HOME

I spoke of "the listening community might be divided" when writing the review to SOUVENIRS, the predecessor of this one here. If you browse through the reviews to HOME, then I think it became very obvious.

While I still enjoy MANDYLION & NIGHTIME, while I still see and dig the experiments and the newer, calmer sound beginning with HOW TO MEASURE A PLANET, transcending into IF THEN ELSE and finally SOUVENIRS, I feel like THE GATHERING are drifting further and further away from me ... and this is to say: from my personal taste.

Whether it has become too "poppy", too "calm", too "reflective", too "ambient" ... or whatever ... for me it has simply become too far away from what I like. The problem with rating HOME is that it is not a bad album, surely not. My problem with HOME is that what once used to be "enchanting" has almost become "boring". It's up to you whether you consider it to be the culmination of the transition they made over the last albums. I can even agree that they did try to bring this package of sound and voice to a perfection.

The reason I think of it to be the weakest studio album (apart from the first 2, the metal and non-Anneke albums) is simply that this perfection to me doesn't feel like an improvement but more like a reduction. An aspect in which they are undoubtedly great but which is not enough to keep me on track for an entire CD.