Published: February 6, 2018

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Coming from Kyiv and active since 2007, Vin de Mia Trix started their career with a crushing and extremely dark funeral doom musical approach. Now, after a four-year hiatus since their previous full-length, the band came up with their newest work “Palimpsests”, and they sure live up to this name! A Palimpsest is a manuscript page (made of parchment) from which the text has been removed, so that the page can be used for another document. For this reason, a palimpsest is regarded as a mysterious object that can have more than just one story, more than just one secret. This is what happens with the sonority and narrative of this record. As the band expresses, “Palimpsests is an album about archetypes, the stories and characters that exist deep inside our collective subconsciousness… these stories are told to this day, and here we retell them once again, adding to the eternal cycle”.

Don’t be fooled by the humble amount of tracks in this album (only four), because… each one of them is around 20 minutes long (the longest, “Noe” lasts for 29 minutes and 44 seconds)! This opus is a complete journey, so close your eyes, turn off the lights and make yourself comfortable for this long experience.

This record is introduced with atmospheric sound effects that will give you the feeling that you’re actually diving into a “cosmic form of subconsciousness”. The kind of sound that echoes in our heads when we close our eyes in order to meditate. This relaxing moment continues as we become aware of the presence of soft guitar chords. Suddenly, as if there was an explosion of light in your mind, the drum kicks in and the music builds up.

The sonority of this work is not about dirges and eulogies anymore: it is triumphant. This feeling is particularly reinforced by the vocals and organ arrangements in “Pharmakos”: a complete track with fantastic arrangements, an amazingly flexible vocal performance and omnipresent massive oldschool doom riffs. On the other hand, “Fuimus” with its psychedelic rock and drone innuendos adds a jam feeling to this opus. To finish this odyssey, “Noe” has the effect of a cool down and is the perfect triumphant epitaph to this album. This is the voice that will wake us from this hypnotic state.

“Palimpsest” is a darkly refreshing work that blends together a mash of numberless genres: from the band’s usual funeral doom, to some post-black riffs, psychedelic rock, drone and even blues. This metamorphose is amazing and brings us a highly diversified musical texture in the shape of a super eclectic doom metal album.