Birds of Pray Options

[deepenoughtodive]

I haven't listened to this album in a long time. I am surprised that i'm enjoying a lot of it. Somewhere in my mind I had this notion that LIVE had just quit rocking the last few albums but that's not true. Now SFBM was way too poppish for my taste but BOP was pretty good. I'm ok with Heaven as a single but Run Away was a horrible choice. That has to be one of my least favorite LIVE songs of all time. I think She or Like I Do would have been much better.

Of the 13 tracks on the album, only 3,4,5, and 12 should have been left off in my opinion.

What do y'all think of this album?

[Pokey]

I didn't mind a large portion of BOP. Certainly Like I Do and Lighthouse are the stand out tracks, head and shoulders above everything else. I have a soft spot for Out To Dry and Every time I see your face ... mostly because at the time I believed, or hoped that this was Live experimenting with a little light hearted pop rock. The fact that it was more so a clear direction of where they/Ed were going to take the whole band and do it even worse wasn't what I was hoping for.
Ed sings his guts out on a lot of BOP, he sounds like he gave it his all for the recordings. His lyrics as Fish stated left a lot to be desired, but once again they went to a whole new level of low on SFBM. So BOP will never be my least favorite album. Sanctity of Dreams is a bit wtf and cheesey, but it was still a song about something different before he got stuck in a space of only being able to write about 2 topics (love and God). BOP at least had songs covering a few different themes on it. Poorly, yes, but still some variety.
BOP also has the 2 previously mentioned stand out tracks, SFBM to me doesn't even have 1 stand out track, it's all garbage. So yeah, BOP isn't my least favorite.

To me it almost felt like they did want to go back to a mid 90s sound but they couldn't quite remember how to do it. It's nowhere close to TC sound, but i guess I was hoping it was a small building block back in the right direction.