical death metal, but leans way further into the sphere of modern prog metal with a primarily clean melodic vocal approach. “The Departure” and the title track, “New Wave,” both shine a bright light on the band’s groovy-melodic side with soaring cleans and instrumentation oozing in positivity, but that doesn’t mean that Soul Giant is afraid to get heavy. The midsection of “The Departure” conjures the rhythmic intensity of Gojira’s “Art of Dying.” Soul Giant’s heaviest moments include the unstoppable force that is “Gut Wrench” and the first movement in the fifteen-minute epic finale “Primordial Plague” that nearly emulates Behemoth.
Being a self-produced album, New Wave does suffer from somewhat muddy mixing, but I find that it adds to the DIY charm. Soul Giant are clearly students of the genre and their songwriting chops add enough dynamics to cast the mostly mild production woes to the side and make for a truly entertaining album. The band knows exactly when to gallop from clean to harsh sections and when to include a huge sweep-solo or blast beat. The raw vocal recordings add a level of honesty to the final product. They may be slightly buried behind the guitar, but you can hear the strain in the performance, rather than covering up every imperfection in ProTools. Lyrically, New Wave could use a bit more substance for my taste, but the lyrics aren’t simplistic by any means and get the job done. At the end of the day, Soul Giant has crafted a bombastic debut full of expertly utilized prog tropes we know and love and I’m excited to see what they do next and maybe catch a live show right around the block from my house when I get the chance.
Recommended Tracks: The Departure, Gut Wrench, Primordial Plague
You May Also Like: Parius, Son of Aurelius, Cormorant, Elkhsha
Final Verdict: 8/10
Related Links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: SS Bootyblaster Enterprises
Soul Giant is:
Chris Fontenot – Vocals / Guitar
Justin Doan – Guitar / Vocals
Jeremy Parker – Bass
John Callais – Drums
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