NÉVOA - Re Un

Névoa - Re Un (2016, Avantgarde Music)

For anyone who has ever gone fishing, one knows that to grab a fish once it is hooked you must be wearing a glove or taking it on board with a net. The music of Névoa from Portugal, a young duo of multi-instrumentalists, might be like the fishing metaphor. Meaning they get from Black Metal to Doom with Sludge passages in the four songs of their new record titled Re Un.

In fact, the album Re Un, is like a sample of many genres and subgenres and it has just not enough of each to actually get to enjoy it and get what the vision of the band. It is like they want to get a wide audience but couldn’t decide which way to take. So to try to please everyone you piss everyone instead.

The feeling I get from this record is something that feels unfinished and I kind of fear that the band doesn’t want to actually embrace one thing but to push so many buttons at once. It is clunky and far from being a piece that seems matured. They also suffer from being the ‘’enth’’ band to do that in the last year. The mix of Black/Doom/Sludge/etc. has been visited and revisited and it already started to fade.

It might be the writer of those lines that is getting older, but I think that the blend or fusion of genres is not always the best solution to get creative or to get a wider audience. As much as I love Black Metal in almost all of its forms, I think that it is a very difficult genre to actually render in an interesting and skillful manner. It explains the particular case of Re Un.

5.0