Finally GREYSWAN are back! After hard work and two excellent promo CD‘s this Italian band, founded back in 1998, could ink a deal with Ebony Tears (Coldblood Industries‘ brand new sublabel for dark music) and serve us now their full-length debut Thought-Tormented Minds.
This record emerges as something exquisitely complex and it needs several spins to fathom the entire depth ... at least if you know the demos. At first it seems nothing has changed that much: GREYSWAN has found its own place within the Gothic rock / metal scene. But Thought-Tormented Minds now tends towards to a more rock direction. Again, much matured and sophisticated. But bit by bit you start discovering more drastic changes, which slowly and subtly sidle from behind. They drastically have lowered the use of symphonic string samples. You only hear them in Sleeples Night (a re-mastered song from demo 2001) but far away sounding and a few effects. Furthermore GREYSWAN have freed themselves from the strong nearness to old Anathema and let now flow in more rock and Trip rock-like influences you might know from old Seigmen, The Gathering, Radiohead and even Portishead. That lends a more progressive touch to the music but it’s still deeply melancholic and depressive. Of course there are still to find some Anathema leanings (especially in Sleeples Night) and these special Pink Floyd guitar leads Anathema loved to utilize quite often. While listening to this track I was wondering how it might have sounded if the vocals were been twice- or multi layered ...
Besides, the band has discovered the slightly disharmonic effect of half-tone chords for themselves but sometimes utilized too often.
Altogether all songs are arranged that way a red thread is leading you thru the entire album. Which – on the other side – makes the tracks sounding similar. Most of the songs are running over 6, 7 and 8 minutes which causes a certain amount of lengthiness although the running time of Thought-Tormented Minds (47 minutes) is generally not too long in this matter.
Upshot: Thought-Tormented Minds is a welldone debut with many highlights (Lost Smiles, This Gloomy Sickness, Afraid To Go On, Afraid To Come Back). But despite of all skills in terms of writing excellent songs GREYSWAN are running the risk of getting too complex one time.

Greyswan