Published: June 20, 2017

Vin de Mia Trix from Kyiv in Ukraine play progressive funeral doom, offering one of the year's longest albums.

Palimpsests* is a concept based on multicultural commonalities; Stories, legends and tales, as well as shared customs and practices that appear to be similar despite various beliefs or geographical, cultural, and ethnic differences. A duration of about 1 hour and 38 minutes makes Palimpsests just short of 100 minutes.

If that sounds insurmountable, the physical edition is naturally a double-album, where each part lasts for about 49 minutes. 

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The music is mostly calm and fluid like a peaceful stream of clean water. A trickling mountain stream reflecting the shining rays of sun from a bright blue sky and the deep green lush vegetation along the river bank. The river winds, though, creating turbulent currents and swirls, nuances that distort and wipe out the reflections. It strikes rocky obstacles unable to hinder the flow, but that throws the water masses around and shuffle the composition and relative location of each water particle. 

Especially Pharmatos and Noe offers a bit of drama, but despite a few harder sequences and sporadic guttural vocals, Palimpsests is a rather calm and pleasant work. It contains a relatively high quantity of clean vocals, plus clear bass strokes and sequences of acoustic plucking among other that help prevent everything from sounding like a steady stream. Although the brook floats calmly, it doesn't just hiss in a hushing manner. It burbles and gurgles comfortably. 

Among the quartet's members, there are two seemingly fresh names, in addition to vocalist Andrew Tkachenko from wonderful Human Collapse and bassist, second vocalist and acoustic guitarist Alex Vynogradoff from Kauan.

Damon Good from Mournful Congregation and StarGazer has been responsible for mixing and mastering, and the sound is in line with Vin de Mia Trix' high ambitions, helping to enhance Palimpsests' meditative impact. The album is available at an optional price and is recommended whether you want a one and a half hour time-out in the hammock under the shady groves, whether you're a traveller hiking forests and peaks, or you're a fairly ordinary sofa lover that lets five minutes on the couch grow into a hundred.