Built in the absence of the man who had designed it, the seventh album by the Helsingborg sextet arrived through Nuclear Blast on 19 October 2007, the first Soilwork record without the guitarist and principal songwriter Peter Wichers, who had walked out in late 2005, produced by guitarist Ola Frenning with Peter Wildoer of Darkane and recorded at home in Helsingborg, at Not Quite Studios, between February and May 2007, with Devin Townsend brought in to produce the vocals in Vancouver. The architect had left the workshop. The workers rebuilt the engine from his drawings and switched it on.
The line-up on Sworn to a Great Divide is a document in itself. Björn "Speed" Strid sang, Ola Frenning and Daniel Antonsson played guitar, Sven Karlsson keyboards, Ola Flink bass and Dirk Verbeuren drums. Antonsson appears on no other Soilwork album. The record reached twenty five in Sweden, nineteen in Finland and thirty seven in Germany, and came two years and seven months after Stabbing the Drama.
Speaking to Tangra Mega Rock in October 2007, Strid called it "almost like a best-of-album", a description more accurate than intended. A best-of collects what already worked, and this album is assembled from exactly those parts: the stop-start riff, the clean chorus lifted on keyboards, the shift from roar to melody at the bar line where everyone expects it. The keyboards sit higher in the mix than on any earlier record, and the drums under them are tight and varied, Verbeuren hammering the double kick into the floor like rivets into a hull. The construction is clean. The surprise is absent.
Strid is the reason to listen. His voice is the one element on the record that converts formula into conviction, the scream rough and close, the clean line wide and certain, and on the best songs he carries material that would collapse in other hands. That is not a small achievement. It is also not a substitute for writing.
The title track opens with blast beats, a statement that the band still intends violence. "Exile", among the first songs written after Wichers left, is slower and more melodic, and its chorus is the album's clearest argument for the new direction.
The absence of Wichers explains more than any single song does. The departed guitarist had been the source of the band's sharpest turns, the riff that changed direction a bar earlier than expected, and a band writing without him for the first time does what any workshop does after losing its master: it reproduces the last approved designs with great care and declines to improvise. Every part fits. Very little is risked.
A best-of collects what already worked. That is both the compliment and the charge.
"The Pittsburgh Syndrome" is the heaviest and most thrash-driven song on the record, a deliberate burst of speed, and it is welcome precisely because it breaks the pattern; the chorus is the weak joint, the riff is not. "Sick Heart River" is the one genuine step into new ground, moody and atmospheric, a song that slows the machine down long enough to let something other than precision into the room.
"20 More Miles" closes the album and is its peak, the song on which melody, Strid's voice and an emotional guitar solo finally serve the same purpose instead of taking turns. Whether the album returns to the harder sound of Natural Born Chaos is the open question; the answer is that it returns to the outline of that sound and not to its danger.
The limit is the middle of the record. Between "The Pittsburgh Syndrome" and "Sick Heart River" the songs follow one template so faithfully that they dissolve into each other, the riff, the lift, the chorus, the riff, until "I, Vermin" and the songs around it become difficult to tell apart an hour later. A band working without its main writer, with its own guitarist in the producer's chair, chose safety. The choice is audible.
For whom, then. For anyone who values the singer over the songs, this is one of his strongest performances, and "20 More Miles", "Sick Heart River" and "The Pittsburgh Syndrome" belong on any serious Soilwork compilation. For anyone looking for the band that once ran melodic death metal off its rails, the record is a well maintained engine idling in the yard. The return of Wichers the following year is the verdict history delivered on it, and it was not an unkind one.