pascal.germroth.name

After having read a rather evil article about their newest album, which essentially praised it for being their first that’s not utterly boring, I listened to some excerpts on last.fm and immediately bought it, less than 30 minutes after reading about the band for the first time. (To my defence: I discovered two Portishead-remixes on my disk later that day, I simply forgot about them somehow as Rhythmbox forgets about my ratings after some of its frequent crashes)

To my astonishment, I received the CD (yes, these physical objects. Not trusting my non-existing backups I don’t purchase virtual goods) from Amazon on the very next day, proofing yet again that paying more for Prime or 24h delivery is a useless waste of money.

Read thorough reviews elsewhere, I’m not good at this, anyway, and as it’s their only album I know, there’s nothing to say for me about any development etc.

I like

the deep sound, speaking of both ambience and audio spectrum; the singers voice seems quite airy and feeble, which is a nice contrast to the more direct music (exactly the reason why I love Metric, I’ll write about that later, maybe)

I think it’s odd

though, that some of the tracks end in such an abrupt way that I suspected the ripped (FLAC, of course) files to be faulty. They weren’t. Also some tracks begin or end with way too long passages of pure sine waves at unbearable frequencies, bad for the beheadphoned ears.

Conclusion:

Very nice; worth the money (although the CD has no added value at all except for being a backup medium for the rips, the booklet’s empty except for a photo of a radio station and credits); best suited for night-time background listening while working (as it’s a bit too minimal if you do nothing but listen…)

I used to think letting the browser rescale embedded images should be a punishable offence, but it turns out there is just no other way if I want the content to have a width relative to the text. Thus a 1024px wide image, scaled to (on my screen) 650px (see I planned for higher resolution!). Hit me :D