Bandcamp A record that begins at a whisper is making a promise about where it intends to end up. This one keeps it harder than almost anything we have measured.
“Alienation” runs forty six seconds. It is the quietest piece on Venceremos by a wide margin and the third quietest track in our entire measurement set, which now covers 491 of them. Forty one percent of its energy sits below 250 Hz and barely three percent above 5 kHz, so what you get is pressure and room with the top of the spectrum simply absent. Then the record starts properly.
A trio with bagpipes
Villagers of Ioannina City come from the mountains of Epirus and have been folding bagpipes, flutes and didgeridoo into heavy psychedelic rock for long enough that it no longer reads as a gimmick. The band is three people: Alex Karametis on vocals, guitars and synths, Akis Zois on bass, Aris Giannopoulos on drums. Karametis produced and recorded it himself at Magnanimous X, and Jacob Hansen mixed and mastered.
That division matters, because the record sounds like someone who knew exactly what they wanted handing it to someone who knew how to keep it. The six tracks in the middle, from “Home” through “Here and now”, sit in a tight corridor: average levels between twelve and a half and fourteen decibels below full scale, spectral centre between 2347 and 2502 Hz. That is a band playing in one room with one sound.
The two places it leaves that corridor
“Epitaph” is three and a half minutes and sits eight decibels quieter than the album’s working level, with the most low midrange on the record. It is the deliberate hollow before the end.
Then “Requiem” moves thirty two and a half decibels from its quietest passage to its loudest. In our set of 491 measured tracks only one goes further. This is not a mastering artefact and it is not an accident of a long track, because “Here and now” runs nearly twelve minutes and stays inside eighteen. “Requiem” was built to do that.
What the shape is for
The album is a dystopia record, and the band describe it as a journey through exile, resistance and awakening. You can take that or leave it, but the sequencing supports it without needing the press text: silence, then a long stretch of something that behaves like a band holding formation, then the floor dropping out, then the biggest swing on the record.
Sixty minutes is a long time to ask for. The reason it works is that the middle section earns the ending rather than idling until it arrives. “The Ruiner” and “No fear” are where the folk instrumentation does most of its work, and “Here and now” is the one that would collapse in lesser hands, twelve minutes that keep moving.
Where it leaves me
The highest rating we give, and we give it rarely. This is the twenty fourth five in 504 reviews.
The reservation is the one that always comes with records like this: it is a single sixty minute argument and it does not survive being sampled. Anyone who plays “Venceremos” the song in isolation gets a good heavy rock track and misses entirely what the album is doing with quiet. Start at the beginning or do not start.
One practical note for anybody filing this: calling it heavy psych is accurate and incomplete. The progressive architecture is the point, and the folk instruments are structural rather than decorative.
The record is framed by two extremes and nothing else comes close to either. “Alienation” sits twenty five decibels below full scale with almost no energy above 5 kHz, which is why it reads as pressure rather than as music at first. “Requiem” covers thirty two and a half decibels between its softest and loudest passages.
Between them the album is remarkably disciplined. Six consecutive tracks hold their average level inside one and a half decibels of each other and their spectral centre inside 155 Hz. That is the sound of a band that decided what the record was before they recorded it.
Peak-to-average stays between eleven and a half and fifteen across all nine pieces, so the loudness never came at the cost of the transients. For a sixty minute album on a major metal label that is worth saying out loud.
