‘Omen’ is the new proof from Soulfly, that Max’s Band has been queuing among all those (not too many though) genre defining acts, who ideally would change the old school multi platinum arena giants. It’s not a flattery but the natural course of history. Soulfly have released an album which would turn them back from world music experiments right on the right track, where they are close to the hearts of those who still remember and cherish the old Sepultura. ‘Omen’ is the 7th Soulfly album and the magic of this number is being justified in the artwork in the first place. You see seven gas masked zombies holding symbols of the seven deadly sins- exactly the way Max had seen them in his nightmares. If we look deeper, it’s ‘Omen’ that starts a new counting again as Max have released only six albums with his old band mates in Sepultura. And as you charge this album into the chamber and pull the trigger, you will definitely see the new raw and destructing energy blowing everything in its sight. No signs of the metal Bob Marley or whoever they used to call Max in the recent years. Quite the contrary, the opening track ‘Bloodbath And Beyond’ manifests punk attitude, punk configuration of sounds and a punk message. The jumping groove of ‘Rise Of The Fallen’ with Greg of Dillinger Escape Plan slightly reminds of the times circa ‘Primitive’, but the really interesting stuff comes with the triple smash ‘Lethal Injection’featuring Tommy Victor of Prong, the apocalyptic beast ‘Kingdom’, influenced heavily by NWOBHM and the bloodied massacre of ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’. Of course Max could not compete the lyrical state of art of Slayer, because when it comes to serial killers, they are the masters of the gruesome, that is why Soulfly’s lyric has gone a little too one-dimensional but the riff behind it is monstrous. What else? ‘Off With Their Heads’ and ‘Vulture Culture’ are typical ‘Arise’ era thrashers and then you get the wonderful ‘Mega Doom’ and ‘Counter Sabotage’. There’s no place for humanity in ‘Omen’. This album is blood and guts- from the beginning to the very end with the inevitable ‘Soulfly VII’… and as a matter of fact we expected it to be exactly like that.