This is the third album from Spanish post-hardcore band Boneflower.
Reveries contains 38 minutes of music; a mix of hardcore, screamo, post-rock, and shoegaze, delivering a post-hardcore record that’s definitely above average for the style. Boneflower have produced an album that manages to walk two different paths simultaneously, and somehow manages to make it work. No mean feat.
Built on firm foundations that come from an emotional bedrock, Boneflower’s music combines beauty and intensity. It’s a blend that brings together post-rock and shoegaze’s delicate fragility and resplendent mood-building, with hardcore/screamo’s emotive violence and jagged strength. This is crowned vocally by scathing high pitched screams, supported by, (mostly), soft ethereal clean singing.
The songs explode with passionate ferocity, while still making room for atmospheric immersion. It’s a well-balanced approach, this marriage of chaos of restraint, allowing for a successful union between post-rock nuance and screaming aggression. Powering it all is an emotional weight that imbues the music with a vibrant colour that almost becomes visible as you listen. The songs come alive more and more as the music insinuates itself into your brain with repeated spins, and getting to know the album reveals a terrain marked with an array of interesting features worth exploring.
Boneflower tear through the songs with a vigorous devotion to their art, changing paces and moods on a whim. The band never neglect their focus though as the album progresses, ensuring that the songs to fulfil their intended goals, no matter how graceful, nor how barbed. Their serrated intimacy is infectious, breaking down defences and barriers until there is only Reveries, in all of its raw, heartfelt potency.
A post-hardcore band has to be doing something very right in order to make it onto my playlists, especially if they are touched by the ambivalent fingers of screamo, but Boneflower certainly qualify. I had more time for this sort of thing around 20 years or so ago, but Reveries definitely scratches an itch that’s rarely scratched any longer. And, it feels damn good.
If you’re a fan of bands such as Frail Body, State Faults, Sugar Horse, and Touché Amoré, (whose singer guests on one track here), then there should be something here for you to like.
Very highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 