Question for reviewers

Hi,

I only have one concern, and that is that we have a tendency in this commercial world to think that something that can be understood and experienced, is valuable. And, there are many directors, and musicians, that do not live by that style at all, and tend to find different things as they go along ... and sometimes, it becomes a suggestion that a free forming writer, film maker, musician can not experience this at all ... like they themselves do not have a "level logical head" for the work they do. Brian Eno can speak of that for days!

This is often seen, very easily in folks that paint, that today did this part in blue, and tomorrow they will change it to something else ... as if there was any "sense" for it having happened, and sometimes there isn't ... and I have this idea that we're trying to close that door. If we do, over 50 years of the arts from Europe in the 20th century will die over night ... because it was not thought out, and I always had a great laugh when Salvador Dali, whom my father knew and met, used to say if he knew what he was going to do, he would not have done it ... it had to have that element of surprise ... and I think that was one of the best parts of what film became ... even better than literature, in its evocative style and colors and such. You can't say, and neither does Werner Herzog, how he chose that music or the color that went with it ... the same for Storaro in coloring so many of Bertolucci's films ... it just is ... and their work stands out because of it, not because it was thought that the color this or that would help bring out some kind of idea or other ... many times, it is not about what it brings out ... some folks just like the juxtaposition and how it looks.

In a workshop with Daevid Allen, he made it clear that the most important part of improvising (he did it a lot with his glissando school) was to not be thinking of anything and let the hands just do their thing ... and while some of us will think this is way too zen, in the end, it expresses a new way of doing something or other, and the same thing abou meditation ... it is all about "turning off the internal dialogue" in order to get to the next step and experience.

And the suggestion that a review can not have that feeling, is scary for me ... I have never really thought of how to write a review ... I merely tried to find, many times, the right set of words to express what I felt ... and that is not about "thinking" or defining what, and how, I do what I do ... it is what it is, and something I learned through improvisation with many actors way back when and will be in my book on it ... and I find that, in the end, some folks are afraid of it, in the end ... what if I get the chord wrong kind of thing ... it doesn't matter as you learn to find and see new moments in time that can not exactly be thought of ahead of time.

It requires some research.  For example, IQ's Subterranea is supposed to be an intriguing adventure of an experiment who's let loose and tries to get revenge on his captors while being a more ambitious album with more playing with genre an an extended runtime and more melodic focus, while fleshing out the band's sound.  There are several goals here.

Does it meet its goal?  Fairly.  The story's pretty predictable and a little tropy when you take Mindcrime into account, and the genres are recycled.  The sound is easily fleshed out, though.

What did it sacrifice or neglect?  Really, it's the runtime that's the biggest issue.  The 20-minute epic that ends this album pales in comparison to the one that starts their debut.

Are the major flaws made up for?  The melodies stay fine, the lyrics are pretty poetic and the sound is fleshed out perfectly.  So about an 85/100.