The Flood and The Mercy - reviews Options

[Soxwsc]

Wut? ocd much? LOL. Um how does something like that bother you? Wierd. I mean, it's a song. lol it's not a sound effect it's keyboards.

Haha Ok, I was exaggerating a little bit. When you focus on something that annoys you that much, it tends to ruin the song for you. Now that I heard Ed elaborating on how it got included on the track, I feel a little better about it.

He talks about it at the 3:00 mark of the Face Culture interview part 3 (thanks Dangum!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYtlxIY6VcE

This post has been edited by Soxwsc: Oct 27 2013, 2:19 pm

[Live4Life]

Haha Ok, I was exaggerating a little bit. When you focus on something that annoys you that much, it tends to ruin the song for you. Now that I heard Ed elaborating on how it got included on the track, I feel a little better about it.

He talks about it at the 3:00 mark of the Face Culture interview part 3 (thanks Dangum!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYtlxIY6VcE

haha okay thanks. i was just being a smartass. Good good.

[jonesy]

Hmmm...two good songs,but nothing spectacular. The rest by Ed's once extraordinary heights are terrible and filler. I think his last album is better than this one,and that wasn't great.

Seven- How his voice should be,and shows some resemblance to once greatness

The Watchmans lament- A decent rock song.

Can you imagine this guy creating Secret Samadhi...it's hard to believe now.
See you for the Live album review if it ever happens?

G'day Dan

[TheBeacon]

Best music from Ed since BOP!!!!!

There are still some weak points but overall a huge improvement over Alive. Ed is actually mad again on a few tracks! i missed that! I think if he would have skipped the EP and added those tracks to TFATM minus Cornerstone this album would have been amazing. Still great though!

Favorites
1. All That I Wanted
2. Parasite
3. Watchmans Lament
4. The One
5. Seven

Head Scratchers
1. Cornerstone.....possibly the worst song Ed has ever recorded!
2. Supernatural Fire.....seems like filler

Should have added
1. Rise
2. Solar Flare
3. The Garden.

With those three songs and minus the two fillers I think this would have been an awesome album from start to finish!

[dangum]

Alternative Nation’s Album Review of Ed Kowalczyk’s “The Flood and The Mercy”
Published On November 3, 2013 | By Andy Frisk | 90's Rock, Featured

“I’m going to stand right here/Scream like a baby/Call me crazy” sings Ex-Live lead singer Ed Kowalczyk in “Seven,” one of the standout tracks off his second solo album The Flood and The Mercy. Depending on how you feel about Kowalczyk, his music, and his former band Live, the lines either speak volumes on Kowalczyk’s personality or are unabashedly heartfelt and totally devoid of satire or irony (like much of Live’s music was in the 1990s in stark contrast to the spirit of the time-I mean even U2 were knee deep in sarcasm and irony at the time). Like U2′s lead singer Bono though, Kowalczyk often plays the role of polarizer. Most people either love or hate him-or love to hate him. Regardless of how you feel about him though, Kowalczyk has one of the best rock singing voices of his era, and can (even still) write one heck of an arena rock song. He proves this once again in nearly every song on The Flood and The Mercy.

Kowalczyk’s solo songs don’t rock as hard as some of Live’s did though. The opening riff to “Lakini’s Juice” (from Secret Samahdi-one of Live’s best albums) still stands as one of the best (or at least memorable) hard rock/grunge riffs of the 1990s, but one listen through The Flood and The Mercy demonstrates how much of Live’s transcendent sound and uplifting feel came from Kowalczyk and managed to balance out Chad Taylor’s riffs. The dynamic between Taylor (Live’s lead guitarist-and resident hard rocker) and Kowalczyk is what made that band so great. That balance is gone here though, sadly. Instead it’s all arena rock in the the spiritual vein of pre-Actung Baby U2. No where is this more evident on the aforementioned “Seven.” Kowalczyk’s spiritualistic rapture (sans hard rock licks) is felt in full force on “Supernatural Fire,” another of the album’s standout tracks. This track rocks a little harder than the rest though, almost like a later day R.E.M. song did (perhaps that’s more guest artist Peter Buck’s fault than Kowalczyk’s though). When Kowalczyk lets his guest guitarists cut loose a little, like on “The Watchmen’s Lament,” the songs on The Flood and The Mercy really soar. When the songs are composed of rather stock riffs and Kowalczyk’s, at times heavy handed, lyrics they have the tendency to slog instead of soar.

