Having listened to this album just the once, all I can say is you lot can suck my dick: this is ****ing excellent! I feared when I read the opinions of the majority here, but your opinion is donkey balls. I love the textures, the moods, the music, the atmosphere: even the singing is quite minimal and if I listen to it as - as Jansz suggested some time ago - another instrument I can certainly appreciate it on that level.
I also have developed a liking for one man bands - Panopticon, When Bitter Spring Sleeps, Mondo - that kind of thing, and while generally they tend to be more in the black metal side of things than death metal, and I'm not quite sure where this falls (seems there's even some pagan metal in there, and a bit of prog metal too) I really appreciate this. I love love love his version of "The Sky Moves Sideways." I'm not aware of any metal band ever covering a prog song before, but if they did I feel sure they would rip the piss out of it. Brendan doesn't - then he does. Singing it in a "normal" voice, just to show he can, and then dropping into the Cookie Monster vibe, works brilliantly. Had he chosen something like "Watcher of the Skies" I'd be like what? But the Porcupine Tree standard is just forlorn enough, just brittle, bleak and bitter enough for this to work brilliantly.
If I have to choose favourites (other than "TSMS") then "Invocat" and "Altered", but there was nothing here I didn't like, and a lot I loved.
