Soen - Imperial (2021)

Country: Sweden
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I liked Soen's fourth album, Lotus, a great deal when I reviewed it here at Apocalypse Later a couple of years ago, but it sounded a little too much like Tool to allow me to entirely buy into the hype that I'd heard about them, which was considerable. Their argument that Tool is a genre as much as a band only went so far in my book. Well, they're back with another album that moves them on stylistically again. There's definitely Tool here again, but this particular album doesn't sound like Tool, which means that it's another step forward for a band who are notable already.

So what does it sound like? Well, my first impression was that it sounds huge. The production comes courtesy of Iñaki Marconi, who also produced Lotus, while the mix is credited to Kane Churko, who is so busy nowadays that soon that name will carry its own gravitas, rather than being subtitled "son of legendary producer Kevin Churko". It all sounds crisp and clean but vast. Each instrument sounds big, except the bass of Oleksii Kobel, which is utterly lost in the mix, providing texture but nothing else. The drums are big enough to bury everything else but the guitars are big too and the vocals likewise.

For three songs, it sounds alternative and progressive, alternating heavy machine gun riffs from both guitar and drums with soft, emotional sections. This is metal, even if Metal Archives won't let them in for some reason, not just because Cody Ford's guitars are often heavy and Martin Lopez's drums often fast but because the whole album is emphatic. It's like they're performing in underlined bold type on heavy sections and merely bold on the softer ones. Even if we knew nothing about Soen and tuned our radio into the softest, quietest section of the softest, quietest song here, we'd still know it was going to ramp up to something powerful soon enough.

There are softer songs here. Illusion highlights just how much Soen are influenced by Pink Floyd and, to be fair, Floyd's disciples, like Radiohead. Even when Ford launches into an obviously Dave Gilmour influenced solo with the band supporting in often recognisably Floydian fashion, it still isn't quite a Floyd song, because they're all finding their own identities, especially Ekelöf, who is clearly forging a firm style of his own.

Some of what he does with melodies and held notes does sound familiar, but not from anything metal I can conjure up. I can't place who he reminds me of, beyond Eric Woolfson of the Alan Parsons Project and David Draiman of Disturbed, because there's someone else eluding me. Whoever it is, Ekelöf is as dominant here as the mix doesn't want him to be. The more I listen to this, the more I find myself not listening to the guitars as much as I'd usually do. I'm listening to him.

I like this album but not as much as I liked Lotus. I think I realised that when I got to Dissident, which does some of the things other songs here do but mixes it up even more. The beat is more unusual and the Tool influences come back to the fore, but the transitions are subtle and fascinating. The drop out of Tool as genre and into delicate prog for a quieter midsection is majestically precise but deceptively loose. It also ramps back up well and the second half of the song is perhaps as great as this album gets.

But that really made me wonder about everything that had gone before and, while there are no poor tracks here, none come close to matching Dissident and I think that's because, Illusion aside, they put a sort of template into play to restrict themselves and that's the song that surpasses it. Everything is four or five minutes and change, featuring both of the two contrasting styles, before it gives way for the next one word titled song that does the same thing in a slightly different way. Sure, they do it all really well, but the more we play this, the less varied it seems.

April Rain - Mirror of Ether (2021)

Country: Russia
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives

I liked this from the very beginning, Prince Rupert's Drop being a capable owner, but it grew on me as the next few songs underlined just how much mastery April Rain have over their tone. Post-rock needs tone as much as nuance to be able to conjure up the soundscapes it exists to do and this has both. The chime sound midway through Tin Woodsman is evocative and the tone as Chiral Allergy begins is just as exquisite as the echo at the start of Tsuru.

April Rain, presumably named for the song by Delain, began life as a one man band in the Ukraine but the civil war prompted Valera Bykov to move to Russia, where they expanded to a four piece and have released a number of albums. If I'm counting properly, this is their sixth studio album. Certainly, they have a maturity to them that's most overt on songs with major builds like Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. This one starts out with beautiful but exquisitely sharp guitar notes that sound like icicles falling. As it grows, we can imagine the seasons turning, increasingly quickly until they start to blur.

That maturity is obvious on a first listen, but repeat runs through make it all the more impossible to miss. This may be deceptively easy music to listen to, but it's hard to avoid the emotional arc running through Prince Rupert's Drop, achieved by contrasting such delicacy with such intensity. Many of the nine songs still to come do that too and I think the transitions are my favourite part of the album.

If there's anything better here, it would have to be the way April Rain handle echo. It might seem like there's little happening in Remission, for instance, which is just a brief interlude between halves, but if we open our ears, we'll hear that everything's happening. It's so deep that we fall into it, which is a great way to start Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. The echo on the percussion in Tsuru is impeccable, and it makes me wonder which of various meanings of that Japanese word they're aiming at. It may be the noun for crane, but I'm going more for the verb meaning to lure in, tempt or entice.

Information about April Rain seems to be thin on the ground, at least in the English language. What I can find all seems to come from the same source, which may or may not be out of date. I'm presuming that Valera Bykov is still the main guy in the band and that he's playing guitar. If the line-up I found is still accurate, there's also Pasha Kuznecov on guitar, Vasya Juravlev on bass and Denis Arynovich on drums. They're all patient and precise, doing exactly as much or as little as they need to conjure up an atmosphere and let it flow. I'm impressed with all of them, separately and together.

This is a generous album, lasting only seconds shy of an hour, but there are no epics here. With just a single exception in that interlude, that means nine pieces of music of between five and eight minutes each. That seems to be a sweet spot for April Rain, because it allows them to build songs naturally and let them breathe in the process. The moments of silence hovering between notes are just as important as the notes themselves.

I haven't heard the five April Rain albums before this one, but I'm eager to check them out because of the strength of this one. It's so quintessentially what the genre is all about that maybe the definition of post-rock at Wikipedia should be a link to this album's Bandcamp page.

Accept - Too Mean to Die (2021)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Sometimes these sort of things just happen, but here's the second giant snake cover in two days and a second of three reviews in a row by bands beginning with A. But hey, it's the new Accept; like I wasn't going to leap at this one. I've been an Accept fan about as long as I've been a fan of rock and metal, as I found them at the same time, through The Friday Rock Show in 1984. The first gig I wanted to attend (and wasn't allowed to, on account of being thirteen) was that year's Monsters of Rock with a line-up that I still drool at. Accept, fresh from Balls to the Wall, were on second, after a Shout at the Devil era Mötley Crüe, and before Y&T, Gary Moore, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and headliners AC/DC.

Talking of AC/DC, it isn't Brian Johnson singing for Accept nowadays, even if it often sounds like it. It remains Mark Tornillo, formerly of TT Quick, who's fronted the band ever since their reunion in 2009, which is as long as Udo Dirkschneider did the first time around. Of course, Tornillo channels Udo but he veers so closely to Beano that there are points, especially on the title track, where it sounds like a mashup of the two bands. Not that that's a bad thing, as this album proves.

Obviously, Udo isn't here, but there were three classic era members in the 2009 reunion, Blood of the Nations featuring Wolf Hoffmann, Herman Frank and Peter Baltes. That's gradually whittled down in the years since to just Hoffmann, who continues as lead guitarist as he's done ever since 1976. This is the newest band I think he's ever had, with two debutants here and two others who joined before the prior album, The Rise of Chaos in 2017. Yes, that means six musicians: there are two rhythm guitarists behind Hoffmann, which ought to sound fantastic on stage.

They sound pretty good here too, this being a strong album. Accept albums have traditionally tended towards a formula: a standout opener, a standout title track and a standout closer, with the rest of the album determining how well it'll sit in and amongst the band's discography. Are the songs in between killer or filler? Accept have done both in their time.

Zombie Apocalypse is a decent enough opener here, even if it can't match Fast as a Shark, Balls to the Wall or Objection Overruled. Interestingly, the closer, Samson and Delilah is an instrumental, which I don't recall Accept doing before. Again, it's not a classic closer to follow Princess of the Dawn, Winter Dreams or Bound to Fail but it's still an interesting and memorable one. Where this follows tradition is with the excellent title track, which may well be the best song on this album. It's up tempo and old school and it breezes along effortlessly but effectively.

As to the songs in between, they're closer to killer than filler this time out but a few songs are Accept by numbers, combining the expected solid riff, catchy chorus and nod to classical music with a bunch of powerful backing vocals, but never quite coalescing into anything that stays with us. Fortunately there aren't too many of those and, as always, they tend to be the ones that ditch the emphasis we're expecting from Accept.

The more urgent songs here, whether they're up tempo ones like No Ones Master or Not My Problem or slower ones like The Undertaker or Samson and Delilah, sound great. I particularly enjoyed the old school vibe of The Undertaker, which churns away inexorably. There's a little modern Diamond Head in the quieter sections, those memorable Brian Tatler chords from the opening of The Coffin Train. That song comes to mind in the chorus of No Ones Master too, which is built magnificently and I'm unable to conjure up any better source of influence for anybody in the last few years.

More importantly, these songs feel like the band mean everything that they do, that they are indeed Too Mean to Die and just maybe The Best is Yet to Come, just like they were still young and starting out. Sixteen albums and three reunions in, Accept are still a force to be reckoned with.

Avdey - Gates of Horn and Ivory (2021)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something completely different, given that I couldn't resist the gorgeous cover art painted by Sponte Sequor and found the album behind it fascinating. It's progressive and it's psychedelic but in a very different way to anything I've reviewed at Apocalypse Later before.

The core of Avdey is in Tunisia, which means Mustapha Denguezly on guitars, synths, drums and other percussion and Adel Boujemaâ on bass. They play music that's easy to listen to but hard to categorise. There's world music here, but there's too much from outside the country to truly call it Tunisian. And I don't just mean western sounds, but other world sounds like the Mongolian throat singing early in Jaganmata.

The most obvious addition is new age music and this, the project's first album, seems to have many of the same goals, being spiritual and often ritualistic and/or trancelike. I'm sure people could meditate to this, though I couldn't, being too interested in what the instruments are doing. The reason I think it's so downright listenable is because it's also filtered through a soft jazz mindset into prog rock, so it's both familiar and utterly different at the same time. While it's always instrumental, it does bring in some samples and they're all in English, which helps keep it accessible to a western audience.

There's a third musician who's all over the album like a rash: Leonardo Ramos, who's a Salvadorean by birth and a Brazilian by upbringing, though it appears that he's another Irish music fan in southern Brazil, not far down the road in São Paulo from Tuatha de Danann in Varginha. He takes care of all the wind instruments here and there are plenty of those, from the expected flutes, whistles and ocarinas to more exotic fare like the xun and the xaphoon, the former an ancient Chinese instrument and the latter a recent creation known as the pocket saxophone.

In fact, while all three of these musicians are clearly identifiable at any point of the album, depending what you want to focus on, I'd suggest that Ramos is the lead. Denguezly's percussion and Boujemaâ's bass laying down textures for him to flutter around, like we'd normally expect a guitarist to do, such as on the solo album of travel-oriented mood music that I reviewed from Ed Wynne of Ozric Tentacles a couple of years ago. There are no overt guitar solos here, but there are plenty of solos on plenty of wind instruments.

Like that album, this one seems to travel, though I'm not sure of all the destinations, however much Google helped. An icaro is an indigenous South American healing song, so An Icaro clearly aims for a shamanistic healing sound. I'm assuming Yapa is South American too, most of the results I'm getting tying to Peruvian/Japanese restaurants. Jaganmata is the Hindu mother of the universe, so we're into Asia, though I'm not sure how far a Hindu mindset goes into Mongolia.

Zenith is a sort of destination, I guess, even if it's a movable one and I have no idea how we might get to it. Maybe we just "come along", which is the English translation of the Icelandic Komdu Með. This is the one piece of music featuring a fourth musician, who goes by Skuggasveinn. It's partially a vocal song and he provides the lyrics and the voice. And that leaves Hamartia, which isn't a place but a flaw, from the Greek for "to miss the mark". It's usually applied to tragic heroes like Hamlet and Oedipus. I hope we don't go there too often, but I guess at least we'd have to be heroes to do so.

One of my goals at Apocalypse Later is to find music that I haven't heard before, not merely bands or countries but styles and this one certainly fits that bill. I think I might just listen to it again before I move onto something more expected.

Therion - Leviathan (2021)

Country: Sweden
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I'm behind on what Therion have been up to, though I remember their early death metal period and I adore their heyday of Theli, Vovin and Deggial in the late nineties. I've maybe heard up to their 2007 album, Gothic Kabbalah, but only founder member Christofer Johnsson was in the band at that point from this line-up. To be fair, drummer Sami Karppinen was in the band for Deggial, though he left in 2001 and didn't return until 2017. Everyone else joined around the turn of the previous decade, from 2008 to 2011, so I haven't heard any of them until now.

What struck me immediately is that this is once the Therion I remember and something else entirely. The epic feel is still there and the mix of male and female vocals too, being split between the tenor of Thomas Vikström and soprano of Lori Lewis, along with a host of guest singers, including members or former members of Nightwish, Candlemass and Scardust. Choral layering is commonplace, courtesy in large part to Noa Gruman from Scardust leading the Hellscore Choir. Psalm of Retribution is the sort of combination of emphasis, lead vocal and choir that I expect from Therion.

What's different is that there's a folkier feel than I remember, not just through a middle eastern vibe in Aži Dahāka that I've heard from the band before, but European folk on other tracks too, especially the opener, The Leaf on the Oak of Far. And, above all, the guitars are notably down in the mix, which clearly favours drums first and vocals second. The first killer riff I caught came as late as track eight, a powerful piece called Great Marquis of Hell, which is odd. We couldn't miss them on earlier albums, if some were borrowed (cough, Enter Vril-Ya, cough).

Now, not all these songs would have that driving guitar anyway, even if the mix was adjusted. Fourth in, after a couple of more vehement songs, Tuonela and Leviathan, is Die Wellen der Zeit, which is the sort of overblown choral piece driven by a string section rather than a guitarist that Manowar would put together, albeit done much better by Therion than anything I've heard from Manowar lately. They can this sort of thing in their sleep and they're awake here.

The songs here are decent. I didn't dislike any of these eleven, though conversely few stood out in the way they used to. Now, the mix did sound better when I realised my equalizer was off but switching it back on didn't solve the problem, merely alleviated it somewhat. Some of the songs did pop better on a fresh runthrough, after I facepalmed myself. Leviathan and Eye of Algol had managed it anyway, but I added Tuonela and Great Marquis of Hell to that list and others came close.

My favourite song, though, is probably Aži Dahāka, because it always felt more powerful than many of its peers, it's dipped into middle eastern flavour and Lori Lewis absolutely shines, with some operatic vocals which soar higher than many of her fellow sopranos seem willing to go. In fact, they don't only elevate that song but the next one too, because she's much lower and aiming more for power on Eye of Algol, but nails that as well. The two songs ably combine to underline why she's a highlight in this line-up, even if there are a number of notable guest singers here and I don't know where they all are.

I'm going to go 7/10 here because I liked everything and didn't dislike anything, even though this is generally weaker than the glory days. I do wonder, though, how I'd have felt about it had I come to it from the other three albums this approximate line-up released, given that the last two weren't at all like this, Les Fleurs du Mal being a covers album of French pop songs and Beloved Antichrist a three hour rock musical. I'd like to hear those, just because I'm adventurous musically, but they weren't as well received by fans as this return to a traditional approach seems to be.

Atravan - The Grey Line (2021)

Country: Iran
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's a really interesting album that I've been listening to a lot. Atravan are a five piece outfit from Tehran who play a commercial form of prog rock. They're so good instrumentally that I was surprised a couple of minutes into the second track and first song proper, The Perfect Stranger, when the vocals of Masoud Alishahi kick in as if they were always meant to be there. I see that he was the most recent piece in the Atravan puzzle, so they may have been instrumental for a few years before he joined.

While all the musicians contribute to a fleshed out sound, initially my thoughts were of bands with a heavy focus on keyboards, especially those with a penchant for effect overlays, like Pink Floyd and the Alan Parsons Project, as well as some Vangelis. If that suggests a seventies influence, that updates to the eighties and beyond with The Perfect Stranger. There's some Marillion here in the guitars and the flow and some Queensrÿche too. What's especially interesting to me is that these influences continue to build rather than be replaced, but Atravan always sound like themselves most.

A few others crop up here and there, like the Lenny Kravitz vibe that shows up late in My Wrecked House and the surprising Leonard Cohen feel that opens the title track. Alishali is able to find a similar sort of emotional resonance and even some of his spirituality, though he visits a lot of places stylistically that Cohen never went, especially in heavier sections. This song in particular gets much heavier, even if I'd never quite call it metal, even with traditional metal elements like double bass drumming from Shahin Fadaei.

Oddly, given the general commercial sound, especially of the keyboards, but also the guitars and the vocals, the songs aren't structured in commercial fashion. These are far from three minute singles, an average song running five and a half and The Grey Line notably longer. Many sections feel like this is music for musicians, making Atravan the sort of band that the mainstream rarely hears about except when other bands rave about them. Yeah, we're happy with what we do, they'll say, and thanks for the platinum discs, but you should check out Atravan.

They'll especially be talking about songs such as Vertigo and Dancing on a Wire, which are exquisitely crafted, with their electronic openings, layered vocals and glorious builds. The more I listen to these songs, and it's becoming notably difficult to move onto another album, the more I hear post-punk in the early parts of the songs, with hints at Joy Division, Shriekback and the Cocteau Twins, before they shift into more obviously prog. Certainly the band have diverse tastes, given the artists they cover on their YouTube channel: Anathema, Rush, Avenged Sevenfold, even Johnny Cash.

Everyone in this band deserves a shoutout. They were formed in October 2010 with Shayan Dianati on searing guitar, Mohammadreza Delavari on an audible and notable bass, especially late in Dancing on a Wire and throughout The Grey Line, and Marjan Modarres on keyboards. Fadaei joined on drums in 2012 and Alishahi fleshed out the line-up in 2013. [Note: Shayan Dianati kindly let me know that Arwin Iranpour took over from Delavari in 2016 and plays the bass on this album. Thanks, Shayan!] Iran isn't a country we tend to think of as a hotspot for prog but a lot of what I've reviewed from there is progressive, whether its the doom/death metal of Eternal Candle, the funeral doom of Roaring Empyrean or the post-rock of Sparkle.

There are a lot of bands with albums either just out or about to be released that I'm looking forward to. It's great to see one like this that wasn't already on my radar shine so brightly.

Wig Wam - Never Say Die (2021)

Country: Norway
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I wasn't going to pick up the new Wig Wam album, their fifth and first since reforming in 2019 after a five year break. After all, they're a glam band with a stupid name and overt pop sensibilities still best known for a decent showing in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005. Now, it was a rock performance, a year before the genre broke the 2006 event by handing a win to Lordi, but, as catchy as that song was, it was generic glam rock with a serious side of cheese. I wasn't leaping at the chance to review another Wig Wam album.

However, Chris Franklin played a track from Never Say Die on Raised on Rock last week and it sounded decent to me, so I bit the bullet and I'm happy I did as they've heavied up and ditched at least some of the cheese. The cover art may count as an artistic statement, as they look like hair metallers, who have finally put the pink boas and gallons of hairspray behind them and dirtied up with an approach based on tattoos and leather. Think Dr. Feelgood instead of Too Fast for Love.

Now, everything here is still catchy. Ten of the eleven songs on offer are laden with impressive hooks, the eleventh excepted only because it's an instrumental, the epic sounding Northbound. More than a few songs are singalongs, with a memorable chorus in Kilimanjaro that's much longer than the verses, "I never did coke, never did grass, but that didn't stop me from being a jackass," being just part of it.

That one has a country edge and it's a lot more contemporary than I expected from Wig Wam, but it's followed by Where Does It Hurt, a song that kicks in so emphatically that it almost finds a Rammstein level of crunch. Dirty Little Secret does that too, ironically as these two songs act as bookends around the power ballad, My Kaleidoscope Ark, suggesting that the band are enjoying getting heavy for once. However, both these songs still feature a pop mentality of turning the guitars down in the verses, at least for a while. Wig Wam are a lot heavier here, but I still wouldn't call them a metal band, even if vocalist Glam describes himself as a "heavy metal loverboy" in Dirty Little Secret.

The most obvious influences to me come in his vocals. He shifts between a few different styles here, as easily as you please. On the more straightforward songs, he channels some Vince Neil, which isn't too surprising, even if I always thought of the band as more inspired by Kiss than Mötley Crüe. I think the best songs are the ones that combine David Coverdale's swagger with a Ronnie James Dio's belt, not a pair of approaches I thought would work particularly well together.

Hypnotized has a Whitesnake vibe from the earliest vocal moan, but it evolves. This one and Shadows of Eternity are half Whitesnake, half Dio, and that works for me. The other song that's recognisable as other borrowed styles is the album closer, Silver Lining, which starts out like the Beatles and adds an Enuff Z'Enuff vibe as it builds, along with a decent solo that hints at Dave Gilmour. I hadn't expected that sort of combo here, and it underlines that checking the album out was a good decision.

Wig Wam are still too slick and too pop-minded for my tastes, but they do what they do far better on Never Say Die than anything I've heard from them in the past. It feels much grittier than I thought it would and it also feels like they mean it. The band's name is still stupid but this isn't a stupid album. I, for one, welcome this new heavier Wig Wam and hope the reunion sticks.

Thou & ERR - The Helm of Sorrow (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2021
Sites:
Thou: Bandcamp | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia
Emma Ruth Rundle: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I appreciated last year's collaborative album between Baton Rouge sludge metal merchants Thou and folksy post-rocker Emma Ruth Rundle, May Our Chambers Be Full, more than a 6/10 rating suggested. I loved how the two disparate styles worked together, each rendered more interesting by the other. It was the lead male vocals of Bryan Funck that stopped me going higher, partly because they just grate on me but partly because they didn't seem to help the album at all. The haunting voice of Rundle over the darkness and weight of Thou was enough to work and the best songs did exactly that.

This EP contains four songs recorded during the sessions for that album that didn't make the final cut for whatever reason. They do much the same thing and don't sound to me like throwaway versions. I'm impressed once more by how they merge the two styles within the first four minutes of Orphan Limbs, which is neatly atmospheric until it goes batshit and screams to an abrupt finalé. At least when Funck takes over, he doesn't do so fully and his voice does play better for me when Rundle is there as a solid counter.

My favourite song here is easily the closer, Hollywood, a Cranberries cover with Rundle doing her best Dolores O'Riordan impression, full of lilting Celtic inflections, and Thou delivering a neatly ominous backdrop of beats. It's an appropriate subject for a song told this way, as the beauty of Tinseltown has always been a notable contrast to the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles and the dirty industry fuelling it. This covers both sides at once, the drums of Tyler Coburn, which shine throughout this EP, tolling a remembrance for everyone Hollywood has destroyed.

The pair of songs in between, Crone Dance and Recurrence, left me dry on a first time through but the former grew on a second. Recurrence is the closest to regular Thou, so their fans should appreciate it, even as they wonder why it's on this EP. Crone Dance is more interesting, a sort of midpoint between a more Thou song like Recurrence and a more Rundle song like Hollywood. Funck gets the lead at points but also fades to texture at others, letting Rundle take over without too much of a fight. The midsection is the heaviest the EP gets too, churning away effectively, and it ends really effectively, dropping tempo all the way to the end.

So I'll give this one a 6/10 too. It's a worthy partner to May Our Chambers Be Full, doing some of the same things in the same way and both shining and disappointing for the same reasons. If you bought the Diehard version of that album, this should have showed up as a bonus already covered. If not, but you dug that album, as so many clearly did, it making quite the dent on the end of year lists, it's safe to say that you're going to dig this too.