The tragedy continues with Psychonaut 4.
Four years after Beautyfall, Graf (vocals), Glixxx (guitar), Drifter (guitar/vocals), Nepho (drums), S.D. Ramirez (guitar/vocals/bass/keyboards), Alex Menabde (bass) and Giorgi Kordzakhia (guitar) signed with Immortal Frost Productions and unveil …of Mourning, their fifth album.
Ghele immediately sets the mood with wailing, quickly complemented by a simple guitar melody supported by a few discreet keyboards at the water’s edge, but the composition is quite short, and Mzeo Amodi takes us into the darkness with its dissonance and saturation. Fierce howls and cries of despair mix to haunt the icy harmonics, but clean vocals come to life on the disturbing tortured passages to give a more local tinge to this seizing Black Metal that continues smoothly with Fiqrebi Mtsukhrisa, where they call M.S. (Harakiri for the Sky). It almost sounds like a more festive composition, but the saturated vocals and heavy riffs quickly bring us back to reality before offering a lighter melancholic touch followed by a weighing, Georgian-sounding heaviness, coupled with the fury of their sometimes rawer roots, but the finale will surprise us with its relatively soothing atmosphere where all the voices come together to finally lead us to Vai Me. The rhythm is much thicker, despite the few notes that float through the air, lending an accessible edge to the musicians’ stubborn pain and hypnotic leads that run rampant while Graf and S.D. combine their voices, perfectly representing the human side of the track, which eventually softens before slowly fading away into a kind of haunting trance on Sizmrebshi. The first notes are genuinely soothing, disturbed only by the vocal parts, but the track will anchor itself in steamy blackgaze tones that create a contrast with the vocalist’s heart-rending interventions, but a few whispers and leads will redirect the track towards its airy tones, still rooted in their folk music. We already reach the end of the album with Dzilis Tsameba, where gentleness meets a raw, menacing sound that finds its climax in the middle of the track with an abrasive part, then a break transports us to the final cloud of oppression where a strange chant haunts the scene, leading us back to the water.
If there’s no doubt that Psychonaut 4 knows how to play with the most negative and painful feelings of human existence, …of Mourning proves that the band can find them in violence as well as in unexpected gentleness.
95/100