A familiar Liverpudlian mixture of romance and melancholic introspection can be found in So, Reverie’s new EP, All You See In Dreams. The band's two members, Andy Power and Cain Garcia have spent some time weathering the frustrations of artistic life together, and the closeness at the heart of their partnership gives their new set of six songs a sense of instinctive chemistry.
Defining that balance, the first track on the EP, Close My Eyes is bright in motion but hides a lot of melancholy underneath, with its sharp guitars carrying the song forward with surprising lightness. The mood grows more urgent with Runaway, which replaces some of that dreamlike shimmer with a post punk drive while retaining a strong songwriting approach.
From there, the EP gradually expands. Days Go By is more luminous, embracing shoegaze while keeping its composition clean and immediate, until the scale changes again on Sea Change, a substantial track whose indie rock coloring gives the record some added weight. Rather than repeating that formula, So, Reverie plunge deeper into abstraction on Separate Minds, connecting the darker contours of eighties post punk with the profound sweep of the following decade’s shoegaze. Lucid Dreams closes the circle from a more austere position, achieving a severe, Eastern European-style post punk atmosphere.
What makes All You See In Dreams convincing is not simply its collection of influences and the genres in which they belong, but the ease with which So, Reverie move among them. Nothing outstays its welcome, and the record’s compact construction is certainly one of its biggest strengths.
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So, Reverie
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