Review Summary: A state of dreamy meditation
Reverie Sound Revue make music best described as a reverie, and they do it very well.
RSR formed in Calgary in 2002 and released their self-titled EP in 2003. Schooling and the vast distances between major Canadian cities split them up for awhile. In late 2007, the band began recording new material for what would become their 2009 debut LP
Reverie Sound Revue.
The entire album was done collaboratively over the internet, at no point was the band ever all together in a recording studio. During this time, vocalist Lisa Lobsinger had started touring and recording with Broken Social Scene - she can be heard on
Forgiveness Rock Record, notably the tracks
All to All and
Romance to the Grave.
And yet somehow, despite this fragmented recording method, the album came out sounding like a seamless whole. As such, it’s a bit hard to discuss on a track by track basis, so I’ll just touch on a few of its major components:
Lisa Lobsinger's voice will make your heart hurt. Her voice is haunting yet comforting. She never seems to go beyond a whisper and yet fills the room with sound.
Lobsinger’s unusual rhythm and enunciation, combined with relatively open and ambiguous lyrics, add to the overall unearthly feeling of
Reverie Sound Revue’s sound. The lyrics range from nearly impenetrable to near-brilliance, with lines such as (as far as I can tell, anyway):
All a pose
Are all consoles
We wallpaper halls
Of hotel homes
RSR's gentle and interesting instrumental work is a beautiful complement to Lobsinger's voice - very rarely does one overpower the other. As terrific as the songs are, the songs still fall along a fairly narrow spectrum. However, that spectrum is so well executed that it's hard to fault them for it. Reverie Sound Revue has essentially written the soundtrack to when you're floating on a bed of clouds, weeping pathetically at the beauty below.
But when you look at the lyrics, it feels like this isn’t the beauty of a rolling ocean wave, a blooming flower, or an early morning rain. It’s the beauty of the city – the beauty in the symmetry of the skyscrapers, the cracks in the concrete, and the gasses rising from a subway grate.
It’s the beauty in being bombarded with all of the noise, all of the stimulation, and all of the threats – and then suddenly feeling like you can float up above them.
Reverie Sound Revue captures that transient moment when you’re sitting idle in a left turn lane and you don’t want the light to change, when you’re unsure if that automatic sliding door will open for you, or when you’re riding upwards to your 42nd floor cubicle and you just want the elevator to slow down.
