Words by Lou Wright

Singer, songwriter, and composer Jannis Noya Makrigiannis ditched his Copenhagen digs and headed for the Greek island of Samos to craft the sound which became Choir of Young Believers’ This is For The White In Your Eyes. This, weirdly enough, makes sense.

There’s something of that expansive, epic world in the record. But that’s not what makes sense. What makes sense is that a man would retreat to the greens, blues, and scorching heats of ancient Samos to craft an idea, and then come back to Copenhagen and the world of concrete, rain, and the new West’s curious neuroses to make a record out of it. It adds up an apt description for This is For The Whites in Your Eyes: a grand, flowing sound filtered through the narrow and dirty filter, which lends its own peculiar beauty, to create something both sprawling and contained.

The record relies heavily on thudding, heavy percussion arrangements and soaring strings to bring Makrigiannis’ simple imagery and folky songwriting onto a higher plane. Again, names somehow suffice – The Choir of Young Believers has the feel of a band saying simple things in complex ways, perhaps complex beyond even their own understanding. A boys’ choir harmonizing lyrically about a god they have not yet come to know, striving only for the sound they know would please someone if only he would make himself known.

The record is not perfect. It leans too heavily on its orchestration and sometimes the songwriter suffers from having too comfortable a sonic bed to fall back on. The sound is also very consistent, leaving little room for variation. Standouts include “Next Summer,” which soars somehow higher than the rest of the record, possibly because of its hopeful tone. There is also “Action/Reaction.” The beatiest track and Choir’s clear bid for radio recognition, it strings the familiar rangy instrumentation over a stable, bouncy beat that lends new spirit to the sound. These two tracks are, however, confined to the first half of the record.

Then again, what would the record be if it were perfect? Who knows. For the moment, it’s enough to listen to a man and his friends driving hard towards a specific sound with single-minded concentration. It speaks, for lack of a better word, of faith (Ghostly International, 2009).