Now and then Tony Wakeford cleans up his shelves and releases a cd full of Sol Invictus archive material. We were already treated to a series of live recordings (Brugge, Paris, Trieste). Now Tursa offers us a cd with rarities, remixes and unreleased tracks, “culled from my big box of DATs and CDR’s”.
The Angel, with a nice painting by Tor Lundvall on the cover, contains quite some alternate versions of songs taken from The Hill of Crosses, which I consider as one of Sol Invictus’ finest albums. Most of the remixes are not spectacularly different from the originals, so don’t expect sudden dance beats or additional hiphop parts. I especially like the acoustic mix of ‘German requiem’ and the minimal Wakeford solo demo of ‘God told me to’.
Most interesting about this release are the two unreleased tracks. Opening tracks is ‘The Angel’ is a short romantic piece with almost no melody, but with lovely vocals by Sally Doherty and nice flowing strings by Matt Howden. The final track is ‘In the wake of the wolf’, together with Joseph Budenholzer of Backworld. A classic Sol Invictus piece, rather straightforward and robust, in line with the earlier albums (and perhaps also of the forthcoming album?). Furthermore there are two tracks present that appeared on compilations before, both with many classical string and choir elements: ‘Did you see?’ (from Terra Serpentes) and ‘The Widow’ (which appeared on ‘Ostia’).
Just a pleasant cd, which does not offer revolutionary insights into hidden aspects of the band, but which is a nice addition to your collection. Of course releases like this are mostly of interest for fans who already own the regular albums and who still crave for more material. Well, for them it is a fruitful period anyway, because a new full-length Sol Invictus album is coming soon (The Devil’s Steed) and Wakeford recently did a new collaboration with Matt Howden as HaWthorn.