Double albums on cd often suck because in most cases they contain a lot of shitty music and all the good moments would have easily found enough space on a single cd. The new Once We Were is a double cd but the above mentioned prejudice doesn’t fit at all.
Both cds have about thirty minutes playing time each. So they would have easily fitted on a single cd. The splitting up of the music seems to have artistic reasons rather than technical ones. According to the info sheet the cd, the red one, is like a real studio album with real songs while the second cd, the blue one, contains rather ambient, experimental, session-like music. I’d go with this description.
The music on both cds is very melancholy and epic, mostly instrumental music but the red cd is much more rock and oriented on classic sludge songwriting with a lot of dynamics while the blue one is constantly keeping the volume low and comes around like an instrumental guitar version of Nalle or something. Very Scandinavian.
I like both discs but if you don’t want to get lost in music-induced dreams you should stick to the red one. The blue one is very dreamy and spherical. I’ve also seen the band live with Scraps Of Tape once. They are a good live band and nice people. Good record(s) somewhere between Espers and Tephra or just Isis for cuties.
[jan]
www.oncewewere.net
|