Review Summary: A couple great tracks joining hands with some weaker riff-raff
Okay, so this is the only good Sólstafir album in my honest opinon. All their other stuff is generic viking metal garbage (again, only in my opinion), whereas this is some sort of post rock influenced depressing black-ish metal. It's pretty good, but has to grow on you. I've showed it to some people and they've hated it, and later they've changed their minds. For me, it took one listen of the track "World Void of Souls" for me to say it was terrible, and half a listen of "Pale Rider" for me to love it. That's the messed up thing about it; some of the songs blow my mind with how good they are, others are so meh, so boring, that they're just the same thing over and over. It's a little on the annoying side.
Anyway, the album starts out with an eight minute instrumental song that shows no side of anyone's imagination. I heard it and said to myself, this is just more of that which we can count on Sólstafir to release. Then track two, the title track "Köld" began. It's so... overpowered. It blasts its Primordial-esque chant-vocals across the heavens and uses them to drive a stake through the face of every album they have previously released. It's that good.
What could only be described as a heavenly ending to a perfect, heavy song is followed by the calming guitar intro of "Pale Rider". "Pale Rider" messes with your senses, with its light intro, to it's double bass blasts, you can count on this song to prove the album. It boasts just over eight minutes of unbeatable musical talent, with the Primordial-esque album slaying vocals chant/yelling something about walking alot. Lyrics are important almost all the time in music, but not here. Their limited English makes their lyrics sound rather... obvious. One of the best musical parts of the song is accompanied by the lyric "One of us shall surely die tonight; I don't care, no I just don't care". If that's not cheesy, I'm unsure of what you would call cheesy. He doesn't care, nope, doesn't care. However what they lack in lyrical talent is more than made up in musical and vocal talent. The other major problem with this song is the super-lame ending. The heavy double bass blasts just end, followed by about three seconds of silence, then the next song starts. A good song needs a good outro, or else there is no calm time, no time to recuperate and get ready for the next amazing song.
Fortunately in that aspect, you don't need to recuperate for the next song, because, unfortunately, the next song, "She Destroys Again", is rather weak. The album takes a dive for the next couple of songs, sounding much the same as their older stuff, just more progressive and more heaven-shaking chant/yells.
The next highlight of this album is "Love is the Devil (And I am in Love)", which sounds out of place on this tracklist, and more belonging to a pop-punky love ballad, where the song is about some chick who his friends say are easy but he can't date because his parents say he's not old enough (being twelve), and because they don't understand. But, I enjoy it. It's a faster song, but shorter than the rest, only just under five minutes. Cheesy lyrics, generic tune about love and loss, but the rhythm and the vocals pull it together. I'm usually not a fan of "chugging", but this song seems to perform that guitar style pretty well, only because it's followed by a heavy bassy tone overtop blast beats, and its pretty hard to mess up blast beats unless you're Opeth and you don't understand how they work (it's not revolutionizing to use blast beats while singing clean vocals, it's dumb and you suck Watershed).
This album boasts some amazing tracks, but is unfortunately accompanied by weaker, inferior songs which brings down the overall experience.
