The Circular Drain

So... as the title says, this album is a half of anything. The first part is fantastic, "a new recording of old stuff"; and, the other half is the fuck up of the best songs of this band!

The first four songs are taken from the band's fist (and unic) demo, called Jernlov. For this play they re-recorded this demo and as result we have the true essence of this band. A very raw sound, with the touch of very nice synths that add deepth and atmosphere into their music.

This duo make a nice blend of old black metal roots with these avant-garde synthetized elements. Consisting in a blstaing drumming work and very harmonic and solid guitar riffs. And, as not usual, some great bass lines, even in the more avant-gardish moments of Solefald (like In Harmonia Universali) they never did some great bass lines, just as different as they done in the first song of this compilation.

The variety of vocals, and their wide range of action make this first part simply great! If this play was just an EP with these four tracks it would deserve 100% for sure!

Now, "the awful truth". The second part of this recording is just something terrible. I am not just against some electronic avant-garde experiments, I like the eletronica Ulver era and some other shit like that (not too much I have to admitt), but, in fact they fucked up some great songs.

By let some crazy and "pseudo-avant-gardish" musicians use their old material converting it into eletronic remixes they just turned something beautiful into pure shit.

Lately Solefald used to have some Viking inspired songs and ambience, and, some songs that had this feeling just lost it with that bad new eletronic desing as I must say. They changed the violins for cheesy synths, changed saxs for drum'n'bass rhythms, and changed the brutal drumming of Lazare for eletronic beats. In fact, this is not a rave band, they are not "cool" and should never sound like that, do they want to pretend that are an "eletronic viking avant-garde black metal band"?

This sounds like been fake with themselves. If Lazare and Cornelius want to make eletronic music it is fine, just make another side project and play like that. They just might not release Black Metal together with this inominated shit... pure shit... I just recommed to buy the fist half of this album... I just wish this could be possible.