MuteMath

[adriftconscious]

Hey hey, the lawsuit has been settled. According to a post on the group's myspace, the record will be in stores in September. They've been in the studio remastering and are set to include some songs from the Reset E.P. on that album as well.

I'm ecstatic for this, and a little bit nervous. I like their album more each time I listen to it, and I think it flows very well. I also don't have as much trouble witht he lack of songs with words as Murlough has, and actually really like the musical interludes-- mostly cause a few of them are just long enough to use for little iMovie clips and the like. I think the band exhibited tremendous growth between discs, and... well, I just wonder how well those songs will fit in with the new stuff, and whether or not we'll see track order change. If so well... I'll be even more angry that some jackass stole the cd I got at their show.

[murlough23]

I also don't have as much trouble witht he lack of songs with words as Murlough has, and actually really like the musical interludes

I like the musical interludes when they're long and/or varied enough to justify their existence. Except for "Collapse", though, which I enjoy but not enough for it to stand up well on its own, they're all basically outros to the songs preceding them. And of those, only "Obsolete" is really worthwhile to me.

[adriftconscious]

so... I went out and bought it. Its my second hard copy of the disc, since someone in my dorm took my original last year. I'm even more angry about that now, because its a collector's item. They did indeed change the track order around. You'll be happy to note that Polite has disappeared off the album, but unfortunately, so has my favorite song Without It. Without It was replaced by PlanB from the Reset EP, track order stays the same for two or three songs, I think, then they add in Control, and Reset has been added at the end of the disc. So, they've gotten rid of one legit song and an interlude and replaced it with two legit songs and a full on instrumental number. I don't have the disc in front of me right now-- its in a friends room, so I don't have track order handy.

Anyway... I don't know what to think of it. I'm so attached to the original version of the album that it's hard for me to come at this with anything resembling objectivity. PlanB is such a mood change from Without It, but I'm not really sure how it effects the back half of the disc, since I'm so dissappointed in Without It's absence. Perhaps a less emotionally invested person should comment?

[murlough23]

Eh. Life is short; we'll do without it.

[adriftconscious]

10 points.

[spacebrat311]

10 points.

Stingy. That reply was worth a good 15.


Overall, I think that the overall flow and consistency of the album is much improved with the new release. But then, the songs they removed were the two I always skipped in the first place.

[murlough23]

I didn't see the need to remove any songs. "Polite" was no great loss. "Without It" may have been one of my least favorite songs on the CD, but it was still a decent song. I have the reset EP, so I don't necessarily need a few of those tracks (even if they picked the best ones!) inserted into a new version of an album I already bought. The main problems that were fixed by doing that were (a) improving the momentum problem near the end of the album, and (b) causing the album to actually have more than 9 full songs. They really should have just brought over a track or two from the EP and put it on the initial release, and left everything else about the original album as is (minus "Polite").

[PopePouri]

Dream Theatre's Octavarium only had 8 songs.  It's still a great album though.

I thought the album had 10 songs with 3 interludes. 3 of the songs clocked over 6 minutes anyways. I didn't like "Without It". It was a filler track and it was boring so I'm happy they took it off. Polite is an interlude so it's not going to hurt the album quality. I actually like it. It's mellow and I like how to feeds into the more experimental songs on the album.

[murlough23]

Dream Theatre's Octavarium only had 8 songs.  It's still a great album though.

The final song on that album had 5 sections to it, which were like 5 distinct songs. A few other tracks went through multiple "phases", as is Dream Theater's norm. I don't mind a track listing that is less than 10 tracks with bands like them because an 11-minute song isn't doing the same thing for all 11 minutes.

I thought the album had 10 songs with 3 interludes.

I'm considering "Collapse", "After We Have Left Our Homes", "Polite", and "Obsolete" to be the non-songs. "Obsolete" is a continuation of "Stare at the Sun", and I like it, but not enough to consider it a song in its own right. There's not much purpose making that one a separate track.

3 of the songs clocked over 6 minutes anyways.

All of which do a lot of repetition and don't actually neejustify their length. I like "You Are Mine" quite a bit, for example, but it makes its point after about 4 minutes.

[PopePouri]

Yes they're non songs so an interlude like "Polite" will not affect the overall quality of the album. "Without It" does affect it.

The only thing that is a continuation from Stare At the Sun is the drums. The rest (bass, melody, song structure) is entirely different and I think it stands out as a separate song. That's why it's been labelled as such.

Regarding repetition, the same can be said to a song like Panic Prone with it's different phases, but it returns to it's original hook every single time. Well that occurs with Break the Same, and You are Mine. It's the same amount of repetition.

[murlough23]

The only thing that is a continuation from Stare At the Sun is the drums.

The chord structure changes, but the rhythm and overall mood stays the same. It's basically an outro or vamp that just happens to last for four minutes. I'm not complaining, because it's a good jam, I'm just saying that it's really just half of a whole.

Regarding repetition, the same can be said to a song like Panic Prone with it's different phases, but it returns to it's original hook every single time. Well that occurs with Break the Same, and You are Mine. It's the same amount of repetition.

Right, but with Dream Theater I'm talking about a fairly significant change in the dynamic of a song, to the point where it's a distinct passage of music. "Break the Same" is really a 4 or 5-minute song with a long outro that repeats the same thing again and again; it's a slow wins-down. I like the main body of the song but the outro goes on for way too long. "You Are Mine" is a gorgeous piece of work, but after verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, it feels tedious when it goes back to verse-chorus yet again. "Stall Out" is a wonderfully "chill" song; I don't mind its length so much, but at the same time, I won't give it enough extra credit for being long that it makes up for the lack of another song.

For me, if one long song's gonna make up for the lack of a song somewhere else, there's gotta be enough non-repetitive content to the one long song to justify it. Just a little bit of extra jamming/riffing/meditation that stretches a normal verse-chorus type song past the typical length of such a song isn't enough to make up for that shortfall. (See Peter Gabriel's Up - every song is over five minutes and many of them don't really need to be, and then the final song is really just a fragment - thus, 9 1/2 songs. The Listening's record is another great example - I love pretty much every track, but 2 out of 11 are very short interludes and the extended repetition on a few tracks doesn't make up for that. Hence, a B+. Good quality but they fell short on unique content.)