Now -- what are you listening to? V3

http://www.metalmusicarchives.com/album/poliisi-itsemurha/poliisi%E2%80%8B-%E2%80%8Bitsemurha(ep)

Well this noisecore release is no Ayreon for sure

Wait, so this all happened because a set of candles fell over and burned Daniel's room? Yeah, so without the comic, I would have had no clue at all what actually happened to Daniel. That's disappointing, because previous albums were easy to follow without needing any outside material: You just needed to listen closely to the lyrics and it all made sense.

This isn't very good, LOL

I have two issues with it, at this point. 1. I find once the focus moves away from Daniel, it kinda just falls apart, because none of the other characters feel well realized, except maybe Simone's Angel of Death. Like, even the tracks without Karevik on disc 1 work because they're all mostly about his character, but once the other characters come in it just gets kinda messy. It also doesn't help that Abby is very poorly handled, imo, despite her vocalist being very good. The character herself just feels so wasted. Also, it feels like Lavinya is about to get a redemption arc towards the end, but then..... She just doesn't? I have no clue what's going on there, at all. Disc 2, track 10 is where things get really confusing, making it seem like Abby may potentially be saved, but then the next we hear her father asks "Why did we die?" and I'm like "seriously, WTF just happened?"

2. The tonal dissonance is insane. That's always been a bit of a thing with Ayreon, but for an album with such a dark story, it's just so silly and light-hearted at times, the two tones just clash together and it doesn't work in spots. Most notably, whenever it does get really dark, it fails to register because so much of the rest of the album sounds so silly upbeat, it feels like you're listening to two different albums. This even happens within tracks, like when Dee Snider suddenly goes from angry, mean dad to soft for one section, then switches right back to normal at the end, so it's like 'where the hell did that one section even come from". It sure doesn't fit the song at all.

 I don't know, I'm overthinking it, for sure, but for some reason this is the first Ayreon album where the lyrics are really bothering me. It's still either a high 4/low 4.5 star album for the music and performances, but it's definitely the worst Ayreon in quite some time.

Edit: I'm downloading the lyric sheet now to see if that helps clear some things up, but I don' think anything could fix some of the issues this album has, like Henry just being awful (not even the singer, just the character himself being a lame stereotype, even more so than past Ayreon characters and without any of the fun and charm.)

http://www.metalmusicarchives.com/album/spocks-beard/spocks-beard