For the most part, their first music was the shit you heard when you enter a Hot Topic: the invisble overhead speakers vomiting up some concoction of whining and shouting, with a 'dash' of guitar. It was pretty horrid.
Then I found out they were making this album, Razia's Shadow: A Musical.
Isn't that name fucking intruiging? A Musical? Like what, they actually are making a musical, or is it just for the sake of naming it that?
Surprisingly, it's the former.
The entire album is a (somewhat) cohesive
story in the same fashion of a broadway musical. The main thing that got me is the Art, however...
Pictured at left is Doctor Dumaya, and up-right is Sangara.
All of the characters, apart from principles, are only in about one song each, but that's a good thing, it prevents them from getting too old on the listener. Further, each character is CAST as a different singer from another band, for instance, the 'antagonist' Pallis is Brendon Urie from Panic! at the Disco (and, mind you, this is the best he's ever sounded).
For the most part, I've been pretty negative on the album, but it is quite the contrary. The entire album is pretty much gold. The songs and melodies are well thought out (and well done! Doctor, Doctor and The Exit are grand, The Missing Piece is perfect, and The End And The Beginning somewhat nicely wraps things up).
The story could leave a little more, they just assume you understand any action (if at all) between songs, without what the Narrator (PERFECT VOICE FOR IT) says in a sort os slant-rhyme scheme, adding a bit of storybook to this clearly dark idea.
People have been criticizing it for being 'repetitive' (they go over a lot of the lyrics from Genesis over and over again, such as the 'Place your hand on mine/untie your mind') but I like it, for the sheer fact that the entire play is, more or less, cyclical. It shows the design O the Scientist and how meticulous he was when he created the world.
Give it a listen, pick it up. It's darn good.
I'll write more in this now that I have more to say.
