There are places in music, as there are places in the world around us, where we are surrounded by visions that are both glorious and cloaked in air almost too cold to breathe, where the ice shines magnificently like a blanket of crystal across endless, hostile expanses. In the night skies above, in the cascades of an aurora or in the brilliance of compass stars shining in the unimaginable vastness of the void, we might experience a similar feeling of magical wonder and daunting isolation, and there are places like that in music, too.

Canada’s Solace of the Void aren’t the only band who’ve sought to create such sensations in their music, but in the song we’re presenting today (and in their new self-titled album as a whole, which is set for a July 26 release by CDN Records)) they’ve really nailed it beautifully. They’ve located their sound beneath Polaris, creating a fusion of cold atmosphere, symphonic grandeur, blackened ferocity, and mystical folk-influenced melodies to create music that (in the accurate words of their advance press) is “northern, luminous, and majestic” — “rooted in the permafrost of creation”. Continue reading »