After reading about this several times here and thus having on my list for a long time, I finally got around to buying it. It was an iTunes purchase, and it worked out really nicely. I was sitting around yesterday trying to decide what I wanted to listen to next, and was thinking of something sort of modern-ish and new-Anathema-like, but I didn’t want to listen to Anathema. So I suddenly remembered that I’d seen “El Cielo” put in that category of music, I hopped to the iTunes store and was listening to the album probably less than a minute later as it started downloading. It was $9.99 for the album, and I think that’s an instant kind of service that’s pretty hard to beat any other way. Even downloading it from an illegal source would have taken a good bit longer and been more work.

Anyway, I only listened to it once, but it sounds pretty cool. If I was to compare unexpected major-label pseudo-prog-rock releases, I think I’ll probably end up liking this one more than The Mars Volta.

The one thing that surprised me though is that I’ve never seen anyone compare the album to Katatonia (and I checked the archive!) To me, it sounds quite similar to “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, although it does seem to have more tonal variety across the album. I can certainly hear the modern-Anathema comparisions too, which is a good thing. iTunes also has “A Natural Disaster” available, I’m still deciding if I should take the chance on that one.

After reading about this several times here and thus having on my list for a long time, I finally got around to buying it. It was an iTunes purchase, and it worked out really nicely. I was sitting around yesterday trying to decide what I wanted to listen to next, and was thinking of something sort of modern-ish and new-Anathema-like, but I didn’t want to listen to Anathema. So I suddenly remembered that I’d seen “El Cielo” put in that category of music, I hopped to the iTunes store and was listening to the album probably less than a minute later as it started downloading. It was $9.99 for the album, and I think that’s an instant kind of service that’s pretty hard to beat any other way. Even downloading it from an illegal source would have taken a good bit longer and been more work.

Anyway, I only listened to it once, but it sounds pretty cool. If I was to compare unexpected major-label pseudo-prog-rock releases, I think I’ll probably end up liking this one more than The Mars Volta.

The one thing that surprised me though is that I’ve never seen anyone compare the album to Katatonia (and I checked the archive!) To me, it sounds quite similar to “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, although it does seem to have more tonal variety across the album. I can certainly hear the modern-Anathema comparisions too, which is a good thing. iTunes also has “A Natural Disaster” available, I’m still deciding if I should take the chance on that one.