The Next Chapter: Bodom After Midnight

Second impression. Changed my mind after listening to the whole album with 2 different sets of good headphones. Don't like the sound at all. The mix sucks. This is nothing like I remember COB sounding live. Granted I haven't seen them after Roope left, but to me COB always had a fantastic live (and album) sound. Here the guitars are washed out and instead of sounding crunchy are unpleasantly nasal, which I'm starting to get allergic to as all albums these days are going for that guitar sound. Drums aren't punchy. At least one can hear the bass. But it all sound so distant rather than direct, except of course for vocals and keys. Like someone recorded it in the back on a cell phone covered by a sweater. Or like they put the proverbial wet towel over the guitar cabs.

I've never been a fan of COB playing their live sets at faster paces. Never understood the reason, other than Alexi wanting to get it over with. But for a sloppy player like Alexi, speeding things up doesn't exactly help. While the accelerated pace is ok with a few songs, with others it's awful. Platitudes and Barren Words sounds ridiculous sped up. Shovel Knockout is unintelligible.

Perhaps a higher quality rip will improve things a bit although I doubt it. They had a chance to give us a live album updated to portray COB at it's best, instead they gave us something that sounds more dated than Chaos Ridden Years. Overall, a shamefully missed opportunity.
 
dthmtl3 said:
I've never been a fan of COB playing their live sets at faster paces. Never understood the reason, other than Alexi wanting to get it over with. But for a sloppy player like Alexi, speeding things up doesn't exactly help. While the accelerated pace is ok with a few songs, with others it's awful. Platitudes and Barren Words sounds ridiculous sped up. Shovel Knockout is unintelligible.
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I think the real reason for sped up live songs is nothing special, deep and thoroughly thought of. It's just Jaska being bad at keeping a steady tempo and having a sense of how fast a particular song should go.
Check out basically any live performance of In Your Face. Once Jaska comes in the tempo INSTANTLY speeds up at least 10-20%. Back in the day I thought it was cool for them to perform those techical songs even faster live. Nowadays I just agree with you. Especially since Alexi kinda couldn't really keep up with it.
To further prove my point: Bodom after midnight live clips sound tight AF...

Let's face it: We all adore COB and agree hey were fantastic, but aside from the crazy energy and charisma they never were a good live band.
 
Yeah I think the limited BAM clips sounded amazing. I like jaska but that drummer was in a different league. I can’t stand Alexis tone on hexed — the cocked wah quacking so much. IWC is bad too. Haven’t heard the new live album yet. I like chaos ridden years tho.
 
Lucas Snajder said:
I think the real reason for sped up live songs is nothing special, deep and thoroughly thought of. It's just Jaska being bad at keeping a steady tempo and having a sense of how fast a particular song should go.
Check out basically any live performance of In Your Face. Once Jaska comes in the tempo INSTANTLY speeds up at least 10-20%. Back in the day I thought it was cool for them to perform those techical songs even faster live. Nowadays I just agree with you. Especially since Alexi kinda couldn't really keep up with it.
To further prove my point: Bodom after midnight live clips sound tight AF...

Let's face it: We all adore COB and agree hey were fantastic, but aside from the crazy energy and charisma they never were a good live band.
Click to expand...
But they do rehearsals before playing songs live dont they? I mean, why did nobody tell Jaska to play it slower like its supposed to be? Since everybody else is playing the same tempo, it must have been trained like that for live shows.
 
Of course the tempo of the live set is planned ahead of time, after all Alexi was the boss. He wouldn't let Jaska just set whatever pace he wanted. To claim that Jaska, a professional drummer who has done hundreds of shows can't keep time is quite a statement. And even if that were the case, he could have used a click track.
It would be interesting to go back in history to see when they started accelerating their shows. Those Bloodstock songs on RRF seem to be normal pace.

To me in a way it was a symptom of Alexi's discomfort, physical, mental, with the rest of the band, or just playing in front of large demanding crowds. He was a lot more relaxed and comfortable with The Local Band and BAM.
 
