nieh
03-01-2005, 04:37 PM
Blargh. I've never been so disappointed by an album in my life. They went from releasing my favorite album ever to releasing almost pure shit. From kick-ass emo-prog to shitty-ass funk-metal-pop-prog. Anyway, first thing's first. The instrumental talent on this album is fucking INCREDIBLE. Twice as good as their last album. The problem? They seem to not know how to do anything interesting with it. Everytime I find myself enjoying something, it's beacuse it's incredibly straight-forward and poppy, which they end up ripping away during shitty transitions. There seems to be no real drive on this album. Their last one had so much passion in the mix it was insane. This one is lacking that and seems like they're just trying to make new songs for the sake of making new songs. Anyway, it's 5 tracks and 77 minutes, the shortest track is 6 minutes and is still a few minutes too long. The first track, Cygnus Vismund Cygnus starts out kicking relatively serious amounts of ass. It sounds distinctively like the Mars Volta but it sounds like them playing the most straight-forward rock song you've ever heard from them. That's not neccessarily BAD, but after the first couple minutes, the song just loses direction. The rock part abruptly stops and changes to something else that just doesn't fit, then goes back to the rock part, then goes to slow jamming stuff for a few minutes, then goes back to the rock part before ending with 3 minutes of dub. Each individual part of the song is at least tolerable, but it sounds like they wrote the pieces completely separate from each other and just said "ok, we've got 8 half-songs that have nothing to do with each other. Let's put them all together into one song and hope no one notices the lack of cohesion." This is by far the best track on the cd. The Widow is a generic rock ballad with warped production to make it "interesting". L Via L Viaquez starts off with a generic poppy, funk-metally, Spanish sung thing that's incredibly catchy despite it's genericness (that bassline is pretty damn funky). That randomly switches between really quiet somewhat waltzy music for the first 6 minutes or so of the song. Then for 4 minutes of the song, the waltzy stuff ends up taking over. Then the last 2 minutes it turns into lame dub again. 'Miranda that Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore' starts off with 4 minutes of synths before a guitar and trumpet come in making it sound like the soundtrack to a martial arts exploitation movie. Then at about 7:30, the song picks up a little and builds up pretty well up until it hits its peak at 9 minutes. The song is 13:18 and closes out with, you guessed it, 4 minutes of dub! "Cassandra Gemini" is the closer, it's 31:43 and only manages to keep my attention for the first 3 minutes (which has a slightly off-kiler melody going, but Cedric's voice just annoys me on it) and the last 2 minutes (when a jazz saxophone comes in before the song ends on the same part it began on with silghtly better singing).
To make it short: this album is not horrible. Calling it 'almost pure shit' may have been a little bit of an overstatement. There's not a single part of it that I think I can say actively sucks. The problem is that it's way too generic, and aside from the incredible instrumental talent, the songs have nothing that can't be heard done better by someone else. Their last album sounded like they HAD to make it or their heads would've exploded. This album sounds like they made it because they just wanted to put out a new cd and it really shows.
To make it short: this album is not horrible. Calling it 'almost pure shit' may have been a little bit of an overstatement. There's not a single part of it that I think I can say actively sucks. The problem is that it's way too generic, and aside from the incredible instrumental talent, the songs have nothing that can't be heard done better by someone else. Their last album sounded like they HAD to make it or their heads would've exploded. This album sounds like they made it because they just wanted to put out a new cd and it really shows.