Gilgulim is a Jerusalem-based collective led by composer and multi-instrumentalist Eugene Kuzmin, who plays nearly everything on the record himself, joined by vocalists Vera Agnivolok and Natalia Belenkaya and drummer Alexandr Binstein. Jerusalem doesn’t export a lot of remix albums, and that scarcity is part of why this one lands with such an unusual weight. The group draws spiritual guidance from Apollonius of Tyana, the first-century sage and wandering mystic, and weaves fragments of Alexander Blok’s poetry and the Psalms of King David alongside their own original lyrics, treating that source material with a light enough touch that it never tips into pretension.
Soulslike
“Soulslike” reworks the band’s 2022 debut into a ten-track remix set, though the label undersells the effect. This isn’t a DJ tidying up stems for club play; it feels more like the same group of people returning to old songs years later and discovering they’d meant something they hadn’t fully understood the first time around. Layered guitar and keyboard drones do most of the emotional heavy lifting, while Binstein’s drumming stays purposefully in the background, steady enough to anchor the more floating passages without ever pulling focus from them.
Opener “Soul” pulls hard on Middle Eastern melodic tradition, giving the track a modal, almost trance-like quality that feels closer to something passed down orally than something composed in a studio. “Erlkoenig” shifts into stranger territory, an unsettled, almost suspended-in-time atmosphere where futuristic textures rub up against older, more historical ones, and progressive rock creeps in through its solos and harmonic detours. “Face” picks the pace back up with a harder-edged, more alternative feel, while still keeping enough ethnic and theatrical color in the mix that it never fully abandons the album’s roots.
“Devilish Pride” and “Vigilia” continue that same push and pull between weight and atmosphere, holding the record’s tension without ever tipping into excess. “Night, Pharmacy, Street” is one of the record’s real turning points, opening on a nearly sinister, almost cinematic motif before unfolding into a genuinely epic stretch of shifting rhythm and melody. A male voice steps in here for the first time on the record, a deliberate shift after several tracks led by the two women, though the arrangement itself never lets the vocal take full command, treating it more like another texture than a lead line. “Ghosty Cab” turns the lights down and the tension up, riding a set of tightly wound riffs and solos that never quite let go of the edge they’re built on.
“Lullaby” and “Chain” pull the record back toward its more contemplative register before “Psalm” closes things out, the female vocal stretching into something closer to opera, leaving the whole project suspended in one last hazy, unresolved image rather than snapping shut on a hard ending.
There’s a genuinely bold idea sitting underneath all of this. The album’s stated ambition borrows the same impulse behind Shakespeare’s seventeenth sonnet, that stubborn wish to hold onto a beautiful moment before time erodes it, and folds that idea into the music rather than simply name-checking it. Name-dropping Shakespeare is a risky move for any band, the kind of comparison that usually reads as overreach. What keeps it from tipping over here is that the arrangements actually behave the way the idea demands: songs that avoid tidy endings, melodies that trail off mid-thought instead of resolving, and long stretches where nobody plays anything at all, trusting the quiet itself to carry the scene.
The album’s spiritual ambitions could easily have overwhelmed the music, but Gilgulim largely avoids that trap. Themes of transcendence, memory, beauty, and renewal come through in the emotional character of the arrangements themselves rather than through heavy-handed statements, with the record’s literary and religious references acting as quiet companions to the sound instead of demanding agreement from the listener. None of it feels showy, either. By all accounts, the band themselves don’t consider the recording process anything special, no unusual gear, no clever studio trick worth bragging about, and that lack of ceremony is telling in its own way. It suggests a group more interested in getting something true out of the songs than in dazzling anyone with the process behind them.
Sonically, the closest reference points sit somewhere between the incantatory folk-rock of late-1960s Britain and the more austere, devotional end of Mediterranean art-rock, music built on repetition and patience rather than showcasing individual solos. “Soulslike” shares that same trust in its own atmosphere, cinematic in scope without ever tipping into excess, balancing intimacy and scale in a way that keeps every transition worth sitting through. Plenty of bands write about a spiritual journey. Far fewer make a record that sounds like it was actually recorded somewhere along the way rather than written about afterward from a safe distance, and that difference is what separates “Soulslike” from most albums chasing the same territory.
Final Thoughts
“Soulslike” treats transcendence as a working method rather than a marketing angle, deepening the emotional life of its source material instead of simply repackaging it, and that sincerity is exactly what makes it worth attention well beyond Jerusalem’s borders.
You can find Gilgulim on Bandcamp. Stay tuned to MusicOnTheRox.com for all your music news and reviews.
