HBB why do you hate the Sieges Even album from this year so much? Kinda curious.
I've been meaning to give it a fresh listen so that I could properly review it as I did their first album, but it's been about a decade so I can't precisely say why. But the general thing I remember is that it was similar to their debut in that it felt like an obvious imitation of greater bands without the ability to execute on it, only now by branching out away from thrash into pure prog they didn't even have any decent fundamentals to stand on. One thing I particularly remember is that there's a certain chord that Rush used a lot in the later 70s and early 80s, don't know enough about music to tell particularly what kind of a chord it is or whatever, but if you know what I mean by the kind of big, shimmering chords they often use in introductions/outros or when announcing a bridge section, kind of the guitar equivalent of a bombastic clash cymbal, that's the chord I'm referring to. Anyways, Sieges Even copies that precise chord all over the album, only instead of using it sparingly they throw it all over the place so it's like noise, only it's not particularly dissonant/intense/ugly so it sounds more like a 10 year old with a midi tracker throwing "pre-set pretty 70s Rush chord" over their music. They also take these crazy Watchtower-esque drum fills, sometimes copying them verbatim, and throw them over what is otherwise a mellow section of a song in a way that doesn't work at all. Doesn't help that their garbage singer at that time was the exact opposite of what that kind of music needs. I'm not remotely a stickler for things like singing in key, soloing in key, tight musicianship, etc, in fact I'm probably deaf to it and happy to be so, but I do ask that music at least sound
conceptually sensible if not technically sensible in a music theory sense, and that album sounds like one of the most retarded mish-mashes of progressive muzak I've ever heard. Even the song titles seem like they were written by some poorly-programmed prog-imitation algorithm than actual humans, e.g. 'The Tangerine Windows of Solace', did an AI read 'Tangerine Dream' and 'The Ivory Gate of Dreams' and just mix the two together? What in the fuck is a tangerine window? It's basically anti-music to me.
