I’ve been giv­ing Down and Superjoint Ritual a chance, and it’s weird to be lis­ten­ing to Phil Anselmo’s vocals against a sound that’s not quite Pantera. In the song Beautifully Depressed, he actu­al­ly sings with vibra­to. It’s a res­onat­ing vibra­to, but very grad­ual and deep, sort of like Mandy Patinkin with a shot of val­i­um and an injec­tion of testos­terone. The fact that he does a decent job of it com­plete­ly throws me off. The fact that quite a few SJR songs have punk­ish roots caus­es fur­ther con­fu­sion, just like Ministry’s punk­ish con­tri­bu­tion to the Rock Against Bush album. It’s like lis­ten­ing to the lat­est No Motiv album and then real­iz­ing that the bassist is now the drum­mer. On top of that, he’s Asian and bet­ter than the old drum­mer.

Speaking of which, going through No Motiv’s ear­li­er albums has been a fair­ly enjoy­able task. They’re com­prised of songs which aren’t as com­plex as Daylight Breaking, but they’re catchy nonethe­less. Unfortunately, It has­n’t been the same with Thrice, espe­cial­ly with their first album Identity Crisis. I can tell that they had some great tech­ni­cal ideas, but when actu­al­ly putting pen to paper and record­ing it in the stu­dio, the sound is rough, almost exper­i­men­tal.

It’s hard going back­wards for bands. I’m glad I dis­cov­ered Dreamtheater as soon as Scenes From A Memory came out. I don’t like much of what they did before that (aside from Space Dye Vest, which is one of my favourite songs of theirs), so it’s scary to think of what more I would­n’t like if I dis­cov­ered them even lat­er. I thought that Scenes From A Memory was going to be their best work, but some­how they man­aged to improve in every sin­gle pro­gres­sive (no pun intend­ed) album. Thrice does­n’t fare so well, of course, as I’ve been spoiled by their lat­est, excel­lent­ly pro­duced album, The Artist In The Ambulance. It’s makes their ear­li­er stuff sound untest­ed and lazy.