Review Summary: It's like eating a bowlful of spinach with bacon in it. You get these morsels of awesome goodness surrounded by sheer meh and the process seems far too drawn out.
I have something of a love-hate relationship with Tears of Mars. I love the way their songs sound and I hate that all their songs sound exactly the same. It's odd and Freud would have something important to say about it, I'm sure.
So when I heard that The Minor Fall - The Major Lift would be a double disc album, I hesitated. Could I buy the thing and listen to it all the way through on one go? Was it possible?
Yes, but it's like eating a bowlful of spinach with bacon in it. You get these morsels of awesome goodness surrounded by sheer meh and the process seems far too drawn out. I’ve been trying to write this review for a month, but listening to the album from end to end and not just skipping past all the filler is extremely hard.
The opening track: Dracul, is unadulterated speed. It's representative of the work they are capable of. It begins the album with a piano opening of Matthew Bellamy-like chords mixed liberally with some stereotypical "dark and stormy night" tunes that transfers into a speedy and forceful guitar rift backed by some mercilessly played bass.
Then the pace suddenly slows and the transition is very much a letdown. On my first play through I have to check my player to see when the tracks have changed, (never a good sign for an album that wants to be listened to as an album and not just have the best tracks pulled from its claws.)
It’s not all bad, Josiah Orsie's vocals still have just as much timbre, flavor, and pure extension of emotion as they ever did, the band still creates an ambience of sound which is not found in other places, and the lyrics (when you can understand them over all the distorted guitar in the background) are just as heart-felt and wrenching as they have been before. While Josiah's voice is not something operatic, he knows how to use it. Good example: Reconcile, a track late in the disc that begins with a background growl and builds forward into a ballad unmatched elsewhere in the album. Reconcile picks up a unmistakable chord sequence, a clear set of verses, and soars high above the rest of the disc.
The band has a tendency to over distort the vocals from the lead singer midway through a song and render the words totally unintelligible. It’s done artfully enough that the disc is still solid and (unlike some of their earlier work) there aren’t whole songs where the entirety of the vocals are incomprehensible.
As you transition into the second disc, you’re welcomed by an appropriately pop-rocky Papa Roach-ish start from the song Shot to Heaven gets the listener back into the music. “No matter what you do, you’ll fail. Don’t let it get to you. Get up!” The trouble comes from the fact that this sounds very similar to the prior disc. Josiah has a less distorted voice and the songs sound more “classically” alternative, but I’m left with the feeling that they could have collapsed this album into a single disc and made the work much more worth the listening time. Mother and Someday Soon are the songs that strike me most as the band writes a song to mom (awww, sweet) and a quick poetic explanation of how forcing a relationship forward inevitably doesn’t work.
Yet, the second disc seems rather too much. The flavor of the band has become rather tiring by the end of the disc and its extremely hard to keep the CD going. It’s always a problem with double albums and they simply don’t vary the music enough to avoid it.
