Charly Bliss – Forever Review

On a day like today, everything is bliss. Toil away listening to new bits from Bob Dylan and Hozier, eat a pain au-chocolat and get a few spins on Monopoly Go. Riveting stuff in the life of someone who has eight plastic crates worth of books and has managed to read just three this year. It is because life and work get in the way, the latter more than the former because albums are piling higher and higher. The Outlook inbox is full, there are so many deletes to be made in the email tray. Step back and breathe. Take a listen to Forever, the latest piece from Charly Bliss and a reminder that your whole life is what you make of it. Put down those plastic tubs of SF Masterworks. Pick up your noise-cancelling headset and engage the indie-pop craze once more.  

Tear down the language barriers as Tragic does and find thrills in the competent grief and joys of life. These are the broad strokes of Forever and Charly Bliss does well to wrangle their points, which roam free in the wide fields of broad topics. But the trouble is the noise, not the words. Charly Bliss may have succinct points to make but they pursue a sound which does not feel like their own. A sense of an identity crisis brews as they chase the pop noise of popular radio conventions. Charly Bliss is anything but conventional, or at least should not pitch themselves as straight-shooting noise with no new points to provide. The onus is on them to create the bright powers their album cover and press packs should provide. Instead, they have fallen down the hole of glitzy pop numbers, light and wavy guitars dominate and leave little impact.  

Spin it all you like but Forever is the sound and style of a band not confident in a unique approach receding into simplicity. Charly Bliss still sounds good. They have a keen ear for mixing their work and it all sounds refined, well-performed and positive. Therein lies part of the problem. Something as confrontational as Calling You Out sounds placid and defanged. These are the personal highs and lows meant to mean something to an audience, tied to breeze blocks and lobbed into the pop ocean, told to swim against the current of established artists. No luck and godspeed is all Forever has. All songs, no story. Not a connection from track to track just a march through out of service and not style. Plain synth and no substance, despite the clear evidence the band has for being deeply moved thinkers, players and writers. 

But they trade it all away for the magic beans of chart potential and just barely get through. Forever is a competent record which does little to serve those in the band any artistic merit. Something was bound to break after over a decade of plugging away with little shift in momentum but Forever is a car stall experience. There you sit at the edge of a roundabout, struggling to see a way through the traffic, honking behind you urging for a merge or move. Charly Bliss buckles under the pressure, spreading themselves too thin and thus losing themselves to the malaise of generic modern pop. Somewhat heartbreaking, but they must be credited for trying the soppy route with Nineteen and the distortion merits of I Don’t Know Anything. Conventional craft from a band who knows better.