The album’s opening track, “The One,” suffers from this slogginess. Rather uninspired guitar work barely buoys Kowalczyk’s almost palpable enthusiasm and earnestness. The song sounds like it would have been more at home on Live’s rather uninspiring album V. It’s a shame that “The One” is the track to open the album. It might turn the casual listener off and cause them to miss out on deeper tracks like “Take Me Back” with it’s excellent guitar work and vocals. It’s perhaps the most complete track on all of The Flood and The Mercy. The U2-ish shambling of “Bottle of Anything” is another deeper track that should not be overlooked. Like “Take Me Back” it manages to capture everything that is great about Kowalczyk’s songwriting abilities without repeating itself or drowning the listener in blandness.

Like many of the best leaders of the 1990s best rock groups (i.e. Bono, Billy Corgan, etc) Kowalczyk remains a polarizing figure. Also like many of the best leaders of the 1990s best rock groups though, Kowalczyk remains one of his generations best front men/song writers. The Flood and The Mercy is filled with moments that remind us of this fact.

http://www.alternativenation.net/?p=37835

[dangum]

Ed Kowalczyk: The Flood and the Mercy
By Kevin Catchpole 29 October 2013

Ed Kowalczyk is still on board the train. He still makes music with this mantra in mind: “Take the personal struggle and amplify it to epic levels, take spiritual confusion/redemption/acceptance and sing it to the rafters, accompanied by equally grandiose productions.” The overall style doesn’t sound stale. It actually sounds more authentic at this point. On the final Live album with Kowalczyk as lead singer, Songs from Black Mountain, the schism between what the band wanted to do and what was on Kowalczyk’s mind was growing wider. It started to show on the earlier disc Birds of Pray, but even as it showed there, they managed to recover from any stumbles they may have had post Throwing Copper.

As a solo artist, Kowalczyk’s wide-eyed spiritual explorations sound less constrained by the band he once led. This freedom is a blessing and a curse. Just as many believed Blur lost their way in the early 2000s after Graham Coxon left and there was no filter for Damon Albarn’s ideas, a similar problem surfaces on The Flood and the Mercy. Ed Kowalczyk is talented, but within the confines of Live there was more of a filter, more of a sounding board for what was a good idea and what was not. On his own, that filter is gone, and the absence of that is palpable on many a song on this disc.

A strong point of this disc is apparent from opener “The One”. While later Live albums tried too hard to get experimental while simultaneously trying to keep pieces of their classic grunge sound intact (and sometimes sounding downright awful because of it) this fusion approach is abandoned in favor of a classic grunge-pop sound. Lyrically “The One” is a different animal than this past track, while musically it recalls “The Dolphin’s Cry”. Live’s commercial fortunes had begun to falter at the time that single came out, but even so people still (more or less) cared about them enough to sustain their career. This fact is certainly not lost on Kowalczyk.

On his solo debut Alive he trafficked in the closest thing to dance pop-grunge he’s ever done with “The Great Beyond”. It was passable, but it sounded strained, perhaps a bit forced. This time around he opts for more straight up early-grunge thumpers when it comes to fast songs. “Parasite” may not be a very uplifting song mood-wise, but it’s a far better choice music-wise. At times the sonics even recall scratches of early ‘90s R.E.M. Given that Peter Buck contributes guitar on this album, it’s no surprise, and these slight touches are faint enough to almost miss them, but they are there.

There are times when his culling from the best of his past leaves him sounding like a man who is starting to run out of ideas. “Holy Water Tears” comes off like a stripped-down, slower copy of Live song “Out to Dry”. Thankfully, this gives way to the energetic and less overtly self-referential “Supernatural Fire”. As much as this track is crackling with energy, what follows, “Bottle of Anything” is floating, awash in repetitive drum machine fills and is one of the rare moments where Kowalczyk strays from the classic grunge template he has used so well all these years. The difference here is this time it sounds natural. It isn’t the forced-sounding sprint of “The Great Beyond” but a reflective tune sprinkled with varying touches of electronica, echoed guitars wrapped in for an ethereal sound – the kind of sound he knows how to do well. It was a sound heard more often on Live’s debut, and not much at all on their work post The Distance to Here. The proceedings are wrapped up neatly with “Cornerstone”, a solid four-minute tune which uses an ages-old “hidden” song trick after a few minutes of silence. The hidden track itself is one of the few moments on this disc that feel most like debut album-vintage Live.