Lucas Snajder said:
Let's face it: We all adore COB and agree hey were fantastic, but aside from the crazy energy and charisma they never were a good live band.
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i sort of disagree with this, no offence :) Yes they werent always great live, but when they really went in the zone they actually play most of everything pretty close to how they recorded it on there albums,

Alexi was at his best during 2001/ 2004 arround 2015 he menaged to play tighter live aswell...
the Seoul 2001 gig really stands out ;)
 
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I've read this before that Janne said that Alexi basically decided to drink himself to death. Not sure when that was mentioned for the first time but it came as a surprise to me. I always figured at some point Alexi was given the bad news that his condition was incurable and at that point he figured what the heck. If the decision came earlier though, that would be nuts if there was still time for recovery but he nevertheless decide to suicide himself by alcohol.
 
Even more interesting to me is that they had planned to end the band anymway in 2022. So Hexed would have been the last album even if Alexi didnt pass away.
 
Sinthoras_96 said:
But they do rehearsals before playing songs live dont they? I mean, why did nobody tell Jaska to play it slower like its supposed to be? Since everybody else is playing the same tempo, it must have been trained like that for live shows.
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Thing is, specially for festivals they play faster to fit more songs, so if they are rehearsing like that all the year they are not going to slow down for a show. If they don't play to a click track is normal to play faster due to excitement and adrenaline
 
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Sinthoras_96 said:
No unfortunately not. I honestly dont understand how they could not record a pro video shoot of this concert. A live bluray of the final concert is like the most obvious thing you could do.
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They probably feared giving a bad show/no chemistry between band members/bad faces or bad blood or anything. Most likelly the band didn't want that show to be how people remembered C.O.B because those were pretty bad times in the band. Also, a camera crew costs money, Chaos Ridden Years has an amazing camera work and production that stands out amazingly well even for today standards (Some years ago I watched it on my 4k tv and it looked really good), so it must have been pretty expensive for the time (also, record companies used to pay for live recordings back in the day, now they don't except in some situations). But yeah, even a more simple camera setup would have been cool, maybe the band put 1 camera on the back of the venue to record the full show (and maybe another one with a different angle), but most likelly that's all, because on YT videos you can't see cameramen on the pit between the stage and the crowd. Looking back at the past and knowing Alexi died they probably regret not recording it profesionally, but I guess at the time they weren't at the mood to do it. On the other hand recording the audio in multitrack is really cheap, most modern sound desks can be plugged to a laptop through usb to do a multitrack recording (there was even a Stone Sour gig were the manager decided to do a multitrack audio recording of the show without telling the band, they liked the result and they released it as a live album)
 
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I spun that record tonight (two posts up)
And yeah. It’s awesome. They’re playing really fast. Songs like Bodom beach terror are really fast enough as it is, and songs like ETID sound a little off when played too fast.
Playing is on point and vocals/lyrics are as intelligible as ever. Fucking Henkka-vocals gets me every time.

Every instrument sounds good in isolation, but the mix feels a little scooped. There’s something making it flatter, less 3D, and that also kind of muddle the instruments more together, when they’re all playing.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is, I’ll leave that to the experts as I know nothing of mixing and mastering.
To me it’s not so bad I won’t enjoy the shit out of this.
I probably also should get new headphones.

Knowing how it all comes to a bitter end makes this concert very haunting, grand, and very final.

This old fart got teary eyed.
 
Yeah henkkas vocals lol …. Why didn’t Daniel do more backup vocals once he joined? Couldn’t he scream
 
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He was the vocalist for some band of his, so he should be able to, but if you're the new guy and they already have a backup screamer...
 
Happy new year and everything, I hope you all are doing well.

They, or Alexi, is playing less sloppy than I first expected which I'm very grateful for. I do agree that they play very fast, too fast on some tracks, and the keys are too loud. I was never a fan of the more "modern" sound after 2005 and the albums played in standard D is my favorite. However, a very good album. Tokyo Warheart has more heart and soul though.

As a sidetone, a song that really hurts for me to listen to after Alexi passed away is "All for Nothing". How Alexi and Janne are trading solos at the end and how the guitar is crying really makes it emotional knowing how it all ended and that they will never play together again. Looking back at videos when they were younger, smiling and just enjoying every minute is fantastic to see. When they split in 2019 I thought it was just temporary and that after a few years they would be touring together again, making new albums. I thought Alexi would live for many more years than he did. I wish it could have ended differently.
 
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