[Archive / Riffs]: RIP Dreare, or have a nice hiatus; here’s a very late, very loose review of "Foregone".
Originally posted on our prior and sadly now-defunct (RIP) website mid-2024 by the venerable Hamza. Be sure to check this one out, it’s another stellar Riff from one of my fine colleagues here at ISC!
Peace, Love and Grindcore xoxo - Brady.
Note: This article is about a “post-rock” band, but I’ve been doing a lot of writing about “post-rock” and seeing and hearing the word “post-rock” so much, even mentally, has made me realise that the word “post-rock” is kind of a mouthful. So this will be the last use of the word “post-rock” in this article about a… band. Wish me luck.
Dreare were, are, or could still be an ambientdronerock band from the Czech Republic. Their album Foregone was a favourite of mine from last year; listening to it, I’m reminded of Will Destroy You’s droniest stuff, local Melbourne cool-guys All is Violent (who in turn sound like if Karnivool fired Ian Kenny and merged with ISIS1), and there are hints of post-metal2 power-trio Russian Circles. It's really good.
Sound-wise, this is almost always a winner for me. It's kind of a cliche at this point to proviso your Mogwaistylespacejamcore review by acknowledging that the genre, as it has evolved to favour the crescendoTM, is kind of overcrowded and unadventurous. In my world, God is an Astronaut-style crescendocore abounds, but is rarely satisfying when full attention is given. The sounds are nice, but on some cynical leveI know that independent of geographical, financial, and actual putting-the-band-together concerns, it’s not hard for a few competent musos to get bunch of pedals together and hammer a few notes into a big, swirling crescendo,2 in the same way that it isn’t too hard to get in the studio and grunt out some AC/DC covers for your Graveyard Classics tribute album.3 But, at the same time, there is an art to writing excellent builds and crescendos, and the great thing about twinklenoisebuttrock is that some bands are willing to play with the sound, try to go beyond merely “satisfying. Compositionally, this is where Dreare shines.
From beginning to end, Foregone is exceptionally well-crafted instrumental music. Melodies, if that’s the right word, are riffy and repetitive, but Dreare do such an excellent job changing up the same motifs just enough to keep them fresh that minutes can go by building on just one one core idea. Take the riff that makes up the lion's share of “Desaturate,” in which the band permutates that guitar line from melodic reprieve to noisy chugfest to wistful outro, all through soft-loud and rhythmic dynamic shifts - for nearly 8 minutes, they don't change a note.
Although the sound is very different, I’m reminded of sleepmakewaves’ crescendocore classic Love of Cartography, where the MO was evidently “write the catchiest melody you’ve ever heard and play it a bit differently each time”. One Foregone, the riffs: you can sing. The grooves and sounds themselves are both spacy and attention-grabbing. Where smw wrote love songs about delay pedals, Dreare writes elegies to desolate, post-apocalyptic landscapes. They sit in a heavy-drone, post-prog niche, and the drone influence in particular gives a real heft to their sound that a lot of other spacedoutaltprog bands are missing. Also, the syncopation and time-fuckery that gets thrown into the ambient stew is very welcome; the consistent effort to move, hide, or otherwise disrespect the one wherever they can get away with it is both noticed and appreciated, with certain sections on "Parts Per Million," "Reconcile" and especially "Subsets" giving me metronomic whiplash.
The additional noise from ambient synth artist Further Down (oh, did I not mention this is a collaboration album?) with synths, hisses, scrapes, ocean noises very subtly helping to fill out the mix. I insinuated that Dreare was a power-trio before, which is technically true, although Further Down definitely acts as a fourth member on this album.
Foregone was released digitally, and only recently did they put it out physically on cassette tape. Yes, cassette tape: a format that’s both outdated and difficult to access – which makes perfect sense, considering they simultaneously announced their future inactivity. Anyone reading this can check out Dreare, maybe order the cassette - at their Bandcamp here, Further Down, here.
RIP Dreare. Have a nice hiatus.
The band ↩︎
Author: Hamza