Pantheïst have put out Ithaca Out of Sight, the second single from Uncanny Times, which arrives on 30 October through Argonauta Records.
The album is six tracks and opens with The Final Journey at thirteen and a half minutes, which says most of what needs saying about the proportions. Laughing Falcon, Kuebiko, Entropy, Ithaca Out of Sight and Requiem for Your World follow it. Kuebiko is the Japanese deity of agriculture, a scarecrow who knows everything and cannot move, and Ithaca is the island Odysseus spends ten years failing to reach. A funeral doom record reaching for both is not reaching far.
The band formed in Antwerp in 2000 and has spent the twenty six years since moving: Belgium first, then London, then Cardiff and the United States, with Kostas Panagiotou on vocals and keyboards for all of it. The line up now has Matt Strangis on bass, Atanas Kyurkchiev on guitars, Linda Dumitru on soprano vocals and Fanel Lefterache, who came in this year, on drums.
Metal Archives files the catalogue in three parts, funeral doom at the start, progressive doom in the middle and funeral doom again since, which makes Uncanny Times the seventh full length and the fourth of them from the slow end.