I bought this CD off THE BAY, as it was only $3 and I have been listening to a rip of it virtually every day for the last two years. Before you project me as a monster, please note that the band broke up soon after this CD was released, as the lead singer no longer wanted to be in a rock band and went to work for his family’s business. So I didn’t even get the chance to screw them out of money. I’ll never understand why a band will practice and do gigs for years (they started in 1998) before releasing a very listenable CD and then break up, but it happens all the time.
Reviewing music is pretty pointless, because you can’t change people’s feelings when it comes to what appeals to them. Pinner could write a few paragraphs and make me not dislike the movie Magnolia. Worm can write a few instant messages and make me understand why I shouldn’t play The Witcher. But that doesn’t apply to music, so I won’t bother to say what I think of the disc, other than it successfully captures the feeling of being in an alternate reality game, one that involves traveling to the part of the USA that is equally distant from Denver and Kansas City on a Sunday night in the summer, as you wait for a phone call on a payphone and wonder if you’re going to get back to work on time, but then not caring if you do. This CD, to me, makes me feel like I am outside the hamster’s wheel of work and mortgage and traffic and getting hassled, and I have recently started every coding session that I have done for pleasure by playing it.
This was the first actual CD I have played around with in quite some time. When I put it into my computer, it wants to install some shit, and I declined the EULA. I went to find the audio tracks, but couldn’t. The back of the disc says it’s OK to rip it, so I fired it up into CDex… and whattayaknow. It identified the disc, and I was able to export the tracks I couldn’t find to .wav files. That’s how I am listening to it right now, in a lossless format. What the fuck. Thanks I guess? The weird part is that I can’t detect any difference between the 20MB wav files and the 192KB MP3 files I had been listening to. gg, ears (mine).
The songs on the disc are in a different format than what “Advance” MP3 I had grabbed. And I think I prefer the order they are in for the Advance, but there’s little I can do about that. I’d love to know why it was changed, but there’s just not a lot of prose written on this band. This post will probably shoot right up the search results chart.
At any rate, I like the disc so much because the songs blend into each other so well. There’s one song that stands out, the last one, which is called Glory/Us, and I think it best exemplifies the feeling of being alone in the middle of nowhere. It’s also the only song I have ever heard in my entire life that speaks to an absolutely positive and uplifting reaction to having your life destroyed by the deceit of another. It being the only one is amazing to me. Maybe it’s just the kind of music I normally listen to, which is fair, but I prefer to attribute it to the fact that this band really was talented, and it’s a shame that they won’t make a second CD.
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