posted August 31, 2004 14:54                  

Remember when everyone though I was fluid in French

posted August 31, 2004 17:11                  

Still, if anyone speaks German and English, I would still love a translation. Some of the phrasing makes it difficult to tell if it's a good or not so good review.

posted September 01, 2004 11:45                  

The Name “Death & Taxes” has become dreadful truth for the band. The bass player and composer Thomas Patrick Shannon died after a long suffering from cancer on 12.11.2002. Tom, already marked by the terrible affliction, wrote most of the songs and ideas from the album, which has been published recently. After Tom’s death, Vince Martinez (g, voc, b), Dean McCall (dr, perc) and guests recorded the songs. Some of the bass lines were performed by Tom himself, as, for example, the bass solos in track 2 and 11.
“The Alaska 12 Experiment” is an immensely dense, impressive and very emotional album. It is partly ice cold in the tonal structure, high sensitive in extreme solos, powerful and hard in breaks and melody changing. The drums are playing the rhythm after a quit part, while the guitar is screaming with a sharp sound (Misunderstanding A Little Less Completely). That reminds of inevitable moments in horror movies, where horrible monsters float up over white fog. Then you have tracks with a song character (Revolver, Famous Strangeness), Blues Prog (Death:Theory) and hard Prog Metal (The Suffer Ring, It Is Now Becoming Fantastic). The tracks are extremely multilayered, complex and emotional, and despite of all self confidence there is also fear and fright.
Surely it wasn’t easy, to record the songs of their dead buddy, whose biggest wish was to make this music. The world has lost another brilliant musician and no one seems to notice.
The 6 minutes track “Terrifying Anticipations Of The Unspeakable” is the goose bumps hammer [track, which makes your body hairs stand] and the horrible climax of the album: Setting death to music. First you only here a church bell, in which the band comes in with a jazz-prog-motive, hard and merciless, very gruesome. The deep, distorted voice sounds like as if it comes directly out of hell and the bell doesn't stop ringing. Over the length of 6 minutes the track with his drama has the effect of being over-excited strange, like mad. And then the music fades away becoming quieter, slower like when a heart stops beating, same the bell, but when the music is gone, it becomes faster again and the sound is swaying some seconds. The most thrilling moment of horror! After that comes just a half-minute long bass solo by Tom Shannon, an almost happy and melancholy motive, which ends with a wrong tone. A long time after the music has faded away, the music is still in the room, in your ears and the silence is like death.
DEATH & TAXES have produced with “The Alaska 12 Expeditions” an extensive, serious, but warm-hearted album full of the joys of life, but which also has dark sounds, telling from death and giving death a tonal figure. It’s difficult for me, to call it excellent. But it is. There hadn’t been such a progressive Prog Metal album for a long time. This very touching, musically magnificent album will remain a highlight. The stroke of fate has become a great inspiration here. And if all goes well, the other boys will pay for that a lot of taxes. Nothing is so sure as death and taxes, DEATH & TAXES.

posted September 08, 2004 20:27                  

yawn

posted September 21, 2004 00:02                  

yawn