We’re The Architects Of The World
Posted on | March 23, 2007 at 11:02 pm | Comments Off
Capsule CD Review Time again. In this digital download age, there’s still some things you can count on, like the fact that Flasshe is going to buy some CD’s anyway.
Artist: Rainer Maria
Disc: Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
Released: 2006
Number of Tracks: 11
Total Disc Time: 48:46
Album Content: This is your basic female vocal indie rock. The title song is terrific and is the reason I bought the album. (I heard it on the radio.) It doesn’t seem like the kind of song I’d like – there’s something off-kilter about the melody. The drums in the verse are a bit too pounding, though I do like the sound of them. Caithlin De Marrais’ vocals are a bit too much on the breathy side for me. But the more I listen to it, the more it becomes a part of me that I don’t want to lose. “But I’ve got a plan…”
Some of the other songs are up there as well. The second song, Life Of Leisure, is almost as good as the first one. I like the driving bass line and the electric rhythm guitar work. Burn has a quiet intensity. The acoustic guitar shuffle of Clear And True makes me move. Love the “I’m not afraid of ghosts” middle part. The drumming throughout the album is unusual – it calls attention to itself a bit much, but it’s growing on me and I’m starting to think it fits.
However, this album makes one colossally irritating mistake. It brings back the old “hidden track”, which has fallen out of favor lately. The last song, I’ll Keep It With Mine, is a Dylan cover that’s pleasant enough. I’m not familiar with the original, but it sounds like they probably do it justice. Then when the song is over, there’s a few minutes of silence and then a very long reprise of the song Cities Above. There are a couple of problems with this. One is that in these iPod/MP3 days, I hate putting a 14 minute song in iTunes or on the iPod that’s really two separate songs with a long silence between them. I could always use an editor and split it up into two tracks and take out the silence, but I shouldn’t have to do that. The other problem is that the Cities Above reprise is extremely repetitive (basically repeating the phrase “He didn’t know my name, but I loved him all the same” over and over again for nearly 7 minutes, over some drony waltzy music). By the end of that time, I’m ready to off myself. So if I ever do get around to editing the MP3 version of that track, I’m cutting out that part.
Sound quality: Generally muffled throughout, which is kind of annoying.
Liner Notes: The packaging is a digipak with a glossy booklet. The booklet has a page for each song, with a photo and a lyric snippet. I kind of like it, arty though it is. I’ve already managed to tear the digipak taking the booklet out of it – not good.
Worth the CD Buy? I bought the CD mostly for the first song, and I guess I’m glad I did, and I’m glad I like most of the other songs as well. I would rather have downloaded it from eMusic. However, it’s not available there, even though other Rainer Maria releases are. (I like this new one better than their other RM albums I’ve heard.) I waited and waited for it to show up on eMusic, but it never did, so I finally gave up and bought it.
Latre.