Wall of Mouths

I keep hearing a ‘st-anger’ snare sound!

LITSOATT, Dead Hand, Marlow are the stand outs so far for me.

You managed to enjoy Lulu? :-/ Fair enough I suppose. Couldn’t stand it myself.

Just listened to Ecclesiastes…WOW!

Fair enough, just did absolutely zero for me.

The single and BYWYAF are stellar Therapy-esque melodic tunes, these two are far more in keeping with typical Therapy? than the rest of the album.

Plague Bell: didn’t like it but it’s definately growing on me after repeated listens.

I can hear strong similarities between Magic Mountain and Marlow, but the latter really hits the mark unlike MM. I really hated MM, but I like Marlow so much I think it would make a great single. Very strong track.

The first 90 seconds of The Buzzing reminds me of Other Peoples Misery, and then the crazy dub section comes in… love it.

Get Your Dead Hand continues the dub theme, a real stand-out track. Indicitive of how they always try something new, and invariably, it works. Certainly no Troublegum part 2 here :)

Ghost Trio or Why Turbulence: As I type this, gotta admit I don’t remember what either of these sound like! Yet to make impressions, obviously.

Stark Raving Sane I didn’t think much of when I heard it on the Metal Hammer cd, but the riff has really grown on me after, again, repeated listens.

Ecclesiastes is a pure trip, reminding me of the French band Air (which I mentioned in another thread). Beautiful stuff, one of the best tracks.

So far I’d rate the album above Crooked Timber. It’s definately a Top 3 contender. :)

Just shows we’re a diverse bunch - we all seem to like different bits! Magic Mountain (where’s the FULL version T?) for me was one of the best things they’ve ever done (but then I like and listen to a lot of instrumental music like that) and Marlowe doesn’t quite match up to it and it’s my favourite track on the album, but fairly different tracks to my ears so not easy (and probably fair) to compare. A different album again and that’s a good thing, much as I loved CT I wasn’t expecting them to make a Mark 2 of it, got to move forward and this record is yet another step in the constant evolution of their sound, one of the reasons I’m still anticipating each release they make after 19 years of listening to them.

Plague bell, the buzzing, get your dead hand.. ghost trio, and ecclesiastes are my favourites so far, and as a whole, I can’t fault it at all, it takes you on a wild ride. :)

deffo a grower,deffo a winner!

soul doubt wrote:

I want a new postman! :(

Might go for that too ;-)

On the other hand, I got the livealbum 1 week in advance from Global Music, so this time I have to wait for the CD to arrive …;-)
It´s great to wait for a CD to come…to see the package and unwrapp it:-)

for me Ghost Trio sounds like it building up to something epic, but never quite gets there. Still haven’t warmed to Marlow yet either.

The standout tracks for me remain BYWYAY and Get your dead hand off of my shoulder (also love Plague Bell, Living in the shadow and Stark Raving Sane)

Otherwise after repeated listens I am a happy camper - as mentioned before however, I don’t see why the album couldn’t have been 3-4 tracks longer (it is very short!)

KJC Dublin wrote:

Otherwise after repeated listens I am a happy camper - as mentioned before however, I don’t see why the album couldn’t have been 3-4 tracks longer (it is very short!)

Agreed. It’s around 40 mins, which seems to be the average for a lot of albums these days, but it does seem very short. I had it on in work earlier, and when it finished playing i thought it’d be lunchtime, but it was still too early :(

Kossu wrote:

And this is the song my wife was most horrified cause of that electric sound on Andy´s vocals.

He sounds like a sulky robot :D

I was already disappointed about this too, although I haven’t heard the album yet. What happened to the days when they’d have 13 or 14 songs on an album. Crooked Timber only had 10, but it was still one of their longest albums. 10 songs at around 40 minutes does seem short and even more disappointing if they really did record several more songs. I feel T? should be more ambitious and go for an album of over an hour one day.

Course, this was just a slight niggle for me when I saw the track list and length on Amazon a while ago, but hopefully any disappointment will go when I finally hear it :-)

MisterHoppy wrote:

You listen to a fair bit of dub Simon, do you hear these dub elements people have mentioned? Cos I don’t really and I listen to lots of dub, might just be my bass isn’t set high enough though. I’m enjoying the use of space in this one as well, given that aside from reggae / dub I mostly listen to what’s termed post rock nowadays I hear it used a lot, nice to hear it within a more aggressive rock sound again, as I felt CT employed it as well.

A friend of my is a DJ. I was curious about all these ‘dub elements’ people keep mentioning so I let him listen to a couple of tracks. He didn’t hear any of it at all, then sent me a link of Korn’s dub album for an example (which I wouldn’t touch with a six foot pole even if it was preemptively nuked). Suffice to say it might work to inspire them, which is good, but the music is still completely different, and that’s good too.

Thefanthattriedtostrangleitslf wrote:

A friend of my is a DJ. I was curious about all these ‘dub elements’ people keep mentioning so I let him listen to a couple of tracks. He didn’t hear any of it at all, then sent me a link of Korn’s dub album for an example (which I wouldn’t touch with a six foot pole even if it was preemptively nuked). Suffice to say it might work to inspire them, which is good, but the music is still completely different, and that’s good too.

You’re confusing Dub and Dubstep mate, and despite the name Dubstep didn’t evolve from dub, it’s (well was back in 98 when the term first came about) a sort of combination of the darker elements of drum and bass and 2-step (a form of garage (not garage rock though) which is even shitter than most garage) before it evolved into what you hear today, DUB on the other hand is the forerunner to remixes (in fact a lot of the early dub pioneers were soundsystem engineers, King Tubby was an electrician and soundsystem operator), it’s a subset of reggae and often involves just the rhythm section of a track (sometimes cut up and re-dubbed) with loops of other instruments and sometimes snippets of vocals dropped in and out with a heavy use of reverb , echo and delay. It quickly became very popular within reggae so you got bands and producers making dub albums without using a vocal track as the starting point (the fact Jamaica didn’t have any copyright laws at the time helped a lot initially).
Basically Reggae has always had very very deep and heavy bass, dub took this a bit further and that’s why dubstep with it’s heavy heavy basslines got dub in its name.