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| Evening Revelry by Benjamin Vautier |
Revelries should be, at least judging from its notes list, an easy thumbs-up from me. Stewed fruity notes blended with spiced rum? Hazelnuts, raisins, and a bit of oud? Sign me up! If there's anything I've learned from wearing this range, it's that Pineward's nose shows immense talent with fruity-woody compositions. Yet Revelries perplexes me.
It opens with a sharp barrage of spicy-fruity things, very clovey, cinnamony, appley, but after a few seconds of legibility, these notes blur together to form something olfactorily analogous to bitter-green angelica, with all of its celery off-notes. Eventually this effect gives way to an oddly dank amber, a phase I struggle with the most. Everything in it feels ponderous and affectless, with only the twang of cinnamon rum lending texture to an egregiously flat synthetic oud. Occasionally throughout the day, I catch pleasant whiffs of a familiar Pineward apple note, but the accord is like cider that's half-turned to vinegar.
With time and tears, this tightly-clenched arrangement loosens up enough to allow the mellow sweetness of raisins and the sugary afterglow of apples and rum to shine through. Sadly, this is not until its murky oud heart has burned off, by which point I've asked myself a hundred times why I didn't just wear Apple Tabac or Pastoral instead.