My soul's gone Kold

Sólstafir- Köld (2009)
1) 78 Days In The Desert
2) Kold
3) Pale Rider
4) She Destroys Again
5) Necrologue
6) World Void Of Souls
7) Love Is The Devil (And I Am In Love)
8) Goddess Of The Ages

Yet another 'best of the 2000s' and yet another mashing of genres. It's kinda getting boring, I know, but I'll make up for it with the next few posts....I almost half kinda promise.
This time round it's Solstafir (fuck messing around with the funky 'O' bullshit in their name), an Icelandic psychedelic rock meets Viking black metal band. According to Wikipedia, the oracle of our ages, their name is Icelandic for the beams of light that radiate from the sun. Epic.
They happen to be another band that I found out about due to a sampler CD I got free with a magazine, either Metal Hammer or Terrorizer this time round. The track was 'Blood Soaked Velvet' (don't worry, no emo bullshit to be found here) from their Masterpiece of Bitterness album. Their music is epic in scale and sound and with Kold (again, fuck the dodgy 'O') it's as sweeping and vast as ever. There's an ethereal feeling to the album, an almost haunting beauty behind it's riffs. This isn't really 'metal' per se, but there's definately a remnant of the black metal guitar sound and effects present, just something about the guitars '78 Days In The Desert' reminds me of Cobalt and the ilk. The songs constantly threaten to break into full ahead, balls to the wall black metal but never actually do. This may seem anti-climactic, bathetic if you will, but it adds a fragility to their sound that makes it haunting and adds that ethereal essence I mentioned earlier. For me the sound is represented perfectly by the album cover and all that it depicts: darkness, bleakness, the ethereal and ephemeral and beauty. Yeah, you heard me, this music is beautiful, what of it? It's progressive, melodic, psychedelic, sweeping, haunting, fragile, cold, rousing and immortal.
This is the type of album you listen to with the lights off, imagining cloud giants fighting over the mountain of Megiddo or a lumbering leviathan writhing under glacial oceans, the waters so deep a blue they almost seem black. Beauty juxtaposed with power, precision and a sense of the grand(iose?)
To paraphrase Tenacious D; this album has powers, 'What powers you ask? I dunno...How 'bout the power... to move you?'