Soil - Picture Perfect Review

Posted by Daniel Wilcox on 10.31.2009

Who knew the guys behind "Halo" were still churning out records? Unfortunately, we'd probably have been better off not knowing.



Soil - Picture Perfect
Review by Daniel Wilcox

AJ Cavalier – vocals
Adam Zadel – guitar
Tim King – bass
Tom Schofield - drums

Track listing:
1. Tear It Down
2. The Lesser Man
3. Like It Is
4. Picture Perfect
5. Surrounded
6. Wasted
7. Every Moment
8. Anymore
9. Falter
10. Too Far Away
11. Calling Out
12. Temptation
13. Last Wish

Soil, or SOiL if you must, is a band that I’m not terribly familiar with, but I recently received a copy of their new album entitled Picture Perfect, and so I figured I’d do some research on them and then go ahead and write up a review of the new album. One of the first thing my research led me to discover is that they’re the band responsible for that track “Halo,” and then I remember being into this band way back when. “Halo,” of course, was huge around 2001, when it was released off of the album Scars. It was a hell of a track, but since the band has not only fallen off the map somewhat, but they’ve lost singer Ryan McCombs (now of Drowning Pool) and guitarist Shaun Glass (now of Dirge). While Scars served as a straight up rock ‘n’ roll alternative to the nu-metal movement of the time, Picture Perfect is a toned down somewhat, less of a southern-tinged powerfest and more of a subdued record, albeit still with its moments of angst and aggression.

This aggression is perhaps most-evident in the album’s opening track “Tear It Down,” which is fast and frantic but also shows that AJ Cavalier isn’t the same kind of vocalist as McCombs. He arguably has a better voice technically, but I’m just not feeling the same sort of passion here out of Cavalier as McComb’s provided on Scars or even on more recent Drowning Pool records. I haven’t heard in between records Redefine [2004] or True Self [2004], but I can presume that they both suffered, as this record has, by the lack of McCombs on the microphone.

Something that does feature on this album that I distinctly remember from Scars, is a number of mammoth choruses. This is perhaps never truer than on the album’s title track, which pummels on the verses before the chorus swoops in to clean up the damage, only for the ravaging guitars to pull it all apart once again. “Anymore” and “Lesser Man” are similar, and both could do well on the radio if it weren’t for the fact that no one seems to realize that this band even exists in 2009. I certainly didn’t.

Maybe a handful of tracks aside, however, there really isn’t all that much here that is going to stick with casual listeners, or even diehard fans. Perhaps ongoing changes in personnel and labels has taken all the steam out of this band, because quite frequently on Picture Perfect, the band simply sound like they’re not giving their all and as you would expect, the album suffers because of it. In particular, the ballads are really, really poor and uninspired. Tracks like “Surrounded” fails to register at all, and the middle portion of the album seems to drag on and on, unrelentingly, for what seems like an eternity before the up tempo numbers come back. The penultimate track “Temptation” is slightly better as it kicks things up a notch with its sinister acoustic passages and strong vocal performance.

Ultimately though, the songs simply fail to resonate. They aren’t catchy enough, or even interesting. The best tracks on here would barely manage to make it onto the band’s earlier material as filler and that’s probably me being generous.

Essential downloads: “The Lesser Man,” “Picture Perfect” and “Temptation.”

The 411: A few big chorus aside such as those in the tracks I mentioned, this comes across as a record by a band that were once huge, but after a few line-up changes and shifting record labels it faded off into obscurity. The record sounds like that because that's exactly what it is. With a whole host of filler and uninspired ballads, this is a record that will end up just like Soil in 2009: forgotten.

Final Score:  4.0   [ Poor ]