Chabliz – Nightporter

With an unbelievable amount of intensity, Chabliz tells you a story written like an amazing book, and the track holds excitement and mystery like a magician’s show. Curious yet? You’ll see what I meant.

If you haven’t heard any of Chabliz’ tracks before, get ready to be blown away by the overall feel being transmitted through their songs. At first, “Nightporter” gives you a heavy heart with it’s initial piano/vocal setting, but then changes pace over time, using additional style elements. The greatest WOW-effect that hit me was when their lead vocalist Petra de Winter revealed her ability to sing across four octaves with her singing, going easily from fragile and vulnerable to powerful, opera-themed singing. This honestly made my jaw drop and raised my eyebrows at the same time (luckily no one took a picture of me when this happened). And just when I thought “hey, I wonder how this track would sound if they added drums”, they did, And boy, this adds an extra amount of density and tension to the already intense dark atmosphere the track creates.

What I like most about “Nightporter” and other tracks of the dutch pop noir band is the playful way of song creation the band uses. Since their toolbox has so much variety in it, you never know what will happen next. This is a key element for being successful with music, because it leaves the listener curious. From there on, it doesn’t really matter if this is your favourite genre you’re listening to or not – because you just want to know what will happen next. That is exactly how instant fans are created.

While listening to several other tracks of Chabliz, I figured that a lot of their playing really depends on the chemistry of the band members Petra de Winter, Pim van Riezen, Marcel Peters and Ap de Ree. Sometimes I get the feeling that they might create new songs just by throwing ideas at each other in a session. The guys behind the instruments often take care of the vocals (and vice versa) like… I don’t know, maybe a mother would with her baby. Seems they got an awesome feel for each other’s needs, and this shows in how well-rounded many of their songs come up. One perfect example for this statement is “The Heel” which was released on their “Nightporter” EP as well. This track creates a totally different setting than the track we’re talking about here, and in my opinion it’s because the band react to each other properly. Like I said, THAT is chemistry, folks.

It’s unreal – and brave – how the guys of Chabliz manage to change the direction of the EP so many times with several tracks. I assume that these changes are not to everyone’s liking, but hey – I am not a friend of holding back skills. If you CAN do it – why should you throw away this versatility for the sake of being linear enough for a certain fanbase, right? So, I can honestly say that I really don’t know what Chabliz has in store for us in the future – and I love it. This is handmade and heartfelt music, and you’ll never know what’s next. Listening to this music is an adventure that no mainstream pop chart act out there can create for you.

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Florian Maier

Owner of kms reviews. Drummer. Sound explorer. Music enthusiast. Critic. Writer. Husband. Father. All stacked up in 1.88 m, 84 kg.

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