|
"Intro" is a very short instrumental piece that serves to start the thing off. It also doesn't give any hint of what's coming, but when the tracks turn over to "Where I Stand" the acoustic guitars are very prominent. The song itself is mediocre -- it has little emotional intensity, I feel, and the vocals, while top quality, sound emotionless. The next song, "When You Leave" is superior in every way, and is one of my favorite songs (although I already had this exact version of it on the ADD sampler Rising! Synthpop vs. the World.) Here, the guitar disappears to be replaced with very early Erasure-esque sounds and much more emotive vocals. Great song, with lots of power, even though it's a mid-tempo rather than dance oriented thing. "Over" is very different. Not only is it as long as a Scandinavian winter night, but it is almost completely acoustic, without even very much percussion. A little synth dribble here and there serves to remind us that Blue October is, actually shooting for the same market that buys Erasure. Almost as if to compensate for the very warm and acoustic song, there is a strange coda attached to the end that turns very dark and very electronic with weird sampled vocals about aliens and space travel. Just in case the die-hard synthesizer nuts started to get worried! "Safe" is another slowish song, with some acoustic effects that is a bit better than "Where I Stand" as well as a bit darker. The beginning of it is eerily reminiscent of early Anything Box, but it quickly develops it's own sound. "Force" is a completely synthetic instrumental with a slightly slower dance beat. The album really shines, though with "Believe." I thought the slightly beefier and certainly more synthesizer-driven remix I had heard of it before was pretty good, but the power of the song in it's album version is dramatic. The piano driven instrumentation with a few guitars and muted synth-effects build in intensity throughout the song. It's absolutely breath-taking. "Incoming" is also one of the best songs on the album, only it lacks guitar and is a fairly straight-forward dance song. The album version has a tiny coda on it to seperate it from the version on the ADD sampler Risen. "Now is the Day" and "True" are also slow songs, very much like the other slow songs on the album. Frankly, other than "Believe" very few of them really grab my attention. The wonderful exception to this is "Slowburn." Much like "Home" on Erasure's Chorus CD or "Lullaby" on Book of Love's CD of the same name (and for that matter, like "Believe" on this same CD,) this song starts out slowly and builds a wonderfully intense and emotionally powerful finale, which certainly helps to let the CD leave you with a good impression.
Overall, my problem's with the CD are probably twofold: first, it didn't concentrate on the type of song that the samples led me to believe it would -- I would've certainly like more songs like "Incoming" and less like the very samey slow songs that make up about 50% of the CD, and secondly, it relies too heavily on acoustic instruments. I'm not a rabid guitar hater, by any means, but at the same time, I like the sounds of synthesizers. I like the atmospheric and unique textures they can add. When guitars or piano, or bagpipes, or whatever adds the same atmospheric level of texture, I love to have them. However, when the same sound (acoustic guitar, for instance) is used repeatedly for a number of songs that are not even similar, the effect is not the same. In addition, when the acoustic guitars clash with the synthesizer sounds rather than accentuate them, as I think happens in many cases here, the effect is even worse.
|