თბილისური ტრაგედია / Tbilisian Tragedy

How have I not reviewed Psychonaut before? After I've seen them live, met them personally and bought 2 CDs from them? How? Weird. Anyway, this single was released ahead of their most recent album, Beautyfall. I have yet to listen to that album, shame on me. But this single definitely got me in the mood for it.

It starts off a bit slow and maybe even boring, but it picks up soon and ends up being depressing, unnerving, and melancholic. Just what you expect and want from Psychonaut 4.

The guitars and drums work together beautifully and create a sad, depressive effect, that sets the tone already early on. The vocals alternate between clean and harsh vocals, the clean ones specifically get filled with more and more pain as the song goes on. The lyrics are in Georgian, a language I unfortunately neither speak nor understand. That and the fact that I found nothing about this song online is the reason I can sadly not tell what the song is about. Knowing Pychonaut 4 it probably has a deeper meaning, I will have to ask about it if I ever meet them again.

My favorite part of this song comes about 8 minutes in. After a slow, calm sad passage with clean vocals – that's already enough to make you weep, even if you have no idea what is going on – the song suddenly shifts. It becomes faster, there are suddenly new vocals overtop, and the sad vocals from before become a lot more desperate. This works together to create an extremely unnerving effect, so you feel even more uneasy than before. It was such a good choice to put this right before the end of the song, because this is the pinnacle of uneasiness. For a song that progresses to more pain, desperation, and uneasiness as the song goes on, a perfect ending.

While this song is not my favorite Psychonaut 4 song – that crown goes to Sweet decadence⁣ – it definitely is a great song. It's pretty much exactly what you want from this band, it makes you weep, it sends shivers down your spine, it's beautiful. All in one, somehow.