Quote:
Originally Posted by Pudding
HCTB 'story' sucks, unless you're a hardcore Meat Loaf fan
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The trouble is that the idea with the story just does not work. I asked in another thread who saw Elvis in Vergas as it cannot be Patrick if you stick to the story. You have an album and you have a story - I regard them as two separate things that are independent from each other. When listening to the album the first couple of times, I was racking my brains how the hell the songs were related to the story, I could not find any relation, sorry.
Maybe it is also due to the fact that I listened to Brantley's original songs before - which I could enjoy without being told how they have to be interpreted. They took songs that already existed and wrapped the story around them. It slightly works on
Peace On Earth but not on the rest of the album.
I am not saying that
HCTB appears to be a random compilation of songs. That is not the case. The songs indeed have a connection to each other and it's exciting to listen to the whole album - but they don't tell the same thing as the short story which is absolutely superflous, in my opinion, and rather appears to be a marketing trick than the foundation of the album.
I suspect no one would have recognized the "concept" or the underlying story if Meat hadn't constantly talked about it.
An alleged concept album that requires to be explained is
not a concept album. Listen to The Who's
Tommy, for example. It's the
songs that tell the story, they don't need someone to tell you what each song is actually all about and how the songs are connected to each other. Meat presses very good songs into a corset and actually restricts the freedom of the listener to explore the music by forcing the story on you.
Many of the songs on
HCTB are
covers or recordings of songs that had been written before Meat picked them for this album. The original songs were written and recorded before in a different context. Usually the concept is created
before the songs are written, not vice versa.
I'm looking forward to a new album but I hope it won't be a "concept" album this time, unless it's a concept that really works. Good songs do not need such kind of crutches - they can walk on their own.