Sólstafir
Masterpiece Of Bitterness

Iceland, summer 2006.

Record store in Reykjavik. I come across a CD with a curious cover featuring strange pale and blurred figures, from which I feel a call, a voice: listen to me and you won't regret it, it seems to say to me. With my enviable English, I ask for information from the man in the store, who, with much less proud English but a radiant smile, explains that it's a metal band, Solstafir (rays of sun filtering through the clouds, or something like that) and describes its standout features to me.

Convinced more by the mysterious cover than by the guy, I decide to take it despite the discouraging price of 2000 kronur (about 24 euros!!), and one evening, in a campsite lost in Icelandic nature just steps away from a large waterfall, I put it in my trusty walkman and hit play. The impact with the first track is love at first listen: "I Myself The Visionary Head" is a rain of guitar notes and drum beats that overwhelm me and drag me into a journey of powerful, enveloping melodies, and then distant like calls echoing from the mountains, only to explode again in a powerful finale.
The voice, shouted, strained, yet almost remote at the same time, makes me feel alone in a musical wilderness that evokes the immense and unspoiled nature, the empty and solitary spaces of this land; the cold, ancient air I breathe has a different flavor, everything is different: the music has fused with the landscape into a single, immobile millennial dance, and I with it. After the first track, of 20 minutes, I already have to pause: it's too much! I can't go on now, I have to reflect on it. My friend, curious, asks me how the album is, but I still can't find a way to answer him.

I let him listen to the first track, and I am happy but not surprised to see that his reaction is the same as mine. At this point, I am ready to move on! I crawl into my sleeping bag, close my eyes, and press play again, this time not to stop until the end. And the magic repeats: the tracks from the second to the sixth have the same magnificently evocative effect as the first; they alternate hard, cold, and fast metal parts with slow, pleasant instrumental intervals, but equally cold in their folksy, introspective, inscrutable sound. The scene is dominated by powerful riffs alternated with sweet arpeggios, but above all, in my opinion, by the drums, the true star of the band, capable of keeping extraordinary rhythms.

The tracks, very long, are only interspersed with the aggressive but almost dispersed voice, giving way to the music that can paint landscapes, environments, cold, spirits... there, I think I've understood what those strange figures on the cover were: they were spirits, millennial spirits of nature that this music manages to evoke, and that now dance to the sound of the last track, "Náttfari", an instrumental folk song, rhythmic, that gradually fades away, along with the pagan magic of this music, of this album that I will always keep as a memory of a journey that might have had a different flavor, if that day, at the record store in Reykjavik, I had decided to save 2000 kronur.