Review Summary: The band threw their hearts into this album and deserves the praise it gets.
It's hard to believe a band that a band that had a pretty okay debut album would release an album that honestly had me speechless.
The Mother, The Mechanic, and The Path is a 3 disk experimental concept album ranging in genres, as fans of Say Anything may know Max Bemis did with this with his double album In Defense of The Genre and while that album ultimately left me disappointed The Mother, The Mechanic, and The Path exceeded my initial expectations. Each disk bringing a different style and genre and telling a branching story that's very touching. The experimentation in the instrumentation is enough to give some much needed variety to the band and have you coming back for multiple listens. The album is 2 Hours long and when I saw that knew the album was either gonna be a pain to get through or passable, but I thoroughly enjoyed everything The Early November threw at me and while the band may not be doing much of anything new their is a noticeable growth between albums.
The first disk is a loud arena ready rock album and is very enjoyable.
The second disk is a low and somber approach with pianos and softly strummed guitars with quiet singing.
While the third disk draws you into the albums story, with a man looking back on his childhood with the help of a therapist.
Their back and forth conversations' and the background music playing always left me wanting more of this, their are 9 of these "sessions' in total, and it was my favorite part of the album.
The lyrics tie the overall story together and at times are pretty touching.
"So then for 3 more years we would never talk
And I’m not gonna lie though, I couldn’t stop thinking about you
Then your best friends came over and I got them to call you
To see if you wanted to watch the band play “Dude Ranch”
I knew that that would impress you
So then we got to talking and before we knew it we were always on the phone
Talking until 4 in the morning
Yeah, there was only one problem
Now, I never knew your man, never talked to him
And still to this day I feel bad for it, but I knew that I loved you
And I knew that I had to do something"
The Mother, The Mechanic, and The Path is a great album that manages to be consistently enjoyable despite it's rather long length, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something different in the genre.
