gaz
Stargazer
Yes I'm with you can't stand digipaks, but sometimes have no choice.
The local version I have seen here in Sydney, is the 10 track jewel case with the black cover.
2013: CONSTRUCT
- Thread starter Defiance
- Start date
Yes I'm with you can't stand digipaks, but sometimes have no choice.
The local version I have seen here in Sydney, is the 10 track jewel case with the black cover.
I've got half a mind to scan all my digipacks, photoshop and tweak everything to make it fit a standard jewel case and send all that shit to some fancy print shop so I can have some peace of mind about my CD collection.
This is really DT's best album in a long time, perhaps ever (but we'll see in a year); I feel like that with every album, but this one is certainly more honest than the others.
I agree, digi-packs are the best thing ever. If they don't fit on your CD rack just put them aside or build a specific rack for them.
I just got the new album yesterday, and the three songs that really stick with me so far are None Becoming, Immemorial, and Uniformity. The whole album is really good though, I love how melodic it is.
Nice!! That's interesting, for me None Becoming was the last song I liked, and the only one I didn't completely get into at first. It's a very complex album, the current "Projector", in the sense that there's a departure from what they'd been doing in the last three/four albums. Might be the best DT album, actually. Still thinking that, even after it's been a while since it was released.
anita_job
Member
The only song I dug was None Becoming with its grand, melancholy, and tragic feel. The album was better than We Are the Void but I was a little disappointed to hear the line "apathetic to this life" on the track Apathetic -- we covered that in "Lost to Apathy" some years ago.
My main complaint about this album is that it is overprocessed in terms of mixing. It is just way too synthetic or inorganic sounding.
My main complaint about this album is that it is overprocessed in terms of mixing. It is just way too synthetic or inorganic sounding.
Hmmm I disagree with everything you say. What's the problem with the Apathetic lyrics? It's a recurrent theme in DT; I don't see the problem, the lyrics are quite different.
And "overprocessed"? You clearly haven't heard albums like that, listen to new Dimmu or the new Dead Can Dance live album and then we'll talk.
Magrathean
worldbuilder
I also thought Apathetic was a bit of a rehash of the themes visited in Lost to apathy, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that; as long as the song is interesting and there's anything to say about the subject, I don't mind a little repetition here and there. DT also has a tonne of lyrics about disappointment in oneself/others, about humanity driving the world to destruction, and about how complicated (and at times violent) human nature can be, yet I hear nobody complaining about it.
Rather than "overprocessed", I'd say "ultra-processed". Yes, Construct has an extremely processed feel, but I'd argue that 1) it doesn't take away from the album (or from the musicians' skill) in the least bit and 2) it might even be intentional considering the album's theme (it is, after all, called Construct, which means something artificial -- unless you interpret the title as a verb, which I don't think is the intended interpretation anyway). I usually enjoy a combination of processed and organic (either extreme lacks some important things in my opinion), but here I love the ultra-processed feel; I believe it's intentional, and I believe it adds to the album's, er, punch (for lack of a better word).
On a completely unrelated note, I just looked up Gatineau (expecting it to be a tiny village somewhere in the middle of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Manitoba region) and found out that it's a pretty important town. (One learns something new every day.) I'm pretty sure your location wasn't that until recently, Defiance...
Rather than "overprocessed", I'd say "ultra-processed". Yes, Construct has an extremely processed feel, but I'd argue that 1) it doesn't take away from the album (or from the musicians' skill) in the least bit and 2) it might even be intentional considering the album's theme (it is, after all, called Construct, which means something artificial -- unless you interpret the title as a verb, which I don't think is the intended interpretation anyway). I usually enjoy a combination of processed and organic (either extreme lacks some important things in my opinion), but here I love the ultra-processed feel; I believe it's intentional, and I believe it adds to the album's, er, punch (for lack of a better word).
On a completely unrelated note, I just looked up Gatineau (expecting it to be a tiny village somewhere in the middle of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Manitoba region) and found out that it's a pretty important town. (One learns something new every day.) I'm pretty sure your location wasn't that until recently, Defiance...
I don't think it's a rehash, really; it's simply that Mikael used the word "apathy" again in the title and dealt with themes that are treated in many other (the majority of?) DT songs. The thing is that if you say "rehash" it has a negative connotation, which I don't think should be the case here. Plus, for me it's interesting to see how "Lost to Apathy" is more of a passive construction, in the pragmatic/linguistic sense as its something that we "receive", whilst "Apathetic" is more of an active feeling: I am apathetic towards this life.
I actually find it relatively organic. I mean, you really have to listen to other things besides metal to know what overprocessed means. Listen to the new MUSE album, or the new DCD live album: the latter is the most overprocessed album I've ever heard in my life.
