Soul Sign has exclusively released a preview of the exciting new single Clean Soil through MetalTalk. The powerful track features the new lineup of vocalist Mark Boals, guitarist Rob Math, bassist Bjorn Englen and Mike Cancino on drums and is taken from a new album due later this year. Clean Soil is available on iTunes tomorrow on 1 August 2023.
Clean Soil opens on a great unison bass and guitar riff, which sucks you into a fascinating song. Bjorn is enthusiastic about working again with Rob Math.
“We work very well together,” Bjorn told MetalTalk’s Steve Ritchie. “I’m able to pull a really good performance out of him, and he feels the same way. It’s really great. He was in Soul Sign a long time ago. Back in 2010, he joined, and he left in 2012. He just came back into the band last year.”
Math is one of those guitarists with a great inspirational tone, and it’s engrossing listening to him play on this new track. The relationship between Rob and Bjorn stems from a meeting at a NAMM Show.
Drummer Mike Cancino has been described before as a “workhorse.” Personally, I thought that description a bit lazy, as watching his playing is wonderfully infectious. Cancino, who has drummed with Lynch Mob and stoner rock legends Unida, has a fantastic ride sound, and he really fills out the sound on Clean Soil. He is also a co-writer of the track.
“Mike’s a great guy,” Bjorn said. “He has an excellent work ethic. He is an excellent drummer and a great friend. We started getting together, juggling some ideas back and forth. I think it was just one of those things that came from just jamming. We were just jamming it, and then I took my phone, and I recorded it. This [Clean Soil] was one of the ideas that me and him worked on that ended up on the album. We had some nice collaborations. I think we wrote about four songs together that ended up on the new album.”
You can see on the video, which is part of the interview above, he really gets around the kit well. “He loves what he does,” Bjorn says, “and he’s very, very passionate about playing the drums. It’s a real pleasure working with him.”
Mark Boals has a pedigree which includes singing with Yngwie Malmsteen, Ted Nugent, Uli Jon Roth and Don Dokken, to name four. He is in impressive form on Clean Soil. The sound of layered vocals when he’s singing lines like “in the land of the free” makes for excellent earworm moments.
“Mark is probably my favourite singer,” Bjorn said, “You know, he happens to be our band, and it’s just great. He’s a great, great guy, like everybody else in the band. He is a fantastic friend, and his voice is just phenomenal. That’s the only way I can describe it.
“I was very pleased. In some of the tracks, he would sing and say I think you can do better. Can you change the phrasing of this… I think in this song. He got it right right away, if I remember correctly. I told him just kinda go bluesy, real bluesy. He nailed it.”
Nailed it, he did, and in the video, shot in the Nevada desert in “a ghost town,” you can see him singing on the wing of a battered old aeroplane.
Rob Math pulls an exquisite solo in Clean Soil, under which Bjorn plays a wonderfully busy bassline. “I’m keeping the bass playing pretty simple in most cases,” Bjorn says of the album, “but there’s some wild playing in place. Probably one of my favourite parts of the album is I like Rob’s guitar. I just love his playing, too, and he’s one of the few people that you give him 10 or 15 or 20 seconds, and he can tell a story with a solo.
“Not a lot of people can do that. He goes through so many different emotions and so many different things quickly. A lot of the guitar solos end up being something like 20 seconds.”
Clean Soil is available from iTunes on 1 August 2023. You can watch the premiere of the video in MetalTalk MTTV Episode 78.
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