Rating: .5/5 stars

After listening to this album, progressive rock is certainly not my favorite genre of music. At all. 

The first track is titled “Put It Right.” The mixing is the only thing to write home about. There are some cool effects towards the middle of the song that slow it down, which is expected at the beginning of most albums. The only problem is, it does not pick up again for seven more songs. 

“Rubicon,” “It Leads to This” and “The Frost” genuinely all blend into one song. Nothing about any of these stand out. The whole theme of this album is the guys from The Pineapple Thief (“Give it Back (Rewired)”) try to be methodical and slow, which comes across more boring than it does cool.

“All That’s Left” is next on the album. This has a pretty solid middle section but the band absolutely refuses to follow up with anything good. This was more frustrating than bad because parts in this song have so much potential, but it is thrown away the minute the lyrics come back in. 

“Now it’s Yours” is driven by the bassline the entire time, which definitely makes it stand out among the other songs on this record. But that does not mean it is any good.

The best song on the album is “Every Trace of Us.” It is what this entire album should be. The song has drive and actually went somewhere. The guitar is mixed in perfectly with the lead singer’s voice, one that is pretty annoying throughout this album. If they could make a song like this once, then it becomes even more baffling that they chose to make the rest of the album a copy and paste snoozefest. 

It is OK though; they ended with a ballad so we could all feel good. The song was titled “To Forget,” which is very apropos about my feelings towards this song and album as a whole. 

I genuinely try to like every bit of music I listen to because I understand that just because I do not like it, does not mean everyone does not like it. But I genuinely have no idea who is listening to this album. It is the longest 40-minute album I have ever listened to. It was genuinely frustrating to hear basically the same song over and over and over again for 40 minutes, minus of course the four and a half minutes of “Every Trace of Us.” 

There are, however, parts of this album to appreciate. The instrumentals are cool and the band really does show signs of good. It was really their inability to follow up those signs of good with anything better. They consistently wasted every bit of momentum they had throughout the album. Bands like Nirvana (“In Utero”) perfected the style of music that started fast and got slow and then built up again, but that is Nirvana and this is The Pineapple Thief. One is among the greatest bands of all time and the other is being dumped on by a college student who has never picked up a guitar before, let alone played one. 

I’m sure there are people out there that like this stuff and if you are reading this, I am sorry. This is not any good.

Image by Steffen 962 via Wikimedia