ALBUM REVIEW: Extinguished Cold Light – Sol Sistere
Formed in Chile all the way back in 2013, SOL SISTERE deal a brilliant, heady blend of atmospheric black metal that successfully ties together the genres darker and more aggressive sound with a glorious atmospheric edge, making for some truly impressive and epic music. Three years after the release of their debut album, Unfading Incorporeal Vacuum, the band return with their second album, Extinguished Cold Light, a record that consolidates and refines their tight and eclectic sound, making this their most impressive and sprawling efforts to date.
Starting Extinguished Cold Light off strong, Elemental Chaos is a fierce and epic piece of music with some excellent guitars parts, solid, thunderous drums and bestial, monstrous sounding vocals and a great atmospheric undercurrent which really helps to beef up the already vast and massive sound. With plenty of brilliant musicianship and lots of diversity in the sound, it’s a fantastic opener which sets a lofty bar right out of the gate. Spiral Moon is a more speed orientated and aggressive song with a razor sharp and intricate sound, blending precise drumming patterns with caustic vocals and tight, robust guitar sections, to great effect. It’s a whirlwind of dizzying, technical and glorious black metal with a grating edge that contrasts well with the more monolithic parts of the song, making it rabid and majestic in equal measure.
Descending Light is a dark and hypnotic track with a dense, dirge-like opening motif and booming, primal percussion, which proves to be a steady piece of music with plenty of vicious, melody driven moments. The vocals on here in particular excel, and give this song a much larger sound which sets it apart from the first two songs quite a bit. The Faceless, another lengthy affair, making use of cleaner tones and, much like the song before it, much slower and melancholic music, in order to stand out significantly from what has come before it. Although the track does pick up the pace as it progresses, it never loses the haunting and sublime elements that mark the first few seconds of the song, and proves to be a great change of pace that adds even more depth to this albums sound.
Swallow the Misery is a blisteringly fast aural assault that is unrelenting for its entire running time, barring a brief, doom-laden passage towards the songs climax. With some especially impassioned vocals, great guitar work and machine gun tight drumming, it’s a relatively brief, yet brilliant, burst of energy that demands the listeners attention from the very first note, and stands as one of the stand out tracks on the record. Insignificance Upon Us has an absolutely hair raising opening riff, which quickly gives way to a whirlwind of soaring guitars, powerful drums and thick, sludgy vocals that have a dark and dirty sound that is unmatched anywhere else on this album. Utilizing cleaner tones and more minimalist moments, it’s a great display of how good this band are at songwriting, and keeping a longer song interesting throughout, something that not a lot of bands are capable of pulling off, making for a great climactic note for the album.
Juxtaposed Universe, a mid-paced, gloomy behemoth, is peppered with razor sharp, morose lead licks and hellish, bestial vocals, crafting a song that is vicious and dark in equal measure. It’s got plenty of huge sounding rhythms which really help to make the song, and add a great counterpoint to the more caustic parts, ensuring that every moment of this songs nine minutes is solid and impressive. Unfortunately, despite this being a very good offering, it just cannot match up to the previous song in terms of seer brilliance, and you get the feeling that if these two songs had traded places, the album would have benefited greatly from ending on one of the albums strongest offerings. Nonetheless, it’s a good end of a great record.
Extinguished Cold Light is an incredibly good piece of atmospheric black metal. SOL SISTERE have managed to capture the intensity of black metal in a way that many acts within the same genre often fail to, making the band stand out quite a bit from many of their atmospheric contemporaries. One of the albums major setbacks is the fact that a couple of the songs, in particular Descending Light and Juxtaposed Universe, are longer than they really need to be. If both of these songs trimmed about two or three minutes off their running time, they would have fit in incredibly well rather than outstaying their welcome. That being said, the rest of the music on offer is so solid and well done that this proves to be only a minor criticism. With any luck, the next release from SOL SISTERE will be just as good as the bulk of this record, because they provide a slight variation on an already established sound that works extremely well.
Rating: 8/10
Extinguished Cold Light is out now via Hammerheart Records.
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