Judging from the cover (thou shalt never do!) and the first few reverb’ish notes that one gets to hear on Soulship, I immediately put AGNES VEIN into the Post-Metal/Doom pigeon-hole. And although this attribution isn’t completely wrong – the band is surely influenced by bands like Neurosis or Isis – it’s just one single ingredient of the dish served. In fact, this Greek outfit has at least as many musical roots in the ice-cold depths of Black Metal as well as in dark, strongly emotional Hardcore in the vein of bands like His Hero Is Gone.
Needless to say, Soulship isn’t exactly an exhilarating record. The bitter and hopeless emotions it evokes damp all light and positive thoughts in your head, making everything nice seem extremely bleak and colourless. Yet all this darkness doesn’t appear to be some kind of set image – everything AGNES VEIN does on this album has a very pure, honest undertone.
Soulship starts with the eleven-minute long To Know the God Within, a slowly climaxing, sludgy, doomy and super captivating track. The clean vocals are really stunning and give me the fucking creeps (and not only on this track but throughout the whole record). And an amazing thing about AGNES VEIN is that just when you think “ok, so this is what they sound like” (which was my thought after the first few minutes) they easily throw in another exciting element, like ghastly, ear-ripping Black Metallic vocals. Or a pummeling passage of blast beats. Or almost prog-rock’ish lead-guitars (as on March of the Netherworld). The songs maybe comparatively long, but AGNES VEIN have a knack for keeping things really interesting, so that you’re hooked throughout all 39 minutes of the six tracks.
The sound of Soulship is thick, powerful and despite its pitch-black darkness very lively. Everything is right in its place and no element is too much in the fore- or background.
There’s really nothing bad to say about this record. Desperation, anger and despair hardly sounded more graspable as on AGNES VEIN’s Soulship. Get this record and cry yourself a river.
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