The Same River

“He showed them magic in the dark third unknown…”

the44sunsets:

Can I just say how extraordinarily great this album is?

It’s just an hour+ of pure, catchy, prog rock goodness. I love everything about it, from the way the vocals are layered to the slight electronic influences to the utterly indecipherable yet strangely beautiful lyrics. (The lyrics are based on the novel Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval and are meant to sound like a dream; The Dark Third refers to the third of the life spent asleep, which, of course, I thought was simply the niftiest thing ever. It’s essentially just fancy word salad, but personally, I can’t help but to love that poetic, surrealist, stream-of-consciousness nonsense.)

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I mean, I don’t like it because it’s particularly original, or terrifically progressive, or bursting with creative energy and technical virtuosity, because it’s none of those things, really. The songwriting is decent but unexceptional, and the musicianship isn’t particularly impressive, either. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the least pretentious, most accessible albums with a prog rock label I’ve ever heard.

But you know what? Accessibility isn’t a bad thing, and I think some people tend to forget that. And this album is just…Really, really damn good. I could listen to this all day.

In fact, it’s blasting through my shitty laptop speakers as we speak (and with YouTube’s famously abysmal sound quality, too, which is kind of a damn shame; as soon as I stop being so damn poor and get 1) this album, and 2) a new set of headphones that don’t suck, I’ll have to remember to do this album justice by giving it a proper listen).

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