LogFAQs > #967885684

1.All Hands
2.Harborside
3.Little Snakes
4.Rivet
5.Reverie
6.Gardenias
7.Hillside
8.Mountainside
9.Soliloquy
10.The Canary
11.From the Sky
12.The Migrant Mother
13.The Fireside

General Comments:

Having listened to this three times now, I still don't know how I actually feel about this album. Progressive metal isn't exactly my favorite genre of metal and there are several songs here that I very aggressively dislike--I do not care for intense or epic drumming and there's a LOT of that here. To an actively painful degree at times. And yet, there's also at least one absolutely fantastic song that I love & I like the themes of the album. The darker side of American history with genocide, mass incarceration, suicide... I'd say that I generally enjoy the stories they chose to tell and the lyrics used to tell them. So this is simultaneously 'a very cohesive album that tells compelling stories & featuring an incredibly high scoring song, the likes of which few albums can ever attain' and 'actively painful at times, in ways that I hate'.

I have absolutely no idea how I would score this album as a whole (though, I suspect, having a 9/10 song will place this on the higher end of this cycle's "Rank the Albums" regardless), but I guess I'm thankful we covered it? It's all over the place with incredibly high and low scoring songs, but it's never boring at least.

All Hands: I actively love this song and feel that it fully justified ranking the album just to get a chance to listen to it.

Harborside: A surprisingly beautiful instrumental that would be a true highlight if only it were a bit longer... I feel the minute long runtime does not leave the listener enough time to fully soak in and appreciate it, though what is here is fantastic.