What can someone say about SOLEFALD? The Norwegian band is among the greatest avant garde Black Metal bands, they are very well known and highly appreciated by the fans of the genre and have released high quality records throughout their career. So here we are 4 years after their last studio album and the masterminds ofSOLEFALD - Cornelius and Lazare - have created and released the 7^th studio album of the band entitled " Norrøn Livskunst" . This is also their first record released through Indie Recordings.

With avant garde music is impossible to describe precisely and analytically an album due to the musical diversity and the huge amount of different music elements and genres blended together. So what I am gonna try to do is give the general picture of their music the best way I can. The album marks some minor changes in the vocal style with Cornelius employing the aggressive style he developed on the "An Icelandic Odyssey" album introducing also some deeper, nearly spoken word vocal approach whileLazare's vocals are more dense and sophisticated. The musical style covers, as it was expected, a broad range giving us everything we loved and wanted from SOLEFALD. In "Norrøn Livskunst" we can find a wide range of complex vocals, female vocals, lots of progressive melodies (with the wide and general meaning of the word), pure aggressive Black Metal, some heavy electronic passages, jazz, folk and a 'dozen' other influences from various genres, a few saxophone parts etc. And all of them blended perfectly giving us music of the highest quality. The only thing I can say that I miss a little bit is the absence of a few violin parts that we could find in their previous records, but that does not change at all my overall opinion about "Norrøn Livskunst".

The more I listened to the album the more I enjoyed it and liked it and in the end without really realizing it I almost listened to the album again and again all day long for a week! The amazing songwriting, the impressive wide range complex vocals and the unique blending of all these music elements and genres is what makes "Norrøn Livskunst" so great. And that's the elements (we can find them in all their releases) that make SOLEFALD such an amazing band. I recommend it without hesitation not only to fans of the genre and the band but also to everyone that is interested in listening to something more complex and experimental or listens to a wide variety of music genres.