Album Rating: 3.0
Wild Mood Swings was actually decent material, but If I were teaching a music class, I would hold WMS as prime example of how track-list order is very important to how an album is recieved by listeners.
If you take the WMS b-sides ('Adonis', "It Used To Be Me', 'Ocean', 'Home', 'Waiting', & 'A Pink Dream'), & replace the weakest tracks in WMS (mandatory to take out "Round & Round & Round", "Mint Car", but if you don't fancy anyother tracks, take em out), you pretty much have an entirley different & better album.
The interesting thing to note is that ever since Wish (& starting with Wish, which sadly had excellent b-sides that would've helped made the dreamy double Cure album long before the attempt in 4:13) , the band has had enough b-sides to help supplement some of their album's weak tracks. The only album I think that I haven't done this to is Bloodflowers, where I only add on B-Sides.
I did this for the Self-Titled, and on a scale of 1 to 5, it jumped one or two places after stitching it with B-sides.
I also did this for 4:13 dream, which, while the original track-list is for the most part good, the album itself fails with the boring "A Perfect Boy", and the 30 sec. to a minute too long "The Only One".
"The Real Snow White" is actually pretty good, but it also goes on a chrous too long, imo (the ending to the song is a nice touch & kind of makes up for it).
"Freakshow" is an excellent ice-breaker from the first few songs on the album, but starts off too jauntily without a second of silence before the track.
I also did not like the placement of the tracks, as there is a lack of flow that previous albums managed to attain easily (minus Wild Mood Swings' obvious concept).
Overall, this is an improvement over the previous album if not simply for being different in direction, then for the hard work that obviosly went into the songs (The Hungry Ghost, Underneath The Stars, & It's Over are already new classics for me).
I would give it a 2.5 out of 5 for the default tracklisting, but a definite 4 out of 5 with the b-sides ("Down Under", "NY Trip", & "All Kinds of Stuff") included, & "A Perfect Boy" & "The Only One" taken out.
Overall, as a whole, I would average out the album sessions (or the the 1st part of this 'era', the 2nd album not being released yet) with a 3.5.
This Message Edited On 11.14.08This Message Edited On 11.14.08
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