Reverie

Pumpehuset, Copenhagen - 2014

Text: Tobias Nilsson Photo: Lunah Lauridsen

Pumpehuset is good at supporting the local underground environment by adding a local support bands to bigger shows. We’ve seen it before with Heidra / Korpiklaani among others, and tonight it was Reverie who were warming up the audience for the mighty Morbid Angel.

Reverie, whom I had not heard of before this night, played a sort of blackened death metal where vocalist Halfdan Holden Venlov mixed up the usual raspy voice with a more regular shouty one once in a while. The music was low-tech and pretty straight forward. The band wasn’t inventing anything new, but neither did it feel like this was their intent, this was troo to the kvlt as they say.

Prior to the show someone had lit a bunch of incense sticks, and while I will give them that the smell that now filled the venue was to be preferred over the usual musk of sweaty metalheads, that, combined with the long and brooding intro sound used, set the band up for more than they were able to deliver.
The members of Reverie are four young guys, suffering slightly from trying to adapt to a fashion sense that had both blossomed and died long before they were even conceived – their skin-tight jeans, which actually managed to look baggy on their under-nourished bodies, and their all too small leather jackets might have been acceptable, but the bone necklaces worn by Venlov and drummer Adam Kjær Nielsen couldn’t help but give off a slightly unwanted comic look. The fact that Venlov managed to trip into the drumkit and half-way disassemble it already in their first song didn’t really lessen this effect…

Reverie did have some response from the large crowd though, with a few nodding heads and also some appreciative shouts from here and there between their songs.
Sadly, I’m hard-pressed at saying why exactly. Reverie simply weren’t very good. At anything.
The music smelled like a supportive parents’ garage a mile away, and of performance there was basically none. I think I remember a single “thanks for coming out” from Venlov, but the rest of the time his string-bending wingmen and he practiced the shoe-gazing game to perfection.
Sure, they’re young, and they had a sort of youthful and innocent charm about them, which they can’t be proud of given their musical direction, and who knows, maybe they will grow into some fine musicians one day. But that day wasn’t here yet.

There was one exception to this though, and he certainly deserves a mention of his own – Adam Kjær Nielsen. Not only was he beast at beating the skins, and a pretty damn good one at that, but he was single-handedly performing the pants off of all of his band mates put together, and that without ever even leaving the stool he was sitting on. His skill and stage-presence are what carried this show.
Hopefully writing this will not split the band, but rather inspire the other three to learn a thing or two from him about playing concerts – if that’s the case, Reverie have a hell of a better chance at blowing their audience away next time around! And yes, I’m feeling quite certain that with two demos under the belt, and a full-length coming, there will be a next time for Reverie.

Reverie

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