The premise sounds, on paper, faintly absurd — a band who credit their spiritual guidance to Apollonius of Tyana, the first-century sage and wandering mystic, and who set fragments of Alexander Blok and the Psalms of King David alongside their own lyrics. It could easily have tipped into pretension. It doesn't. Kuzmin's arrangements, thick with layered guitar, keyboard drones and a rhythm section that Alexandr Binstein keeps admirably unshowy, treat the material with a lightness of touch that saves it from itself. Vera Agnivolok and Natalia Belenkaya's vocals drift and overlap like incense smoke, never quite settling into a single lead, which gives the record its most distinctive trick: you're never sure whose voice you're following, and the effect is closer to eavesdropping on a private ritual than watching a performance.

Calling it a "remix album" undersells what's actually happening here. This isn't a DJ tastefully reshuffling stems; it's closer to a congregation revisiting old material and finding it means something different in the retelling. The record's stated ambition — to "declare: Beautiful moment, do not pass away!" — borrows the logic of Shakespeare's seventeenth sonnet, that desperate wish to preserve beauty against time's erosion, and folds it into something genuinely felt rather than merely quoted. Few bands would risk that kind of company. Fewer still would earn it. Kuzmin's group mostly do, largely because the music itself sounds like an argument against forgetting: guitars that circle rather than resolve, vocal lines that hang unfinished, a production choice throughout to let silence do as much work as sound.

None of this is showy. Ask the band what was technically unique about the recording process and you get a shrug — nothing unique, they say — and that candour tells you something useful about the record's priorities. This isn't music built to impress engineers. It's built, unfashionably, to mean something to the people making it, and that sincerity seeps through every track without ever curdling into self-importance. Pilgrimage records are ten a penny; ones that actually sound like the pilgrimage happened are rarer.

If there's a lineage worth invoking, it sits somewhere between the incantatory folk-rock of late-'60s Britain and the more austere, devotional end of Mediterranean art-rock — bands who understood that repetition, patience and a willingness to let a phrase breathe can do more than any solo. *Soulslike* shares that patience. It trusts its own atmosphere. Tracks unfurl rather than announce themselves, and the album rewards a listener willing to sit with it rather than skip ahead.

Kuzmin and company have made a record that treats transcendence as a working method rather than a marketing angle, and for that alone, *Soulslike* deserves attention well beyond Jerusalem's city limits.