Beneath the Silent Shades

Reveries End is a difficult entity to classify. Beneath the Silent Shades i,s at first glance, superficially gothic metal, but just a few minutes of focused listening betrays a completely different beast underneath the soft, deceiving outer surface. There indeed is something beneath the silent shades, and a few spins reveal a band that has borrowed the very softest stylistic items from melodic doom, build the scaffolding of gothic metal, with a tiny hint of doom-death, and injected the result with enough adamantium progressive metal to turn it into something wholly different, then stylishly spray-painted it with jazzy influences in well-chosen spots... and added something just a bit alien, in a good way.

The overall sound is soft, very polished and so unforgivingly professional that it almost hides the intricacies of the multi-layered music. Reveries End has created a very complex first demo, and the apparent ease of performing the music almost hides the exceptional skill and songwriting involved. The vocalist, Sariina Tani, has a very beautiful and obviously trained voice, but she avoids the pitfalls of turning the demo into a default piece of plastic pseudo-symphonic pretentiousness. The songs rely on her skills to a high degree, but just as a good member of a fundamentally progressive band, she keeps serving the music and the greater good, and result is original beyond expectations. The vocal style resembles a winding path through a lush garden with plenty of tiny wonders along the way, scattered so abundantly that they start to seem like integral parts of the whole, and almost lose their novelty value. But not quite. The vocal work is sophisticated enough to keep the listener alert, but modest and humble enough to avoid seeming like showing off, and would not be out of place in certain brands of jazz fusion or other more "serious" styles of music; there's nothing inherently "metal" in her singing, but the marrige between the vocals and the music is close to perfect. She's good, in other words. Very, very good.

To go deeper into the essence of the music, there are no sing-along choruses here. No, the vocal lines are very melodic, but at the same time, so intertwined with the elaborately built and perplexingly maze-like music, that they occasionally have the feel of oriental neo-classical music in them. And there's sadness in the tunes. The first and foremost emotion in the music is sadness, blended with a strange kind of desolation, and perhaps something weirdly exotic. The rest of the band never lets the dreaded Demon of Shred out, but still works hard for the whole, without contrived time signatures or excessive impressive but hollow displays of musical prowess. And that's the point here, once again: It's about the songs, and about the band, not about boasting the abilities the members obviously possess. There's complexity, and there's layered weaving of tapestry, but it's there because the songs need it.

In the Finnish prog metal tradition, the front of the stage has been hijacked by bands playing their very soft, barely metal brand of prog rock turned into metal, something that blends mediocre prog rock disguised as power metal with neutered prog metal, and calls it a day once the song is written. Reveries End, on Beneath the Silent Shades, keeps the apparent softness, but stacks the songs with ideas, progressions, and ambition. This is really something new, and approaches the progressive idea from a new direction, through the gothic angle. The technical performance and production values are impeccable, keeping the whole extremely stylish and polished.

This indeed is impressive. Difficult to define, but probably worth a look by many people. And since the fans of gothic and progressive metal rarely seem to find common ground, this is an opportunity for both. Expecting a storm of blasting fury is, of course, wrong, and the music's soft outer shell might repulse traditional metalheads. However, there's plenty of goodies under that surface layer for people who like complexity, novelty, and technically accomplished things that do not turn into vulgar displays of shred.

Recommended!