Bliss
Reverie
•
October 29, 2015
Dark, macabre, guttural and low-fi; Danish Black Metal outfit REVERIE fit all the standard hallmarks of the genres.
The lyrics are incredibly guttural; screamed as if the vocalist is choking on a thousand shards of glass, while the drummer is seemingly beating the kit in a strange fashion completely devoid of much rhythmic relation to the rest of the group. The generic, incredibly clichéd Death and Black Metal guitar riffs are nothing if not incredible in their banality.
While nothing can be said about the speed or brutality of the music, because it is all very fast (mind-numbingly, repetitively so), and the aggression is hardly subtle, it does all feel like a very staid and unoriginal version of a subgenre that was once touted as being completely horror-filled and gruesome. "Bliss", however feels almost cartoonish in its slavery to the most bland of areas - maybe the term Grey Metal should be used... Boring, almost-but-not-really-exciting-or-really-that-great-at-all aggression.
A favourite sound effect from several of the songs (and they all sound pretty much the same, so differentiating here is less than pointless) is the singer shouting like he's just been pushed off a building - making use of what is sometimes called a Howie Scream in films (Or a Wilhelm Scream depending on if you see it as a "being shot" scream, or a "falling into the distance" scream - that's 2 seconds on Google giving me this knowledge, not an extreme nerdiness for classic stock movie sound effects).
I'm not 100% certain what the intended outcome of this assault on all things that could be considered "music" was, but whatever it should have been, REVERIE (The Danish group, not any of the other groups that go by the same name) have certainly failed. The only positive I can see is that they have forced me to come up with creative ways of explaining how truly awful this release is.
2 / 10
What the Hell?
"Bliss" Track-listing:
1. Dust and Dirt
2. Fall Apart
3. Bliss
4. Blood in the Sea
5. Gennem Dine Ar
6 First Reverie
7. Circles
8. From Sea to Shore
9. Blind at Heart
Reverie Lineup:
Andreas Nielsen - Bass
Adam Kjaer Nielsen - Drums
Andreas Trap-Jensen - Guitars
Halfdan Holden Venlov - Vocals
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