post reviews for SFBM here Options

[Wambangalang]

If anyone finds a review for the album post it, this way we can get an idea of how the album is recieved if anyone cares about that. I found two, one alright, one bad.

http://www.xpressmag.com.au/archives/cd_reviews/

http://www.theage.com.au/news/cd-reviews/s...4521394712.html

enjoy!

[wynken_de]

I just found this review form a Finnish website dna.fi and translated it for you to read. It's not a very praising one, but nothing new there then... The album got 2½ stars.

“The American rock band Live was founded 15 years ago. The band’s debut album Mental Jewelry got plenty appreciation and its follower Throwing Copper reached number one on Billbroad 52 weeks after it was published. The record sold 12 million copies, mainly thanks to the single Selling the Drama. The new album was produced by Jim Wirt, whose production has been also heard on Incubus’ and Hoobastank’s records.

The rugged promo photos and the poetically beautiful sleeve picture create an image of pompous and deep-minded release. The illusion breaks already during the naïve grumbling of the first song The River, which was also released as a single. The singer Ed Kowalczyk loads such “Oh Baby’s” that an innocent listener gets unavoidably dizzy. The contrast between the front cover and the music pushes the listener between the tree and the bark to wonder the fragility of life.

After The River the songs’ ideas remain almost all the time in the pathos of mystical and greater-than-life-love, and in the end it transforms into a bunch of nonsense sentences. Coming from adults, this kind of words are embarrassingly cliché, but I suppose someone actually needs this, especially when the conservative music behind the lyrics is calculated to least annoy the great masses. It is sad to realize that the band, who in its better days released the bold single Lakini’s Juice, has fallen into this grey area, from where it’s very hard to climb back to the group of the very few bands who have personality.

At his best, Ed Kowalczyk is a sympathetic vocalist, whose tender voice also has weirdly fascinating vibration to it. Unfortunately Ed cannot save the unity alone and especially not with this kind of material. To be frank, Songs from the Black Mountain is a numbing cluster of professionally made crap. And that’s about where it ends. Live has lowered itself to the level of basic bands, where one doesn’t find the Throwing Copper type masterpieces. It’s a bloody shame this has happened. Right now, I must start listening to Selling the Drama, I Alone and other classics to wipe out this disappointment from my mind.”

[NectarDan]

To be frank, Songs from the Black Mountain is a numbing cluster of professionally made crap.

I would indeed say he is being frank with that kind of comment.