With their debut album a couple of years back, Spanish post metallers Degraey fascinated as they provoked, aroused as they consumed; drawing potent attention and plaudits with every move within Chrysalis. It was a release which opened its body to reveal a sonic kaleidoscope of beauty and dark intimation which almost devoured the imagination. Ever since there has been a waiting anticipation for its successor, one really brewing up in recent times as Reveries loomed nearer and fair to say that now here, the album takes its predecessor’s creative adventure and striking elements to new plateaus in league with its own individual and compelling invention.
Barcelona hailing, Degraey began in 2012 when drummer/vocalist Cesar Perals (Carontte) met guitarist/vocalist Victor Paradis (Boreals) but really emerged as a stirring proposition three years later as its line-up embraced the talent of bassist Luc Espinach and Ivan Pizarro on guitars and synth. Chrysalis followed in 2017 drawing strong praise and support with its tapestries woven from post-rock, shoegaze and doom nurtured threads across a post-metal canvas. It was a firmly magnetic sound and proposition which has only evolved and expanded since, the quartet exploring deeper and darker depths whilst building on the prowess of the last album with Reveries. It casts a dark journey though as inclined to embrace radiant calms and melodic beauty, the result a ferociously riveting release springing sonic flights across atmospheric climates as imaginative in sound and enterprise as visual intimation.
As quickly revealed in opener Nurture, this is an album and exploration as lyrically and vocally stirring and poignant as it is musically dramatic. It is a fusion of craft and individual prowess which creates landscapes that blossom with a fusion of bold and varied often seemingly conflicting contrasts, the first within the opener effortlessly gripping ears and thoughts. The track gently caresses ears with the intimacy of guitar, gentle melancholic melody slipping from its strings as almost discreetly an atmospheric breath evolves behind. Soon weightier sounds and suggestion rises, subsequently consuming ears and song with their own voracious touch and drama. Then almost as quickly, the storm breaks for that melodic beauty, one as captivating in the similarly mercurial presence of Peral’s vocals, before in time the intensity of emotion and creativity boils and erupts once more.
It is an absorbing and powerful start to the album which is more than matched by the similarly suspenseful and captivating Not so Far. It too enchants with its early lures, voice and melody an enthralling warm tempting. Around them though there is a floating tension which gathers pace and intensity yet never really escapes its restraints, at least not until a ferocious climax of emotion and sonic turbulence though that too eventually succumbs to melodic beauty
Every track within Reveries is a full and often exhaustive adventure in its own right, but equally as potently unites in an overall tempest that just grips and enthrals in a collusion of voracious extremes and passions bred on instinctive imagination and craft. The magnificent Woven Conscience is a perfect example of those sonic and emotive incongruities aligned with glorious imagination, its body a mercurial cauldron leading eager ears and conjuring imaginations into fierce adventure within unsettling, equally capricious and unpredictable storms.
Through the eagerly creeping and increasingly irritable but simply irresistible Sprawling Nest and the similarly flowing but unique apocalyptic soundscape of Back to Dust ears and attention were lost to the real world before The Inert brought the album to a mesmeric conclusion with its own physically and emotionally protean insinuation.
Sonic and emotive dissonance brews at the heart of each song, persistently breaking and inflaming to threaten indeed devour the peace and hope each similarly arise from. For some Reveries may offer a challenge which is too disturbing to embrace but it is an examination which only brings rewards and pleasure and increasingly so if also a corruption to your state of mind and hope the world is not already a lost cause.
Reveries is released March 1st digitally as a name your price release @
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Pete RingMaster 01/08/2019
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