Haha thanks, mate! Nice of you to look up where I live. Hmm no, not around there, and the name is pretty French haha. I guess you might call it important, since it's the closest French-speaking city next to Ontario, and even more, Ottawa (which is, of course, completely bilingual
). It's very much suburbia and there's not much to do at times, but I live in a great location next to a little patch of forest so I have a lot of trees around and a river in front of the house (very nice); plus most of the commodities are quite close, and there are a lot of little independent shops nearby. Even more, bus 8 that takes me to uOttawa is 300m from my house, so it's very convenient. Finally, the best thing I guess is that Gatineau Park is 1km from my house; it's a pretty damn nice park I must say. I once biked up to Pink Lake and almost passed out (about 7km uphill), but it was worth it, it's a beautiful, meromictic lake. And there's an insane amount of bike trails, I've lived here for a bit and still haven't taken them all. If the band decides to hang out with me when they come here, we should go there
.[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2-56xk_iJM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2-56xk_iJM[/ame]
anita_job
Member
I don't mind rehashing of themes (the range of human experience in a given historical context is actually rather limited in terms of possibilities) but covering the same themes in almost the same words is a little different.
The overprocessing is also something that is inherent in the digital medium. Now that recording and mixing is done all digitally (instead of with analog tapes as when DT's first few albums came out) from beginning to end, music as a whole has lost a lot of its organic flavor. For more on that topic, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording
Kenneth R.
Cináed
This album is DT through and through. While it might be "more of the same", it's more of the good than the bad and I'm okay with that. It's in my top 5 for album of 2013.
Magrathean
worldbuilder
Living next to the forest sounds awesome. A good friend of mine recently moved to a beautiful little house right next to the forest in Frederikstad, Norway, and you can't believe how envious I am of him.
The vid you posted shows a very pretty range of colours in the trees, but I cannot fathom why someone would name that lake Pink Lake.
Anyway, Gatineau sounds like a really nice place to live (minus being suburbia, but I suppose all the green makes up for that).
It doesn't really matter to me if they use the same words again. Sometimes, there are no other suitable words to use; while the word "apathetic" has a few synonyms ("indifferent", "unconcerned", "dispassionate", and so on), perhaps the band thought none of those words quite fit the song as well as "apathetic". I'd much rather have them repeat (and not even exactly) a phrase they used eight years ago than have the songwriting process suffer just to avoid said repetition.
I'll look at that Wiki page over the next few days, as right now I don't have the time to read that wall of text. Thanks for the link, though, anita_job. As for Muse and DCD (is that Dead Can Dance?), same answer: will listen over the next few days.
In my case, it's in the top 2 for album of 2013. The other contender is Neurotech's The decipher volumes, and it's been tremendously difficult to decide.
Easily one of my favorite Dark Tranquillity albums. I find it highly accessible. My favorite songs at the moment are "The Science of Noise," "What Only You Know," and "State of Trust."
After first listening to Construct for awhile, and then not, then coming back to again, I really have to review and say that I believe Dark Tranquillity are starting to sound a bit "cheap" - the contrast between the "singles"/"rather good ideas" is getting pretty far from some of the filler tracks, and I really first started to notice this on Damage Done so many years ago, though it was never a big, starkly difference until We Are The Void.
What I mean by this, is with the last few albums especially, or like with Character, it'll seem like there's some ideas that are so catchy and intense that they just stick with you, where some other tracks may indeed have some character to them (pun), but just not enough to get you hooked to the track or present as truly interesting. For instance, on Construct, Apathetic just comes across as annoying, and on We Are The Void, I Am The Void must have been one of the worst DT songs released, and Surface The Infinate had an extremely insane chorus on the "making-of" videos, but was changed to something boring and rather tame last minute.
Overall, there's no pattern in it, as with We Are The Void, it was more like instances of boredom, where as on Construct, some of the songs fall weak because it seems Dark Tranquillity are trying to be "spastic" and have "odd time signatures" (which, in my opinion, sort of ruins what an amazing idea State Of Trust could have been if the catchy, Projector-like chorus was quite a bit longer than what it was. And then we have Character, where the "off" songs seemed a little boring, and Fiction, where the filler songs almost seemed too silly and too catchy.
I just haven't really been able to sit down and listen to a Dark Tranquillity album all the way through, or even keep all the songs actually on my Ipod, since Damage Done, and really, even in comparison to Damage Done, Haven was really that last album where I appreciated and loved every single song as though it was one of the best in Dark Tranquillity's career - I felt the same way about Projector as well, and even all of the bonus tracks recorded in those periods. Without a doubt too, both with Void and Construct, I haven't been able to stand the bonus tracks, they just seem like cheap, leftover ideas.
Granted, in my opinion, even The Gallery and The Mind's I suffered from some "off" tracks throughout the list, so I can't say that I'm really surprised by this evolution of Dark Tranquillity, but I got into them around Damage Done, and since then, I sort of hoped they'd have been a band to really get the structure together and really make sure each song has a great standard and really breaks things up from the next. Even Character maintained to at least sound like a very respectful album in my opinion, even if some of the ideas were dull, it managed to sound very thought-out and there was a lot of detail to ensuring each track sounded quite interesting in terms of the truly complex sonic production.
