REVERE

Expressions of ambition are welcomed in any art, just as an evidenced complacency so easily turns an audience off. The trick, though, is ensuring that this ambition is realised in a fashion that also exhibits originality, setting the creators in question apart from any might-be peers. It’s this deft balance that London-based septet Revere achieves: sounds singular enough for obvious parallels to become intangible, matched with a very clear desire to further the band’s fortunes, entirely on their own terms.
 
Revere’s founding frontman, Stephen Ellis, is all too aware of the band’s position in the wider musical landscape, as it releases its second album, ‘My Mirror / Your Target’. “We’re not really part of a scene. But I think that one thing that sets us apart is the apparent British-ness of our sound. That’s because of where we’re from – Newcastle, London, Liverpool, and Scotland – and also due to the influences we’re drawing from: folk and classical sounds, as much as post-rock and more anthemic fare. We’re comfortable moving between worlds.”
 
Between worlds, and from city to city, stage to stage. Revere’s celebrated live shows have been witnessed at a host of festivals, a variety of domestic venues, and on expansive European tours. It’s live where their collision of stylistic constituents most vibrantly seduces the senses – and it’s lessons learned on the road which have certainly had an effect on ‘My Mirror / Your Target’, which emerges leaner and meaner than the tumultuous layers of the band’s debut, 2010’s ‘Hey! Selim’.
 
“We learned a lot about the need for space between instruments, between albums,” says Ellis. It’s easy to go into a seven-piece outfit’s output assuming a conflict between elements – the brass and the strings, the percussion and prose – but Revere has produced a sound on ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ which never sounds cluttered. Everything has its own space to breathe – and this is a facet of the album’s appeal that engages instantly with listeners tired of bands throwing everything at a wall in the hope of just enough sticking to carry their compositions.
 
“We’re a lot more experienced now,” continues Ellis. “In the studio, we were able to capture the live magic without simply setting up and pressing record. There’s a lot more than that in each track, from a production point of view.” ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ continues Revere’s relationship with producer Dave Moore, whose own credits include work for television series The Bridge. It’s easy to hear how the band has evolved since ‘Hey! Selim’ on the tender ‘A Road From A Flood’ and ‘Landlock’d’ – songs which naturally complement more boisterous singles around them, offerings like ‘Keep This Channel Open’ (“A great radio track in every sense,” says BBC 6 Music’s Chris Hawkins), while showcasing a new aspect to their artistry.
 
Plenty in the music industry has changed since Revere’s inception, with younger audiences hungry for quick-fix tracks over albums with real longevity. So it’s to Revere’s great credit that ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ – a set named in reference to, and serving as a thematic metaphor for, the Second World War practice of reflecting light to transmit messages over distance; a system that would simultaneously expose the position of the communicator to enemy forces – plays out like an album of old, one that you might spend ages poring over the cover of, pausing only to flip the record once the stylus returned to its resting cradle. It even has a mid-set interlude, ‘“…we just sank…”’ a spoken-word piece addressing the D-Day landings bookended by the luxurious lilt of ‘Landlock’d’ and the dramatic Mariachi brass of ‘Tadoma’.
 
“There’s sometimes the implication that albums can’t sound this big or ambitious without the ‘right’ label backing,” says Ellis. “But the industry is constantly shifting. Financial factors have never dictated what we can and cannot do in the studio. We’ve overcome many obstacles, but this is the music we want to write and perform. The album is tied together by the theme of communication, and so even seemingly disparate songs make dynamic sense when set together.”
 
Not that ‘Hey! Selim’ struggled to connect – critical response to the self-released LP was largely positive, with The Times, Guardian and Telegraph putting their approval in print. The Fly commended the band’s “heartfelt songs” and “infectious energy”, while BBC 6 Music’s Tom Robinson called them “extraordinarily widescreen” and “a stunning band”. No faint praise – and such a swell of support led to greater visibility in the mainstream, with Revere performing sessions for 6 Music and Dermot O’Leary’s Radio 2 show, and an invitation to perform at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival (which they rightly accepted, alongside slots at Glastonbury, Latitude and Green Man). Not bad for a band doing everything under their own steam, without the weight of an established label behind them.
 
And they’ve gone far beyond the simple ‘write, release, support’ cycle for their first album, setting something of a precedent for what comes next. A number of tracks from ‘Hey! Selim’ were reworked by members of such acts as Metronomy, Florence + The Machine and Biffy Clyro, resulting in four well-received remix EPs. You can expect numbers from ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ to be treated likewise in the coming months. The band’s music’s been heard on the cinema screen, in Antonio Campos’ 2012 indie hit Simon Killer, and they’ve even starred in a movie, too – the band makes an appearance, playing during several scenes, in artist Oliver Guy-Watkins’ (forthcoming, at the time of writing) debut feature, Vitality.
 
Elsewhere in the press, Revere has been compared to bands like Canadian baroque-rs Arcade Fire and their sound summarised as “chamber folk meets Radiohead” (The Herald, Scotland). Such parallels with household names is a good thing regarding the reaching of new listeners – “If they help people discover us, these comparisons are okay,” says Ellis – but these are ultimately reductive pigeonholes for a band keener to break down walls than construct any around its palpable passion for progress. It’s no prevarication to state that this is a band in perpetual growth – ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ might be the current project on the slate, but, says Ellis: “We’re already writing new material. It’s a constant process for us. And we’re always thinking about the next live shows.”
 
Which have, so far, included an amazing collaboration between the band and Malian legend Toumani Diabaté, on a cover of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (the Manchester band comprising a key influence on the band), and always feature a special aesthetic side to the experience. The band’s eighth member is artist Ryan Pearce, who works with Revere to produce visual backdrops to lift their performances above the expected, above the norm. On record and in the flesh, everything about Revere is about going further, stretching themselves and communicating to their audience in, says Ellis, “the most complete way we can”.
 
Complete expression, ambition crystallised: with ‘My Mirror / Your Target’ Revere has produced its most definitive statement yet. What comes next is still diaphanous, but the here and now represents something distinct from any release rubbing its shoulders.
 
written by Mike Diver
 
&Revere […] combine the fiery melodrama of Muse with the rousing chamber-pop of Arcade Fire. They could, and should, be huge& STEPHEN DALTON, THE TIMES
“How you and I got this far without them in our lives I’ll never know; Triumphant, raucous and spine-tingling” – FORFOLKSAKE
“Revere...so stirring that they could have roused an army of hippies to war!” POLARI MAGAZINE
&The most underrated band in Britain at the moment, everything they produce is of the highest quality& THE BEAT SURRENDER
&An extraordinary widescreen technicolor epic of a song...a stunning single by a stunning band...& TOM ROBINSON, BBC6
“Epic widescreen melancholia” NEIL McCORMICK, TELEGRAPH
REVERE:
 
Stephen Ellis: vocals, guitar
Nicholas Hirst: keyboards, vocals
Ellie Wilson: violin, vocals
Marc Rollins: drums, programming
Russell Cook: bass, vocals
Kathleen McKie: cello, vocals
Seb Pidgeon: guitar, vocals