With so many cookie-cutter bands around jumping into the nearest genre and ‘paying homage’ to all that has gone before, it’s sometimes difficult to get your head around exactly where a band like Sólstafir is coming from. Like all things new, it takes a bit of work. After years of having these guys on my list of bands to make some time for, occasionally dipping my toe in the water, but never really making the effort to get my head around things, I was finally, and without ceremony plunged in at the deep end with Ótta. Overdue, but better late than never, I primed myself with the a bit of background reading – namely the amazing Hellfest appearance earlier this year – which probably served as one of the best adverts for a band I ever came across in a single lunch hour. My defences were down and I stood ready for the challenge. Part post-black metal, part pulsing folk rock, a bit of let-it-wash-over-you shoegaze and a decent slice of the Icelandic spirit might fill in a few gaps but, as usual with bands of such pedigree, the sum of the parts never quite captures the point of Sólstafir. Even after the briefest of spins, the grand beauty of the debut Í Blóði Og Anda is self evident while later albums have smoothed off some of those harsher post-hardcore edges and laid bare the Sólstafir vision. What we have arrived at here is not exactly more mellow – although anyone that comes into this from the more extreme end of the metal spectrum would certainly consider it to be so. But it is certainly less raging, less frenetically random. It’s almost as if the band has now made its mind up about life, the universe and everything – and has set about with Ótta weighing up existence as a whole rather than charging through dismantling it piece by piece. No less emotional, but those emotions through the years have become more refined, more focused and less likely to switch and leave you hanging. Like their neighbours Enslaved from across the Norwegian Sea, they have developed a sound all of their own even if that sound was far more apparent from the word go with Sólstafir, who have retained elements of each album with them throughout their career – with each one unmistakably belonging to the band whichever angle you come from.
Where all this has taken us, is here to Ótta – one of the band’s most complete and most focused albums to date. It contains all the tortured anguish and melancholy of previous releases but this time the drifting post rock has reached the perfect meeting place with the more ambient, acoustic elements to the point where it almost impossible to notice where the two join together. Post rock most definitely, perhaps even prog, but with an almost casual way of enveloping you like the best of black metal. Whereas previous albums have sometimes felt like they’ve been packed to the rafters with things to see and do, there is no such feeling with Ótta. The whole sound simply melts within and between each track in a calculatedly unhurried way to produce a feeling of vast, uncluttered space. More than wilderness and landscape – more like time and space itself. But within the apparent simplicity of the sound there is a multitude hardworking strands drifting in and out – layers to unpick and unravel over repeated listens. Working up to Ótta, Sólstafir have proved themselves to be a first ranking metal band, even if I couldn’t honestly say from this I would class them as a metal band at all. So they must accept the honorary position of such as metal breaks into new spheres and takes us all along with it. Sólstafir have clearly proved themselves through their journey as being up there in terms of individuality with the aforementioned Enslaved and other kings of their own destiny like Neurosis. Bands which are also on their own path. I’m sure some people will be disconcerted by the drifting nature of Ótta. But just because they make it look easy doesn’t mean that it is. Quite where they go from here is difficult to say after they’ve shrugged off most of their angst and found themselves in something close to perfect harmony.
(8.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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