Bandcamp “Resistance” opens the album on an acoustic guitar. “Latent” closes it on one. Between those two bookends sit six tracks and forty minutes that almost never let go of the throttle, and the frame is the most deliberate thing about the record.
Einvigi come from Turku and have been going since 2014. P.G. writes everything here, words and music, and made the cover as well. The recording did not stay in one pair of hands: Tomi Uusitupa produced, recorded and mixed at Oxroad Studios and Miro Kiiski mastered it. It comes out on Einheit Produktionen.
What stays the same
The level. Across all eight tracks the average sits within a decibel and a half, and the distance between peaks and that average stays inside a decibel and a half as well. That is a very tightly held record, and it is held at the loud end. Tonal centres move a little, treble share moves a little, but the fundamental impression of Latent from the first blast to the last is of something running at a constant and fairly high output.
This is not automatically a complaint. Plenty of this music is supposed to be a sustained pressure rather than a series of events, and the band clearly know how to build inside that. The arrangements do real work: “Stigma” drops into a reduced ambient passage in its middle third, “Hourglass Paradox” cuts hard from the wall into clean vocals three minutes in, “Valeriana” alternates low spoken passages with the high screams. There is variety here. It is variety of texture, not of weight.
Where it opens up
“Deafening Silence” is the exception and the best thing on the album. It is the one track that is allowed to breathe, with the widest spread between its quiet and loud passages on the record, drums that sound like a room rather than a grid, and a lead guitar line with enough sustain to carry the middle of the song on its own. It is also, not coincidentally, the least modern-sounding piece here. After seven tracks of pressure it arrives like a window opening.
“Latent” itself, the closer, is the other one worth singling out. It starts bare, moves through spoken word and clean vocals into screams set far back in the reverb, and it is the only place where the record sounds genuinely uncertain about where it is going, which after forty minutes of certainty is welcome.
Where it costs
“Leviathan” is the narrowest track on the album and it sits sixth, deep in the second half, at the point where a listener most needs something to change. It is a good song carrying a bad job. More broadly, eight tracks at one output level over forty three minutes asks a lot of goodwill, and the record spends some of it. The individual pieces are stronger than the sequence they are in.
So
Worth your time, with a caveat that is about endurance rather than craft. Nothing here is badly made, the writing is confident, and “Deafening Silence” is genuinely excellent. But a record held this consistently at one level over this length flattens out in the listening even when every individual song stands up, and the two tracks that let the pressure off are the two I keep returning to. If Einvigi put three more “Deafening Silence” on the next one, that is a very different album.
This is a very tightly held record, within a hair of Hippotraktor’s Annihilist from the same week. Average level across all eight tracks runs from -10.6 to -12.0 decibels, a span of 1.4, and the distance between peaks and that average runs 11.1 to 12.6, a span of 1.5. Tonal centres sit between 2272 and 2634 hertz and treble above five kilohertz between 15.6 and 20.3 percent, so the frequency picture barely shifts either. What does vary is the quiet-to-loud distance inside each track: “Deafening Silence” opens 16.0 decibels, by a clear margin the widest here, while “Leviathan” holds 9.5 and “Resistance” 10.4. Its peak-to-average figure of 12.5 is among the highest here, which matches an arrangement with real room on the drums rather than a gated one. Nothing is squeezed flat in mastering, but nothing is given much space either.
Standout tracks: Deafening Silence, Latent, Stigma
