Honestly, this feels like an album where a little more work could have made it a great single disc. The Breath of Life is not it. It is good, but it removed some of the best stuff, while keeping some unnecessary reprises/preludes, and sounds too much like a Neal and Friends record. Forevermore sounds more like a good mixture, but does feel a bit too long. Overall, I like this quite a bit, and there a few songs of which I am definitely a big fan, but it just feels too messy overall.
I think i wanna try and make my own version.
I love the entirity of disc 1 of Forevermore. Disc 2 not as much. I love the breath of Life but it ends TOO fast. i feel like there's a good middle ground there.
I always find this feeling a bit funny since more than half of TBOL comes from the 2nd half of Forevermore. Maybe the edits to songs like "Owl Howl" and "Solitude" make a difference?
I am also of the mind that debates about "disc 1 vs disc 2" are silly because the tracklist is only divided by the media format. If we lived in a world without CDs and the music remained purely on vinyl, would people be debating which of thr 3 LPs was better for Forevermore? Would we be debating which of the two LPs of TBOL is better?
Maybe because I listen to music almost entirely digitally these days, I see albums as a whole work and don't really see them aa "disc 1" and "disc 2" unless they're definitely meant to be separate entities (like a bonus disc, or a second disc of extra songs not associated with the first disc, like Porcupine Tree's The Incident or Neal Morse's Testimony 2).
I do agree that TBOL is over pretty quickly with its 64:12 runtime, but its brevity is what sets it apart from Forevermore, as well as its more focused lyrical concept. I definitely need to spin TBOL a bit more as I have almost exclusively been listening to Forevermore for the past week or so, but I miss songs like "Rainbow Sky", "The World We Used To Know", and the Gentle Giant-esque vocal break in the middle of "The Greatest Story Never Ends".
-Marc.
Honestly i listen almost exclusively digital too but i was born in 85 so CD era guy. so I STILL divide things in my head, lol
as far as disc 1 basically being TBOL your right. but i think it looks lesser coming after disc 1......cause i REALLY love disc 1, lol
Hey, born in 84 here myself, and for most of my teens and 20s, I swore by CDs, made hundreds of CD-r copies and remixes of music, and used a CD Walkman for most of my high-school and college years, but when I got an iPod and later a smart phone, I'd say 99% of my listening had become digital, and so my view on multi-disc albums became one that saw them as complete works, not divided by the constraints of physical media. The digital age has allowed longer works to be absorbed and listened to in single sittings without having to be bothered with changing discs or flipping vinyl sides.
Maybe this is why I love the Ultimate Mix of The Absolute Universe since it runs seamlessly for its 98 minutes of runtime and doesn't fall into the whole "disc 1 vs disc 2" debate that these sorts of albums run into, especially when albums like this are composed as they go along. I always read a lot of opinions saying that "disc 2 runs out of steam" or is "weaker" but honestly, I think it might just be listener fatigue for some fans, and maybe they enjoy disc 1 more because whenever they go to start listening to the album, that's as far as they get, so they enjoy it and understand it more, leaving the less-listened-to 2nd disc to the wayside.
I personally cannot think of any double albums that I like where I thought the back half was significantly weaker than anything in the front half. Maybe the concept albums, particularly those by Neal Morse, suffer a bit for some because he brings back so many themes and songs near the end, so folks feel tired of them by that point, or see that as a lack of creativity or originality, but I *love* when themes return and repeat, it helps give the album a sense of cohesiveness.
Basically, if all music was digital, or fit on a format that allowed them to be on a single piece of media, there wouldn't be these broad, generalized opinions of "disc 2 isn't as good as disc 1" because we wouldn't have those dividers placed upon the album. It would just boil down to which songs on the whole album do you like or don't like, which can really get folks thinking harder about the music they absorb, rather than just putting down half the album because it's simpler to say so.
-Marc.
Topic: Transatlantic Official Thread (Read 531513 times)