...A Better View Of The Rising Moon - 1997

Advantages: A musical watershed; Your CD player will biodegrade before these tracks become yesterday's noise...
Disadvantages: Hazardous to listen to if you're prone to contemplating suicide...

.../hope-affirming qualities; the stubborn defiance, the resolute independence, the cyclical regularity and consistency of degree of travel, all merely a mockery of life's transient nature, an illusion calculated to raise our hopes just high enough to allow us a temporarily unobstructed view of the tragic and inescapably hopeless nature of the human condition. E. A Legacy Of Lunacy Waters ingeniously draws on another, less apparent, yet more insidious characteristic associated with the literary symbol of the moon, i.e., insanity or "lune-acy", with which to accommodate the other theme which pervades the album's music and lyrics: the madness which either A), one requires to accommodate the folly of false hope, strength and defiance of death which is temporarily simulated by the apparent consistency of life's hypnotically and rhythmically cyclical day... Read review

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Advantages: emotive, personal
Disadvantages: -

...that fine sight every day, for it to have suddenly gone was hard to stomach I’m sure. The good thing is that the world, let alone the US, has someone like Bruce to speak out and get his opinions across. The intention of ‘The Rising’ was never to sell millions or rake in the dollar, it was to simply get one nations thoughts out through one man, a man that I’m sure a lot of people respect and agree with. Another of the finer tracks is ‘Worlds Apart’, despite starting with a rather differing beat, it soon picks up to follow the pattern of the album and the backing vocals give the song the feeling that the backing singers are actually the US population singing with him, standing for what he stands for and believing in what he believes in….a united feel if you will. “We’ll let blood build a bridge, over mountains draped in stars I’ll meet you... Read review

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Advantages: Some of the band HIM's best ever work and a good bonus DVD included
Disadvantages: There are some boring moments to behold

...HIM are in many ways a band of contradictions; since their first days on the music scene back in 1991 to the release of their first album in 1997, 'Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666', the group from Finland have been slated as a number of things. Primarily, people don't know how to define them. Their style - and heaven forbid they read this - is very Gothic in its presentation; His Infernal Majesty, in full, focus their craft around the two themes of love and death, sometimes the two clash within their music, in others, they are separate entities altogether. But then again, there is a much more alternative metal type feel to their branding, away from the dark lyrics. Lead singer Ville Valo, who comes across as almost coy on many occasions, commonly dons himself from head to toe in black, reverting back to the idea that they are slightly... Read review

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