GAEREA
Mirage'
Season of Mist
Review By Tony Sanchez
Since its release last September, GAEREA’s Mirage has been on a constant rotation on the daily playlist. The third release on French label Season of Mist by the Portuguese rising dark star has become an almost immediate favourite album of 2022.
Their evolution into more atmospheric soundscapes while retaining all the viscerally punitive scorches of traditional black metal paired with some of the best song writing the genre has spawned these last few years seem to have hurled the band on everyone’s radar. GAEREA manages to appeal to both black metal purists and seekers of new sounds, not painting by numbers and indulging in an almost progressive fresh take on a beaten genre that often fails to reinvent itself.
With nine tracks combining a playing time of just over an hour, GAEREA once again attests that to the point doesn’t necessarily has to be short. This is where the progressive adjective perhaps takes its roots as the band had already established they could deliver scorching brutality with their previous works, this is a more mature approach to song writing and even though it doesn’t feel particularly investigational or risk-taking, the subtleness in the trivial little details that surrounds the haunted fierceness of the vocals in Mirage is, in a way, comfortingly gratifying.
I’d recommend GAEREA (Mirage in particular) to anyone willing to listen to something with real depth regardless of their fondness for traditional Black Metal. In fact, putting aside the Black Metal moniker might be the way to go. Like Gaahl said to me recently “genres do not matter, it’s about emotions”. Well GAEREA’s Mirage is definitely an emotional ride.
4.0 Out Of 5.0
gaerea.bandcamp.com
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