Band:	Solstice
Album:	White Horse Hill
Style:	Epic doom metal
Release date:	February 2018

01. III
02. To Sol A Thane
03. Beheld, A Man Of Straw
04. White Horse Hill
05. For All Days, And For None
06. Under Waves Lie Our Dead
07. Gallow Fen

In 2013, Solstice - that is to say guitarist Richard M. Walker and a cadre of new players - returned from a lengthy drought with Death's Crown Is Victory, a half-hour EP that marked the first substantial offering made by the band since 1998's New Dark Age. Now, the gap between albums has been lengthened to 20 years, but Death's Crown Is Victory made such extravagant promises that the extra wait seemed a small price to pay.

After all that, White Horse Hill is not quite the unfettered triumph its predecessor signaled, nor what I had hoped for, though it does suggest that perhaps Solstice is only beginning its career anew and still has much time to grow and improve. The album makes an auspicious entrance with the portentous "III," bounding across pastures of bombastic doom into "To Sol A Thane" as if the brilliant return of Death's Crown Is Victory had been mere minutes ago rather than five years in the past. The electrifying leads, dramatic and throaty cleans, and primeval war drums retain Solstice's vibrant and commanding presence, a mixture of folk spirit, doom brawn, and heavy melodies.

Nonetheless, it is hard to shake a sense of malaise from this album; "For All Days, And For None" sits in its half-electric, half-acoustic state of ambivalent solitude, a seven-plus-minute interlude without any solid footing to make the result proportionate to the expenditure. The song has the cadence of a build-up or a much, much shorter intro piece; it simply isn't terribly interesting, and by the time "Under Waves Lie Our Dead" trundles in to pick up the slack, I'm not ready for an even longer song - and one that, even if it does go fully electric, doesn't ratchet up the energy by a great deal. After "To Sol A Thane," the album undergoes a real momentum dump from which it never recovers.

White Horse Hill is a real style-over-substance album; Death's Crown Is Victory crammed a lot of great ideas into only four songs, but this album, when tasked with extending the run time by 20 minutes, loses its grip on the controls. There are plenty of great moments, but no one song, save perhaps "To Sol A Thane," that really lives up to this fantastic folk-heavy-doom sound that Solstice has managed to save and painstakingly nurture over these years. Solstice still sounds good enough that they should have no shortage of opportunities to continue creating music and carry on for another 20 years (hopefully with more output), so I look forward to the next release, but White Horse Hill is more of a speed bump than a master work.