Alaska
alaska Customer Review: Ignore the naysayers
I’m glad that I didn’t read too many reviews here before buying BTBAM’s album alaska. This is my first BTBAM album and I bought it on good faith from some positive word-of-mouth that they were a great band and that Selkies was a beautiful song.
Even though I’m a fan of Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Opeth, The Mars Volta, etc. etc. I was not prepared for the intensity and speed of the heavier parts, the all out insanity of tracks like alaska and Autodidact, the growling vocals that sometimes don’t enunciate the printed words at all, or the superb lyrics that mix humor and emotion and some great imagery. This is an album that rewards with multiple listens–in the car, on the computer, on headphones while looking at the lyric book. You’ll hear something new every time, and each song will start making sense and exposing it’s brilliance as your brain begins to put the pieces together.
Anyone that buys a CD because a record company placed a sticker on it referencing other bands, and then complains when it doesn’t sound like those bands deserves a boxing of the ears. You folks are suckers. BTBAM utilizes a wide variety of styles and sounds and they do it very, very well and very tastefully. The vocal high point “It’s raining” in Backwards Marathon is an amazing moment in the song, and actually is not falsetto–Tommy is singing (belting?) with quite a full sound there–and has a very reminiscent sound of the singer from The Mars Volta at that moment. The only laughter it should elicit should be like the nervous laughter of adolescents and children who aren’t sure how to react when they’ve been caught being bad by Daddy during his weekend bender.
Amazing album.
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Happenstance helicopter saves kayaker from tide
Anchorage Daily News - A teenage kayaker, thrown from his boat into Turnagain Arm currents so strong they sucked the clothes off his body, caught a lucky break Sunday afternoon when a alaska State Trooper helicopter happened by. Sean Hickey, 19, had been kayaking with a
ZEN and the art of lawyering
San Francisco Gate - After doing legal aid work in alaska and Alameda County, she represented the United Farm Workers, then co-founded a labor law firm in Berkeley. But six-day workweeks and a divorce took their toll. In the 1980s, she contracted the Epstein-Barr virus
