RockRoast

Well, my hopes for a great new album from Into Eternity were veritably murdered by an April 2nd post on their official website.

The band have announced that the title of their upcoming release is The Incurable Tragedy. Earlier, I had expressed interest in their next album because guitarist Tim Roth had described it as a concept album. But it seems the concept will revolve around the cancer-related deaths of several of Roth’s friends and family members.

Poor guy. But cancer isn’t exactly the best subject matter for a concept album. I was hoping for something along the lines of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime. I wanted something with one of those awesome fictional plots. But it appears that Roth’s lyrics will be intensely personal and overwhelmingly depressing. Kind of like his lyrics on the band’s last album, unfortunately.

I suppose only the release of the album will be able to confirm whether I’m right about the concept, but I’m not as optimistic as I was before this news.

Couple that with the release of a demo track from The Incurable Tragedy recently released on the band’s Myspace page and I’m hardly optimistic at all. The song, “Diagnosis Terminal,” sounds like it would have belonged very well on Into Eternity’s previous release, The Scattering of Ashes, in that it is bursting with unused potential.

“Diagnosis Terminal” contains some of the band’s trademark sounds: quick, ill-transitioned time signature changes, mediocre vocals ranging from throaty screams to low growls to clean falsetto, melodies that alternate between flatness and beauty, moments of instrumental brilliance buried between loud solos and hyperactive riffs, and the usual raping of the double-bass pedal. It’s discouraging to hear so many things in one song that are so similar to the mess that was The Scattering of Ashes. I’d hoped to hear some kind of progression, a different direction, or a bit more variety. But “Diagnosis Terminal” is only one song. Hopefully the rest of The Incurable Tragedy will be better.

We can only hope.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is one of the best-selling albums of all time. And that, frankly, baffles me.

It’s nothing against the album. I think it’s fantastic. It has its ups and downs, I guess, but Brain Damage/Eclipse is one of my favorite album-enders of all time. Dark Side of the Moon is a masterpiece in my book. I just don’t understand why its follow-up, Wish You Were Here, wasn’t more successful. I mean, looking back over their history and their music, I can’t understand why it was Dark Side of the Moon, and not Wish You Were Here that sold upwards of 30 million copies worldwide and stayed on the Billboard 200 for almost fifteen years.

Okay, it actually makes a lot of sense.

One reason that immediately comes to mind is that the songs on Dark Side are more digestable. “Us and Them” is the album’s longest, weighing in at just shy of eight minutes. Wish You Were Here sandwiches its songs of digestable length between twelve and thirteen minute halves of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” I guess I can understand why that might have scared off a lot of potential buyers. But if you ask me, they don’t know what they’re missing. “Shine On” may be extremely long, but it gets better with every listen, and the melody and vocal harmonies are well-written and memorable.

Even so, I consider Wish You Were Here to be Floyd’s true masterpiece. The whole album is drenched in this atmosphere of detachment and a kind of noble misery. The lyrics and melodies found in the title track represent the band at its best, and there are similar moments of brilliance in “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar,” the former displaying some pretty cool synth work over the slow beat and soft guitar. While it may be a bit on the depressing side, I contend that Wish You Were Here offers more musically and emotionally than Dark Side could ever dream of.

So if you haven’t heard Wish You Were Here, I suggest giving it a try. If only twenty million more people agreed with me, then maybe it would have its rightful place as the top-selling Pink Floyd album.