Published: September 19, 2013

 Funeral doom from the Ukraine here and this debut sports a nice cover if you shell out for the CD rather than the free download on their bandcamp page. ‘A Study In Scarlet’ is the first song and it begins in traditional style with a persistent, simple melodic refrain wandering across a sedate, stately riff. In style this is more in the early Ahab mode rather than the Skepticism or Unholy schools. Long as you’d expect, the odd change in tempo which reveals a more technical progressive death metal style than the straightforward dm you often get. Add in some reasonable clean vocals and that’s where you are. Pretty traditional save for the tech chunking part and that melody really, really sounds familiar. It’s the sort of thing we often get from Solitude Productions and has that very Eastern European sound to it. Reasonable, too, just not particularly compelling.

‘Nowhere Is Here’ pretty much follows the same route with that mournful melody picked out over the torturous, slow riff as the vocals growl nicely of matters melancholy and dark.

The excellent ‘La Ou Le Reve Et Le Jour Sefflererent’ does move us into a different area where a simple piano, veering towards some utterly down beat blues of the kind the divine Diamanda Galas might cut from her veins, and it is a welcome change after nearly 20 minutes of reasonable but I’m afraid fairly generic funeral rumblings. It serves well to remind me that this is a debut and the usual line about time and room to grow is relevant as this shows a sound  and an inclination which bodes much better for future originality. ‘The Sleep Of Reason’ alas slides back to the previous tracks but ‘Silent World’ with its clean vocals, spoken passages, slow death metal feel and acoustic guitar brighten (in a funeral doom way, you understand) the mood again and ‘La Persistencia De La Memoria’ takes us back to the piano and keyboard sound but with a more sombre, filmic and classical feel this time. ‘Metamorphosis’ with a looser, rattling sound comes in somewhere around first album Paradise Lost with a pinch of Unholy and they round it all off with the very funereal ‘Matr’.

Vin De Mia Trix, on this their debut demonstrate both the generic and the original and their obvious desire to mix things up is more than heartening. There are times here when either things are too ‘as expected’ and others when despite the thought and the progressive nature it doesn’t quite reach me. But nonetheless this is a promising and talented debut and I expect to hear better from then next time round. Still well worth a look though.