While Charlotte DIY musician Deion Reverie is working through a specific experience on his new album, Kill Me With Your Closure, he does so in a variety of styles that will please all types of music fans. The 14-track compilation dives into a multitude of genres, exploring the fallout of a serious, long-term relationship.
At the end of that relationship, Reverie had no closure from his ex, and turning to someone else for sex to cope ended up being the wrong move for him.
“It deals with me coping with everything, coping with not having that person around and sadly, the coping is using another person for sex,” Reverie explained. “It goes into talking about trying to start something new with someone, basically, and ending up hurting that person ’cause you’re not fully healed from the last thing.”
Learning from his previous relationship, he was careful not to leave the other person without closure, thus breaking the cycle he found himself in.
Growing up with musically inclined, supportive parents who kept instruments around the house during his childhood helped turn Reverie into a prolific DIY musician. Music came to him naturally, and he began by teaching himself guitar at age 12.
Reverie continued pursuing music in high school, back when Myspace was the top-tier social media platform. He’d post music to his Myspace profile, then began burning CDs of his music to pass out to friends at school.
“I was just handing stuff to my friends,” he said. “It was kind of a learning phase, waiting on someone to say, ‘This sucks,’ or, ‘Do better!’”
That criticism would never come. Around 2015 he moved from handing out CD copies to releasing music on Pandora Radio and YouTube, and eventually began releasing songs on iTunes and Spotify.
Now, with Kill Me With Your Closure, which released in January, Reverie has taken the next step in his prolific career, creating a small monster of emotion that hits listeners in a variety of genres.
The opening track, “Diamonds,” leaves the gate with emotional intensity. Vocals drip with frustration over a lost relationship. His voice is soft in a lo-fi tantalizing way, but with lyrics that pierce through the heart over the alt rock that nods to his early influences of Emery and Taking Back Sunday:
“She only fucks in parking lots, but it’s never for love / She only fucks to get what she wants, but it’s never enough / She’ll whisper all the pretty words to make you fall in love / But you need money and diamonds just to make her come.”
Kill Me With Your Closure doesn’t compile the story of a hurtful ending and new beginnings chronologically, however. Instead of setting the track list to tell the tale from start to finish, Reverie arranged it to make sense audibly, much like a playlist you’d make for a friend — or a former lover.
The songs jump around the story, giving listeners glimpses into the life of the relationship’s end and Reverie coping with depression, isolation and trying to find love with someone else. With these glimpses, listeners can piece together the full picture and understand the story for themselves.
“The album is not in order; it’s kind of like a Tarantino movie almost, where it jumps around, it’s everywhere,” he stated. “But it’s all there.”
He described a definitive change in style and tone in the middle of the album, to the point where there’s a distinct A-side and B-side, although Reverie didn’t label them as such. The front end sounds like the alternative and emo rock that punctuated his formative years, while the back half is representative of Reverie’s recent musical maturation.
“It wasn’t really until I was 14, 15, 16 [years old] I was discovering Hawthorne Heights, My Chemical Romance … I was like, ‘Oh these people know how I feel,’ that sound, that genre,” Reverie said. “You can hear a lot of that on the first half of the album, you can really hear that whole era of my life and then later is the more adult side, the grown-up sound.”
The latter part of the album are reminiscent of The Weeknd. Reverie embraces his rap and R&B influences by rapping a few verses opposite of soulful singing in songs like “Unravel” and “I Was Hurt in My Last Relationship and It’s Fucking Up My New One.”
There’s no rest for Reverie, as he’s geared up and ready to release new songs, start new projects and secure spots in venues around town. For starters, he wants to get into The Underground.
“We’ll see what happens,” Reverie laughed as he talked about wanting to play at the Fillmore’s sister venue. “I’m kind of shooting my shot there. I’m aiming big.”
Musically, Reverie plans to further explore the different genres he displayed in Kill Me With Your Closure. It’s like whiplash listening to him talk about jumping from genre to genre, but that’s what happens when you’re influenced by so many other musicians.
“I wanna do an electronic, more pop-y side project with my friend Nicole [Kane],” he continued. “We’ve been talking about doing something more mainstream, more EDM, totally separate from the sound … I wanna do that and I also want to do a post-hardcore project because I really wanna scream again.”
After having to cut quite a few songs to keep the record digestible, he plans to release the songs that couldn’t fit on the album, but not in a deluxe re-release of Kill Me — something more like a follow-up. Reverie said he enjoys those unreleased songs, but had to carefully choose which ones wouldn’t make the album while still keeping the story intact.
At the end of the day, Reverie stands by his album, stating he loves every song he picked, each of which has his own “polish” pulled from his major musical influences.
And that’s all the closure we need.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
