Hell

I don't know, I was thinking about those guys who decide to go eat at all-you-can-eat cino-thai-viet-nippo-italo-brasilia ni with a buffet and/or conveyor belt, spending a beautiful €8.90 to stuff themselves to the point of vomiting, only to leave a disgruntled 1-star review on TripAdvisor saying "so much quantity and very little quality, non-existent service, noisy place, zero intimacy for couples, watered-down soy sauce, staff that doesn't know Italian, smell of fried food on my clothes!!" So what?

What have you dug up for me...

You did well to reevaluate DEK. I learned a few years ago (specifically since the release of Night Is The New Day... whoever needs to understand...) never to judge Katatonia's music too quickly. Never. Because even though they insist on writing songs that are always around four minutes long, without too many frills, and never straying too far from the verse-chorus structure, what they have created since The Great Cold Distance is, in my opinion, anything but immediate. You listen to an album for the first time and you can barely remember two songs. You listen to it twice and you think, “It’s nice, but what a drag.” By the third, fourth, fifth time... Just when you're about to give up, you realize they have seeped under your skin, slowly, with all the calm in the world, but in an irreversible way. And you can no longer shake off that invincible, poetic decay.
As for the EP, it's an interesting release especially for collectors, but Katatonia fans were already familiar with these not-so-hidden gems; moreover, some wonderfully brilliant tracks are missing in my opinion. I don't see the future of the band very clearly, too many lineup changes (first the Norman brothers, then Frank Default - a very important contribution in recent years - and now the drummer Daniel, who I thought was perfect), too many unusual side releases for the band - the DEK remake could have easily been released as a bonus disc for some special edition of the original album; Viva Emptiness sounds great with the new mix, some successful changes and others a bit less so, but it wasn't really necessary; and now this EP... I don't know, they give me the impression of not knowing exactly where to go. After all, the title of the last album seemed to herald a creative stagnation. Let's hope they soon return to writing music with the same inspiration as always.

Great job, but I had no doubts about it. As for the atmospheres, I prefer this one to the previous one, but in terms of songwriting, at times it feels a bit uneven: Dusk, Ariel, and particularly You're Not Alone don't excite me much, while the three Lost Songs and the last two tracks are amazing, among the best works of Anathema (and the list is long... very long!!). Unfortunately, the lyrics are still in line with those of their "new" phase that started with We're Here, meaning they're terrible. I would really like them to return to the cryptic and frenzied poetry of A Fine Day To Exit, an overlooked masterpiece and my favorite from the band. It's not a full 4, but they're Anathema, and for them, I can overlook three or four eyes.

The solo Kozelek has reached incredible heights with Ghosts, April (my favorite), and even the most underrated Admiral Fell Promises, which I find extremely captivating and poetic. In the last two albums, he has visibly declined; I’ve only listened to Among The Leaves in its entirety once, and I haven't been able to revisit it except in bits and pieces (and with difficulty). It seemed too sprawling, verbose, recycled, rushed, etc. This latest one feels better arranged and a bit more thought-out, but it still bores me to death, and above all, I can no longer tolerate his croaking ("Richard Ramirez" is one of the most irritating things I've listened to this year). Oh well, peace, I will continue listening to Lost Verses until I'm sick of it.

They don't disappoint at all.

In fact, if I were to compare the levels of interaction now with those from three/four/five years ago, in my opinion, there's no contest. Just take a peek at the comments section under the reviews; if you find a handful, that's already something, otherwise it's tumbleweed territory; back then, for one reason or another, it was always quite a lively chatter, people communicated more, and even the occasional oddballs/fakes were more entertaining. With this, I don't mean to point fingers at anyone, far from it; I myself, for instance, only chime in every few weeks/months, when before I was here every day. I simply note that, over the years, the old users have almost completely vanished, some recent ones feel a bit anonymous (no offense, but as nes says, it might also be due to the reviewed music, or perhaps we've just all gotten a bit lazy, or maybe after 35,000 reviews there's less and less stuff to write or rewrite about), and the new features of the site, which I really like graphically, have made everything more scattered - there's no longer just "the comment," now there's the comment on the review, the comment on the album, the comment on the artist, the comment on the artist's comment... etc. etc. Anyway, nothing serious, it's normal for things to change over time, and DeB had its boom last decade.

It's great. But inevitably a few steps below Ashes and Marrow, my favorites.

Big movie of the super-madonna.

I saw some of his recent photos (he's still around and apparently still doing live shows) and basically he's my grandmother in a wheelbarrow operating a deadly drone. It doesn't get better than this...