Album Review: Vouna – Self Titled

Vouna
Vouna
Artemisia Records
★★★

Caught between the dark sub-surface of wailing goth funeral chants and sludgy death rock lies Vouna’s debut. An intro into the band’s pyre, this self-titled contains songs of sorrow and slow-burning intensity. Vocalist Yianna Bekris has carved out an underworld with her cries that fascinates and challenges the listener.

“A Place To Rest” immediately presents a duality. The meditative vocals seek solace within the confines of crashing death and doom rock. The music is a leather jacket nestled up against a dank, concrete cove of coldness and misery. Yet, there is comfort in its conflicting behaviors. They add solace to the tormented.

Bekris is at the helm of both the music and production. When you hear the crystalline of the acoustic churn out haunting notes shocked to realization of desperate electronics vying for attention, you realize just how much she has right.

What you find doing with Vouna songs is trudging deeper into its musical forest, getting lost in their trance like on “Drowning City” or the heavy “Last Dream.” The deeply saddening “You Took Me” engulfs your senses and rot out any notion of a happy ending. Because in this story, the comfort you get is to embrace the dystopian sadness that Vouna resonates.

A current of gothic propensity in an otherwise atmosphere of doom-laden riffs, Vouna presents a fictional aura of hauntings served as songs and an album that will satisfy those who revel in the darkness of the underworld.