Sol Invictus - The Cruellest Month
I’ve heard Sol Invictus and bands covering Sol Invictus off and on while exploring the Folk Metal phenomenon, but I’ve never been a big fan. Neo Folk isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ve heard many bands in the genre, and while some are fairly good (such as The Soil Bleeds Black), most of them are boring and dispassionate (such as This Empty Flow and even Blood Axis). Sol Invictus, being one of the older groups in the genre, is a bit more interesting than the average Neo Folk band. One of the first things that I noticed is that Sol Invictus doesn’t exactly write “songs” in as much as they participate in a cacophony of Renaissance and Medieval musical instruments that blend together in a mish-mash of sounds that sometimes works and other times just makes your head hurt. It’s like improvisational Jazz for the Ren-Faire set. The second thing that I noticed is that the vocals, while sort of melodic, are very flat. You can understand everything, but they generally fall into a tight range that drones on and on and on. I really couldn’t get into this album. Things were just too chaotic and unstructured where the music was concerned, and the vocals just bored me because they lacked dynamics. When I want to listen to Folk music, I have Lord Wind, Hagalaz Runedance, Perunwit and Wojnar, all of which are better at creating a Medieval atmosphere and also have more structured songs. Sol Invictus is an interesting listen for limited amounts of time but I couldn’t sit through an entire album of this.
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