Review by Felix on December 9, 2019.

I have a special relationship with this full-length, because it was my first album of a Norwegian band. Unfortunately, there are no further reasons to appreciate this record in a specific manner. Soulside Journey is stuffed with painfully meaningless death metal. Inter alia due to its then exotic status, I tried hard to become a fan of this work. But I had no chance.

Today they are dinosaurs, but back in 1991, Darkthrone were absolute beginners and did not know much about the art of writing enthralling songs. The gap between their ambitions and their abilities was greater than the distance between Oslo and Hammerfest. To be more precise, the songs start somewhere and end somewhere, but I cannot identify central ideas. Instead, it feels like listening to fragments, because the single pieces appear torn and inconsistent. Darkthrone spit on conventional song patterns and that is not bad per se. The problem is that the songs fail to create a comprehensible flow. Too much (mediocre) ideas show up, and, even worse, none of them is clearly defined. This leads to pretty obscure results, not least because of a high number of awkward breaks. "Grave with a View", to mention just one example, starts atmospheric with background chorale, but this approach remains incomplete and the following parts fail to evoke any kind of emotions.

Basically, I miss catchiness and velocity. Too many slow-moving parts occur and some of them have the potential to cause mental anguish. The longer the album goes on, the worse it gets. This is not so much a problem of the later songs. They are not better or worse than its predecessors. The annoying fact is the recognition that the entire album lacks great compositions. In view of the omnipresent mediocrity of the song material, it is almost useless to philosophize about the quality of the production. Briefly, the nasty sound cannot be dismissed as amateurish or inappropriate. It does not lack of power and creates a cold aura, no more and no less.

One may call the compositional approach "progressive". Well, I do not support progressive metal actively, but I bet that no fan of this sub-genre would use this term in connection with Soulside Journey. It would be also unfair to speak of "free jazz death metal", because Darkthrone, there is no doubt about it, try to give their material a structure. Unfortunately, they are simply not able to form the songs successfully. Whenever they perform a good part, and there are doubtlessly a few pretty decent sections, they throw it away in a matter of seconds and turn to other ideas. It is therefore no wonder that the tasteful artwork of this wonky debut remains its biggest asset.

Some pitiless smart alecks criticize the Norwegian duo for being inconsistent. I do not care about their babbling, because Darkthrone mostly deliver high quality albums. But the most important reason for my lack of interest is that I really appreciated the stylistic modifications of the band after this half-baked debut whose only very little highlight is the opener. Therefore, come out and accompany Fenriz and Nocturno Culto on their journey if you like to do so. I stay at home.

Rating: 3.8 out of 10