Reverie – Bliss

Sometimes you have to wonder who selects the genre tags on Encyclopaedia Metallum.  Is it the bands themselves or some random fools?  Seriously, we’d like to know, because we’ve never had to do such a thing ourselves, so not knowing we’d like an explanation.  The primary reason is it often seems so very wrong upon listening to a band to see them listed as one particular genre, because in spite of how hard the art world tried to define today’s dismembered cows in glass cubes as “post-modernism”, everyone who knows art knows it’s really just modernism with no real direction anymore.  In music, however, the post tag works well, if mainly because we’re not entirely sure how to define some of these bands these days, so applying ‘post’ before any genre covers basically anything.  “Hmm, this sounds something like death metal yet not the usual so umm…yeah make that post-death metal.”  Once your mind begins to question aesthetic, just toss that post on there.  But, amazingly, considering the ease of posting the hell out of everything, most people don’t take advantage of it.  Why?  It’s so easy!  Live in the post moment.  Post away, post for life.  It’s the only way.

  

“Boy these guys sure ramble nonsense around here,” you say.  Well, you’re dead wrong, just as calling Reverie or this particular album, Bliss, black/death metal (direct reference to aforementioned site) is essentially absurd.  It’s not even an easy way out, it’s a no way out, a meaningless usage of tags.  It makes us think, “did anyone listen to the whole thing or merely sample a few seconds?”  Even then, however, a few seconds should reveal you’re much more secure in tossing out the post with death or black metal, in this case, and probably, for good measure, a bit of shoegaze, because there’s nothing wrong with staring at your shoes when you feel a little bad about the world.  So let Reverie entice you to contemplate the greater things about why the world is just so awful.  Let’s give a post to Bliss.

 

Bliss, on the surface, or at least within the first few moments, can easily be mistaken for blackened death or deathened black, whatever -ened you prefer.  Going further, however, this is revealed to be a serious error on the part of any listener who would so assume.  Reverie have chosen an unfortunate name for themselves, because it’s almost impossible to pull up in a search without some sort of metal tag along with it, but somehow, some way, they got the attention of Invictus Productions even though they’ve only been around about four years and have merely two demos before this.  Bliss is amazing in its simplicity of design.  Reverie, hailing from Denmark, utilize the atmosphere of black metal with more energy, more thought, and probably more purpose than most.  Their frantic chord progressions often repeat phrasing for easy assimilation of their sound for any old listener of classic black or death metal, but at the same time they cleverly develop it further to mix moments of dreaminess with pensive space.  Emptiness of form is occasionally their forte, which combined with the vocals, operating at more of an angry yell with brief moments of rasp and groan, move their music back and forth between genres so any fan of death or black metal can engage.  Plus, why not think on things a bit?  There are a number of moments in this one where Reverie force you to do just that with spacious chord work, acoustics, bizarre effects, and other things which simply put one does not normally find in either black or death metal.  What’s surprising is how, after it all comes together, Bliss makes for such a quick listen, meaning that by the time it’s all over you wish it’d just began.  Invictus picked up a release that was partially raw, and perhaps unrefined, but it’s clear there’s a reason for pulling them from obscurity.  Pay attention to these guys.

 

Reverie Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Reverie: Bliss
Escho, Invictus Productions, Big Love Records
4.7 / 5