[Dodo36]

The Harris interview on tLWS articulated a lot of what I've been failing at saying well. The sessions just seemed laborious, and that infected the experience for the band of those songs. The songs as they leaked, with a few exceptions, were obviously not finished products as far as final mix and overdubs and everything else was concerned. The music was there, but the sound of the rooms and what they were capturing didn't match outside of that space. I really love a lot of those songs. To me it has the superior arrangement for Raven, but the sessions as a whole lack something intangible in their performance. That Karmageddon remaster clips the cymbals way too much and is just hard to listen to IMO.

I haven't had an hour to actually listen to Lillywhite's bit, but from what people are saying there's a lot of supposition happening on the 'weakest link.' Until '05, I would have called the weakest link Fonzi because of how reductive most of his parts were. Since then, he has exploded and not been afraid to actually lay it down. Conversely, around '05 is when I noticed Boyd actually slipping as opposed to an off night here and there and that just snowballed after Roi passed.