"Second Son", the first song on Ex Reverie's fine The Door Into Summer, offers a wonderful contrast. What begins as a potentially go-nowhere dirge erupts into a brief out-of-the-past acid-rock freakout, the maxed out guitars mingling uneasily with strings and woodwinds, not to mention singer Gillian Chadwick's deceptively pure voice. As the album progresses, you keep waiting for a similar outburst of fuzz guitar frenzy, but it never really arrives, at least not with such fervor. More often than not, the disc sticks to vaguely Eastern mysticism and medieval witchy-pooisms, a mix of incense and Ouija boards, delivered with total sincerity and off the charts portentousness.
"There's a force behind me, more powerful than you think," intones Chadwick in "Clouds? Or Smoke?". She's aiming for menace, but as far as stuff meant to spook you into submission goes, Ex Reverie is pretty mellow, neither particularly mean nor mysterious, and bogged down with flowery lyrical flourishes, like late-night notebook musings unleashed. They're actually perfectly suited to the mostly languid prog-folk songs, which themselves favor trancelike drifting over intricate assaults.
It must stink to have your heart in another time but to be stuck here in 2008, though The Door Into Summer is surprisingly light on tension, let alone the mild cognitive dissonance of anachronism. The Renaissance fair-ready "Wooden Sword", for example, is all the unintentionally funnier for its po-faced seriousness, while the swirling dress hippie pop of "Days Away" sounds stolen straight from some Haight-Ashbury vault.
Yet when Ex Reverie stumbles on something special-- a killer riff, or an interesting arrangement-- the group at least recognizes its potential. "Dawn Comes For Us All", for example, pushes forward on the back of an ultra-cool slo-mo Godzilla vs. Sabbath-styled churn, albeit one with more space stirred into the mix; the song's a cappella vocals and handclaps breakdown is an album highlight. Earlier, "The Crowning" sticks to its deliberate tempo and pace, making the intertwining guitar solos of its coda more effective.
As strong a recreation of another era-- let alone another dimension-- The Door Into Summer may strive to be, its effects never quite transcend its affections, and in the end, it's still a few pours short of a full flagon of mead. It's channeling way too hard, like a novice psychic nervous around her supervisor when all she needs to do is relax and let the spirits come.
