Okay, this is my summary.
The album is brilliant from start to finish music-wise, (well, except for the middle of The Best of Times, by which I mean start of singing till end of singing, which is okay, but nothing special). The band make very few false steps the whole way.
Lyrically, A Rite of Passage, Wither, The Shattered Fortress and The Count of Tuscany are cool, and these are the tracks I’ll happily take away from the album.
Most DT albums have one track that approaches, if not makes my favourites, and this album’s one is Wither. (Which means the last three albums’ editions have been The Answer Lies Within, Repentance, and Wither, all fairly mellow songs).
The Count of Tuscany is pretty bad lyrically ‘on paper’, but seems strangely silly in tone, in a way that I quite like, so I can still enjoy it for that (the first thing that came to mind when I first heard this song was Flight of the Conchords’ Jenny). I really don’t like the whoah whoah whoah outro though, just unnecessary. I wish DT would stop forcibly giving their epics these OMG endings and just let the song end what I would call ‘naturally’.
The Best of Times is lyrically fairly clunky, enough so that I doubt I’ll bother listening to the song much at all (as has been pointed out on quite a few occasions in the past, lyrics seem to matter to me a bit more than most people). And then there’s A Nightmare to Remember, possibly the worst thing lyrically that DT have ever done, and thus rendered pretty much completely unlistenable.
So, better than a decent handful of DT’s albums, even with two tracks I don’t really care for.
However, I have to say, I’m not hugely interested in the album, and I’d say it’s simply cos I’m not listening to much of any metal at all at the moment. I might have listened to it 4, maybe 5 times. I mean, I could say something like “the album lacks spark”, but I don’t think that’s the case. I’m just in another place at the moment.
Poll
Topic: Black Clouds & Silver Linings: Reactions (Read 134220 times)