Sunday Review Secret Solstice 22nd of June 2019
I woke up this morning with my legs hurting, a sore throat and admittedly pretty hungover but I can safely say that I had fun last night.
I’ve been to festivals before and know how things tend to work. As in, there is a lot of walking, standing around and moving from one place and the other using your legs and the whole concept of sitting down tends to get overlooked. I therefore had this great idea at the start of the day to walk from downtown Reykjavik to the festival site. I think that, and series of other events made it so that I could barely walk at all by the end of the night. But whatever. I had fun which is the most important part. After arriving I went straight to the main stage, Valhalla, and saw the industrial, punk techno-rock and recently Eurovision band Hatari and they blew me away and set a very high standard for the rest of the night. They are, I think, probably the best live band Iceland has to offer right now. Don’t believe me? Go see their show.
After seeing Hatari ruin every future live show for me I relaxed for a bit before seeing Sólstafir at the Gimli stage. Their dramatic post metal sound was welcoming and if you want to check them out I reccomend the song Fjara. Trust me, check it out.
But having seen two bands with heavy sounds with a bit of screaming I decided to change it up a bit. I went to the Fenrir stage for a bit of dance music as that’s where all the DJ’s love to go. Right next to the stage there was the silent disco. Just a crowd of people singing like no one is listening but I was and it was great.
You might be reading this thinking “this guy is overly positive” but that was just how I felt yesterday. The sun was shining and that’s about all that you need for a good mood in Iceland.
Last but definitely not least was the headliners of the festival. I honestly haven’t been a fan of the Black Eyed Peas and their last few records. It’s been a long time since my favourite album by them, Elephunk, was released which my 14 year old, and my current self, love. But I was excited because even if they’re not on my playlist they have a whole list of songs that everyone knows. If you haven’t heard “Pump it” or “The time (dirty bit)” then you’ve probably never gone out or even left your house for that matter. Everyone knows their songs and therefore the anticipation was unreal. They came out flying with their song “Let’s get retarded” and then followed a hit after a hit. They have a lot of them. My feet were hurting but I did not want to stop dancing and when they finally played “I’ve got a feeling” for their last song literally the whole crowd was dancing around the whole site. It didn’t seem to matter if you were in the front or somewhere way in the back. Everyone knew that it was time to dance
