rustcore

Watched the ARTE stream twice before admitting to myself I was never getting to Clisson, so this is as close as I get. Jo Quail's cello is the reason to take this over the studio versions, she fills the space the second guitar usually would and the quiet stretches stop feeling like a wait for the next crescendo. Suicide by Star still does what it did to me on a burned CD in high school, and the double kick under the back end is ridiculous in the best way. My one gripe: a set this short and no Echoes. If I were putting one of these on a mix for somebody who has never touched post-rock, Fragile

The joke about Sloan is that their throwaways are built better than most bands' singles, and vol. 3 is where that stops being a joke. Half of it is Action Pact era, the record their own fans still argue about, and Step On It Jean was a 7-inch b-side with a better guitar hook than most of what made the album proper. Even Though sat on a Canadian iTunes edition, which is an insane place to leave a song that good. Four songwriters means nobody ever has to pad. Never got to see them and it bugs me. Will You Ever Love Me Again? goes on the next mix I make for anybody.

Six songs and one of them is twenty-one minutes, so you know what you're in for. The clean stretch in the middle of The Count of Tuscany is the reason I keep coming back, Petrucci quits shredding for two minutes and just lets the arpeggios ring out. Portnoy's last night with the band before the long exile and you can hear it, he's hitting everything a little too hard. Summer Sonic crowd sounds tiny in the mix, wish I'd been in it. anyway

Way outside what I normally spin. I'm a basement-show twinkly-guitar guy and this is a battleship set to a stadium chorus. Put the Bismarck follow-up on half as a joke and the chorus just got me. It's paint-by-numbers Sabaton, you can watch every gear turn, and the World of Warships tie-in is about as subtle as a torpedo. Still, sometimes you want a hook the size of a building and a history lesson you didn't ask for. Fun as hell, anyway.