Once again I save a thread from its pending banishment to the archives section.
I was a really big fan of this band in the late nineties and early 2000s. I have just about everything they ever released, save for their really low-volume EPs and the like. I even have their video collection that came out at the same time as their greatest hits album, Tangents. I used to watch Much Music a lot when I was in college, instead of MTV and VH1, and grew to like several Canadian acts that didn't do much in the U.S.
I had moved out of range of my favorite radio station, so I was not really keeping up with music at the time, when my friend gave me a dubbed cassette of The Edges of Twilight. He had bought the disc after hearing Fire in the Head on the radio, and thought that I would like them. Needless to say, he was right. I had never heard a blend of hard rock and world music like theirs before, and it opened up my eyes to different genres. Previously, I had mostly listened to hair metal (which is really pop disguised as rock/metal) and from there moved on to progressive metal (DT is the only other band that made such a similar first impression on me, only more so), with a little thrash and classic rock thrown in.
Over the years, I continued to follow The Tea Party's career, buying all of their albums, some of them online because they had no proper American release. Although none of them were as good as The Edges of Twilight, I liked all of them. I was even lucky enough to see them in March of 1998 at The Paradise in Boston. For a venue of about 900 people, there might have been a dozen people there, which was truly disheartening for me, let alone them. I don't believe they ever toured the U.S. again, playing only a few one-offs in places like Buffalo, Detroit, and Seattle.
When they broke up in 2004, I wasn't torn up that much, because their albums I felt were slightly diminishing in quality with each successive release, and it was getting to be a pain in the ass to purchase them. I had to go online to get Seven Circles, and while I did surprisingly find Jeff Martin's Exile in the Kingdom at Newbury (probably the only copy shipped to New England), even that was only decent, maybe comparable to a poor man's Splendor Solis. I heard Jeff Martin's next band, The Armada, on Martin's website, but it didn't grab me enough to purchase the album.
My friend alerted me around 2010 that they were reuniting and going to tour Australia and maybe record another album, but I didn't really care. A year or two later, he burned me a copy of Live From Australia, which I found to be good but not great. Then, last fall, I heard The Water's on Fire online and, while I dismissed it as the mandatory sell-out ballad to get radio airplay (in Canada and Australia, anyway), it sparked my interest enough to buy it when it came out on iTunes. I found it to be good but not great, which is my same opinion of everything they've released since Triptych. Still, I hope they have enough success to keep going and putting out more music, because I've never heard any other band like them before and I still find them to be a great change of pace to what I normally listen to.
Topic: The Tea Party thread (Read 12380 times)
