Metal Monday: Solerrain Takes You To A Brutal Lonely Place

posted in: Rock

If you’re a regular reader of Metal Mondays here at OurStage, you might remember a feature I wrote called “From Russia With Metal” about the band Illidiance. It would appear that Illidiance isn’t the only OurStage metal band from Russia cranking out killer metal tunes. Solerrain, hailing from St. Petersburg, is another metal band from Russia ready to melt your face.

Solerrain play a style of metal that’s not been utilized by many bands in recent years: extreme power metal. Since Wintersun still hasn’t released Time, Children of Bodom peaked a bunch of years ago and Norther has been consistently mediocre on their last few albums, someone’s got to pick up the slack (don’t worry, Kalmah and Ensiferum are still going strong). Sure seems like Solerrain would be an obvious fit for this role as they’re still pretty new on the scene, and they bring it fast and hard. In fact, Solerrain don’t seem to know the meaning of the word moderation, as every song they’ve got on OurStage is full-throttle at every moment.

As a metal band, you can’t really play at light speed tempos unless you’re masterfully proficient at your instruments, and that’s something that Solerrain have in full. Every note and slightest nuance in every guitar line is perfectly executed, every keystroke by the keyboardist is precise and every syllable of every word is delivered with force. If you’re looking for a lack of musical proficiency here, you’ll not find it.

A bit remarkably, Solerrain recorded two separate versions of their album Fighting The Illusions”one in English, one in Russian”to both appeal to their homeland and to countries around the world. They also have a penchant for covering pop songs that haven’t been relevant since the early 2000s (like Crazytown’s “Butterfly” for example). You can check out a few songs from the English version of Fighting The Illusions below. Prepare to have your face melted: