Promo 2012

Cirrhus is a great album, but if you had shown me this tape before it was released and said that these songs were going to be featured on it, I don't think I would have been remotely interested. I actually own this tape but I don't think I've ever actually heard it properly until just now - probably for the best. Three out of four of these tracks are from that album, but they simply aren't done justice here by the recording quality. The composition is virtually unchanged from how they would eventually appear on the album, which is good. The riffs and songwriting on the debut full-length's songs are probably some of the tightest the band has ever used - the way the songs progress melodically is beautiful, and there's a great interplay between consonance and dissonance, a good use of key and tempo changes, etc. If you haven't heard that album, go check it out.

So I can hear exactly how these songs are going based on my familiarity with that full-length, but the material clearly just wasn't recorded here in a way that would make for good listening. The production is raw and razor-thin, all shoved up into the middle of the mix, and the drums completely overpower everything with the overly loud cymbals and toms. You can tell what's going on if you're already familiar with the songs, but it's taxing and not very fun to listen to. Case in point: the final track "In Paranoid Triumph", an earlier Cirrhus track, is one I'm not quite as familiar with, and the production renders it nearly unlistenable so it's hard to even say what's going on. It's the kind of thing only the musicians themselves listen to because they're obsessed with hearing their own material and are convinced that anything they make is worth releasing (and I get that myself), but it's just not the kind of thing for which you spend money on creating a public tape release, y'know?

That's really all there is to it: great songs marred by production that's raw in a way that doesn't add atmosphere or passion, but rather obscures artistic intent. Along with the live album, this should've stayed as one of those private CW releases. This is not the kind of thing that anybody in the general public cares to hear.