Jesus, this album is terrible.
Just listened for the first time and I strongly disagree with this statement. The only thing is terrible in this album is the mix, in my opinion. The mix is really bland and uninspiring and dull and downright awful. If only this album had SGHN mix, it would've been much more amazing.
The songwriting, on the other hand, became much better in comparison with their previous effort. My favourite songs now are Cloud Factory, Blood and Half a Marathon Man; WHDDHYDHTDH is good but the lack of proper ending doesn't help at all. The best song I think is Blood, I'm really glad they're playing it live, can't wait to hear it.
Larger than Life ended up pretty underwhelming, hope it's a grower, because from the first listen I found it dragging and unmemorable for an epic. Some people said it's trying to be the second WPBO, well, I don't have this impression, and this song is nowhere near the perfection WPBO has.
The worst song is probably Running Lights, followed close by Love. Other songs are quite good, despite X Marks the Spot being a big WTF with all that preacher stuff.
Also, the booklet in digibook has a few jarring typos, the one that stood out for me was
"There will blood!". They really should've checked that stuff, I think.
Overall, the album lands somewhere in the middle of SA discography. It's certainly better than SGHN, I like it more than Unia (yeah, I'm not a fan of Unia, I'm sorry), WHG and Silence, but it doesn't have enough balls and epicness and atmosphere to beat Ecliptica, RN and TDOG for me. Still, an admirable effort and I'm sure I'll keep returning back to it in the next days/months.
We shall see what you guys think about all this songs in upcoming Sonata Arctica survivor, starting out right after the Avantasia one will end. We will need 5 people or more, so I urge everyone who's reading/writing in this thread to take part in it. I would appreciate help in the "bonus songs/demo tracks" department, if anyone have a list (?, looking at you there) I would gladly see it.