With The Flood and the Mercy, Kowalczyk has also mostly traded one flavor of spiritual musings for another. Unfortunately, his choice makes him less unique than before. It isn’t that his choice here is a bad one, or something to be criticized. It is more disappointing because he began in the world of music by choosing to expose listeners to something off the beaten path, something not that much explored. It is fair to say that most who listened to Live’s debut album Mental Jewelry, and those who later researched its inspiration, had never heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti before. The writings of Krishnamurti, which were cited as inspiration for the lyrics on that album, are part of what makes for a much more interesting body of work. This isn’t just because that work was off the beaten path of what the average music listener knows, it is also because Live knew how to take the themes and wrap them into strong, well-crafted grunge tunes.

Kowalczyk’s change of heart may have come from his feeling like he had written everything he could think of on that which was once his muse, and it was time for a change. Change is good, but this particular change has cost him some of the distinctive flavor that once colored his music. What this means for The Flood and the Mercy is that it is a solid effort, but not as intriguing an effort as those that came before.

Rating: 6/10

http://www.popmatters.com/review/175954-ed...-and-the-mercy/

[jecclr2003]

Best music from Ed since BOP!!!!!

There are still some weak points but overall a huge improvement over Alive. Ed is actually mad again on a few tracks! i missed that! I think if he would have skipped the EP and added those tracks to TFATM minus Cornerstone this album would have been amazing. Still great though!

Favorites
1. All That I Wanted
2. Parasite
3. Watchmans Lament
4. The One
5. Seven

Head Scratchers
1. Cornerstone.....possibly the worst song Ed has ever recorded!
2. Supernatural Fire.....seems like filler

Should have added
1. Rise
2. Solar Flare
3. The Garden.

With those three songs and minus the two fillers I think this would have been an awesome album from start to finish!

Not to bust your chops.. you do know that Cornerstone is a Bob Marley cover.. right?

[Hoodstock]

Not to bust your chops.. you do know that Cornerstone is a Bob Marley cover.. right?

Not to bust your chops ... you do realize the song is poorly written and Ed's cover of it is horrible and way worse than the original ... right?

Telling everyone that it's a cover when they voice that they dislike it doesn't make the song work on the album ... and it definitely doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.

[Bremang]

I like Ed's cover of cornerstone...and the original is a classic.

[jonesy]

Hmmm...two good songs,but nothing spectacular. The rest by Ed's once extraordinary heights are terrible and filler. I think his last album is better than this one,and that wasn't great.

Seven- How his voice should be,and shows some resemblance to once greatness

The Watchmans lament- A decent rock song.

Can you imagine this guy creating Secret Samadhi...it's hard to believe now.
See you for the Live album review if it ever happens?

G'day Dan

Ok,so I missed one...

Take me back

This song is awesome.....that chorus erupts out of nowehere as heavy as anything he's done before, trademark classic ed.
The watchmens Lament is also even better than I previously thought. It should be the next single,it would get airplay here

Of the softer songs Seven and All that I wanted are far and away above the rest. Unfortunately there are too many of those annoying boring church group songs on there. Parasite is genuinely terrible, the verses anyway,it's forced angry and is cringeworthy.

Anyway,we got two classic Ed rock songs of yesteryear, and a couple of good softer songs,better than nothing. Just wish he would lose the church songs that go absolutely nowhere.

[jecclr2003]

Not to bust your chops ... you do realize the song is poorly written and Ed's cover of it is horrible and way worse than the original ... right?

Telling everyone that it's a cover when they voice that they dislike it doesn't make the song work on the album ... and it definitely doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.

Got it... you hate a classic song.
And it wasn't telling "everyone", it was informing him of something he may not have known.

No reason to be an asshole about things.

[TheBeacon]

I've taken The Garden EP and TFATM album and made my own new Ed album. This flows much better to me and is listenable from start to finish now.

1. The Watchman's Lament
2. The One
3. Parasite
4. Rise
5. The Garden
6. Take Me Back
7. Seven
8. All That I Wanted
9. Bottle Of Anything
10. Holy Water Tears
11. Angels On A Razor
12. Solar Flare
13. I'm The Proof

side note: The Watchmans Lament def should have been the single on this album!

This post has been edited by TheBeacon: Nov 7 2013, 4:25 pm