WaywardOne wrote:Anyone looking for those bonus tracks come on down/up/over to Thornton, Colorado! Our Walmarts are stocked.
I drove through Thorton yesterday afternoon, though I wasn't looking for Walmart. Small world.
I'm loving this album. I purposely avoided listening to the singles when they came out so I could experience the story from start to finish, and so the first time I played the CD all the way through on Friday was the first time I really listened to the songs and lyrics and plot (though Mark's interviews pretty much outlined that already) in any detail. I don't have any issues or preferences with the style of any of the songs because I assume that Mark wrote the music to be part of the story's tone, so each piece of music fits into the narrative in a particular way. Rather than liking or disliking a song or solo, it's fun to ask why he wrote a piece in a certain way and see how the story evolves with the construction of each song. Having said that, it's a very sonically interesting album and many of the songs are already great stand-alone listens, but as a concept album, it works very well as a whole. Each play through reveals new details or questions about the narrative that I didn't catch or consider the prior time through which makes each listen very fresh. It'll be interesting to see how ADM stands up to my favorite concept albums like Maiden's Seventh Son, Nevermore's Dreaming Neon Black, and the all-time greatest, Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime. It's a great album and an interesting story, and I'm really glad Mark took this chance to break away from what has worked before to try something this different because he really smashed it.
Now I really can't wait for the book to see how closely my interpretation of the album and the plot of the novel correspond. And I'll start drafting the screenplay...just in case.
Oh, and I just heard A Dying Machine on Pandora tonight. Nice!