From Iceland — Sólstafir - Masters of Bitterness

Published May 19, 2006

Sólstafir present a somewhat outdated vision of metal with this, their first full-length album, with dissatisfyingly shallow sounds and chords, but still manage to convey their chosen imagery of frozen Northern wastes populated only by the souls of the damned fairly well. The songs are of hypnosis-inducing length, the screams are those of a dying man betrayed by his own kin, and the cavernous guitars seem to echo through the halls of an abandoned mountain castle littered with cobweb-strewn skeletons. Excessive and wholesome, but doesn’t quite hit the spot somehow, perhaps owing to the rough and diluted production.