Customer Reviews

Land Dispute

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The sound of the new TSN album is, as others have noted, less driven by mellow synthesizers and distantly "pretty" lyrics. This is not a bad thing. What it does for me is allow TSN to grow as a group, showing new sides of themselves and always surprising the audience. This is an intimate and angry album that is less restrained than The White Beyond, capturing the desperate emotional code of vintage postpunk while not ever ripping off its sound.

It wouldn't work if it were an obvious move toward pop or dancerock, but instead the ringing guitar tones and Alex Reed's lyrics, which seem to grow more intelligent, precise, and utterly deranged with every record, all reframe your view of where the band has been heading all along, charting retroactively a shocking path through their history up to Land Dispute.

The album is slightly frontloaded, with the first four songs being some of the best, but the whole thing is strong enough that later gems of A Dream -- classic ThouShaltNot -- and Let Your Silence Sing just make it gleam and smoulder all the more. I suspect a lot of TSN's older fans who crave a rehashing of "Without Faith" might be taken aback, but the brazenness with which the album opens suggests that maybe the band is offering a challenge to those audiences to follow them down this strange path. For me, at least, it was a very rewarding one.

Five stars; their most difficult, but best album.

With *Land Dispute*, TSN went beyond their goth genre trappings to cultivate more fully what was always there: intelligent, layered, emotionally resonant lyrics and strong songwriting. It's not clear modern rock deserves something so rich and intelligent, to say nothing of the few techno/industrial fans who actually might give it a listen. But for the discerning, curious listener, it is endlessly rewarding. I fear TSN's future efforts will find them slipping back into genre trappings for fear of losing their already-small audience, so let this review be at least one vote for progress.

Three years of anticipation and a release date that was bumped back several times may have led me to develop unrealistically high expectations for TSN's new album, but several listenings have not convinced me that Land Dispute measures up to its predecessors. I was attracted to ThouShaltNot in the first place by the synthetic sonority and intricately layered production of their previous albums; Land Dispute strips much of that away in favor of a rawer, guitar-driven sound--less dance club, more college radio. At least Alex Reed has lost none of his lyrical skill, delivering biting, multivalent imagery in songs like "When I Crash," with its comparison of an angry breakup with a car crash, and subtle musical puns such as the modulation in the bridge of "The Projectionist," which is followed immediately by the line "Sing me in a different key." If I loved TSN's earlier albums less, I might like this one more.