He looks fantastic, Jon! The first pic is especially awesome. Very fit and very good-looking fellow.
I've got a few moments to spend in this thread today, so I thought I'd punch in that Riverside album. Time Travellers is gorgeous! Gonna listen to some more stuff. Thanks Ev. I owe you a couple of books
I'll take this deal, sure. Just started
King of Thorns today because I finally caved in and bought both of the remaining books in that trilogy.
Oh, the irony. Just when I said our company cut our available OT hours last month, this week our boss approached some of us and told us we're free to put as many OT hours as we need to finish our project till the end of the year.
So that means I'll be working both remaining weekends, which kinda sucks—but as the posts for this thread are pre-written, I think we'll do just fine. I may be slacking in some of the roulettes though.
Two updates today, and due to some of the interesting albums down the list I'm confident I can wrap it up in 10 or 11 days.
Without further ado, here we go!
#25
Communication Lost
Wolverine
Genre: progressive metal
2011
Recommended to me by: Dr. DTVT
A rare breed of dark progressive metal where you can hear every instrument in the mix clearly, this album takes the approach Soen did with
Lykaia and turns it to eleven by writing even darker songs, losing some melancholy and adding a few power ballads with well thought out choruses. First sent me in my first roulette by Mason, this band took a few tries for me to get into it, and while I enjoy other albums somewhat,
Communication Lost hit me in the feels harder than anything else by Wolverine. It’s a very long album, almost filling the 80 minutes of CD to the brim, and the thing is, the atmosphere doesn’t change much during the whole experience. Unfortunately, that means if this kind of music isn’t quite your cup of tea, you will find this album underwhelming. Fortunately, as this has been the kind of music I’ve been drifting to lately, I found this album, well, not the best thing, but the 25th best thing, I suppose.
There are albums where the album art works so perfectly with the album’s name
and the album’s music, when you just have to wonder how much thought went into it, or if it was half-intentional, half-coincidence. Those stories can usually be found in interviews, and I haven’t read any Wolverine interviews at all, but I can safely say this is one of those cases where both the album title and the art are incredibly evocative and perfectly representative of what kind of music the album itself entails. Sometimes simple is the best, and for the bleak atmosphere they were going for, this album art fits remarkably well.
It’s also curious how, for me,
Communication Lost features an unconventional album structure. In my head, I split it in two parts, each one building up to one big emotional climax with soaring vocals and epic, heavy guitars backing them up. The first run is from the track’s opener to
Your Favourite War, which releases the energy from meaty
Into the Great Nothing and acoustic
Poison Ivy with a certain deadpan delivery, building up to a fantastic guitar solo and all-out ending. Then the second buildup begins, and this one is entirely on another scale, with emotional aspect of the album ebbing and flowing, resulting in some of the great choruses like
In Memory of Me and then some quiet moments, before finally rolling into the ultimate song of the record: the title track.
When I began writing this, I was determined to mention that the title track is one of the best songs I discovered on DTF. Then I looked at my whole Top 50. Then I contemplated how many more awesome albums—and brilliant songs—didn’t make this list. I just can’t make statements like this, and even this album ranking is superficial—on any other day a lot of these albums could be easily swapped around. Therefore I’ll just say that the title track is great beyond belief—but so are another hundred songs or so you kind folks introduced me to.
Favourite songs:
Your Favourite War (
YouTube,
Spotify),
In Memory of Me (
YouTube,
Spotify),
Communication Lost (
YouTube,
Spotify)