Winter’s coldness perfectly fits Einvigi‘s universe.
Created in 2014 in Finland, the band is composed of Petteri Granberg (guitar/vocals), Joonas Koppanen (bass/screams), Henri Sund (drums, Modern Day Citizen) and Krister Virtanen (guitar, ex-Concrete Icon, ex-Unsphered). A first EP was released in 2017, followed by Sielulintu, their first album, at the end of 2020.
The band’s universe is composed of a sensitive melting between Blackgaze, Post-Metal, Folk influences and ambient tones that makes their music both accessible and complex. The rhythmic is heady, (finnish) clean vocals make us dream, but this seizing calmness is joined by a raw saturation, while melodies still whirl, then howlings come as on Soturin Uni. Some ambiences come to enrich songs, as on Alttarille and its Black Metal influences, then guitars’ dissonance strike, offering a magnificent and desolated landscape at the same time, before the band makes us travel, like on Noitajoki. The band’s cold and distant sound takes its whole meaning on Synty, a soft song which is slowed down by a break before the sound storm. Melancholy can be felt more than ever on Sielulintu (“The Bird of the Soul” in Finnish), a song that allow each instrument a place before making them meet in a hurricane of sharp melodies, on which visceral howlings alight. Whether the sound calms down, it is still dark. Korven Yllä Tanssivat Taivaan Tulet, the last song, offers us once again its batch of heady and airy melodies before getting darker. The break gives a second breath to this intense composition, before the outro comes for a last time.
The enchanting and distant universe of Einvigi turns out to be perfect to end 2020. Between softness, coldness and heady melodies, Sielulintu darkens the horizon then brings hope back before offering us a well-deserved mental journey.
90/100