I'm sure it's hard for any band to truly write a full album of songs out of nowhere, and I'm glad that Dark Tranquillity are still putting out great music at any rate - however, really the only good track I was able to truly become long-term addicted to on the new album is Uniformity: it just had a certain charm and production value, a certain emotion and power, that hasn't been matched since the Haven days (though Lost To Apathy was a good bet for the money!). I truly wish this new album had went much deeper into a Projector/Haven territory, and with Uniformity leading the way, I think the band had a really good chance to do just that.
Anywho, does anyone know if the Memory Construct song is availible in any form? I really want to hear it and see what the big "difference" is about the track... maybe it'll be a super-dramatic-energetic-Haven-esque outtake that'll really sort of pump up the album for me!
(All this ain't to say that Dark Tranquillity is a bad band - there's plenty of songs across the new releases that I do find amazing, just, the feeling of a "band in their prime" isn't there. I'd say the best songs over the last three albums is "Uniformity", "The Grandest Accusation", "The Mundane And The Magic", and "Iridium" - and "Iridium" was written back in the Gallery days! Apart from that selection, just judging the albums as a whole, I feel like all the other tracks just don't exactly match up - even then, that's not saying most of them are bad, just, a few really are, and most seem to feel slightly cheaper/less-attention-given in the production and/or structure.)
What I mean by this, is with the last few albums especially, or like with Character, it'll seem like there's some ideas that are so catchy and intense that they just stick with you, where some other tracks may indeed have some character to them (pun), but just not enough to get you hooked to the track or present as truly interesting. For instance, on Construct, Apathetic just comes across as annoying, and on We Are The Void, I Am The Void must have been one of the worst DT songs released, and Surface The Infinate had an extremely insane chorus on the "making-of" videos, but was changed to something boring and rather tame last minute.
Overall, there's no pattern in it, as with We Are The Void, it was more like instances of boredom, where as on Construct, some of the songs fall weak because it seems Dark Tranquillity are trying to be "spastic" and have "odd time signatures" (which, in my opinion, sort of ruins what an amazing idea State Of Trust could have been if the catchy, Projector-like chorus was quite a bit longer than what it was. And then we have Character, where the "off" songs seemed a little boring, and Fiction, where the filler songs almost seemed too silly and too catchy.
I just haven't really been able to sit down and listen to a Dark Tranquillity album all the way through, or even keep all the songs actually on my Ipod, since Damage Done, and really, even in comparison to Damage Done, Haven was really that last album where I appreciated and loved every single song as though it was one of the best in Dark Tranquillity's career - I felt the same way about Projector as well, and even all of the bonus tracks recorded in those periods. Without a doubt too, both with Void and Construct, I haven't been able to stand the bonus tracks, they just seem like cheap, leftover ideas.
Granted, in my opinion, even The Gallery and The Mind's I suffered from some "off" tracks throughout the list, so I can't say that I'm really surprised by this evolution of Dark Tranquillity, but I got into them around Damage Done, and since then, I sort of hoped they'd have been a band to really get the structure together and really make sure each song has a great standard and really breaks things up from the next. Even Character maintained to at least sound like a very respectful album in my opinion, even if some of the ideas were dull, it managed to sound very thought-out and there was a lot of detail to ensuring each track sounded quite interesting in terms of the truly complex sonic production.
I'm sure it's hard for any band to truly write a full album of songs out of nowhere, and I'm glad that Dark Tranquillity are still putting out great music at any rate - however, really the only good track I was able to truly become long-term addicted to on the new album is Uniformity: it just had a certain charm and production value, a certain emotion and power, that hasn't been matched since the Haven days (though Lost To Apathy was a good bet for the money!). I truly wish this new album had went much deeper into a Projector/Haven territory, and with Uniformity leading the way, I think the band had a really good chance to do just that.
Anywho, does anyone know if the Memory Construct song is availible in any form? I really want to hear it and see what the big "difference" is about the track... maybe it'll be a super-dramatic-energetic-Haven-esque outtake that'll really sort of pump up the album for me!
(All this ain't to say that Dark Tranquillity is a bad band - there's plenty of songs across the new releases that I do find amazing, just, the feeling of a "band in their prime" isn't there. I'd say the best songs over the last three albums is "Uniformity", "The Grandest Accusation", "The Mundane And The Magic", and "Iridium" - and "Iridium" was written back in the Gallery days! Apart from that selection, just judging the albums as a whole, I feel like all the other tracks just don't exactly match up - even then, that's not saying most of them are bad, just, a few really are, and most seem to feel slightly cheaper/less-attention-given in the production and/or structure.)
La Rocque
I am that I am
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