LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN

This was a nice surprise for me, as I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. Very original and creative, and overall very good. It is beautiful, uplifting and hopeful sometimes, but mostly dark, depressing, sometimes scary, and still beautiful. There is enough good material on here, coupled with the originality and creativity, to raate this album as a five star effort. However, there is also some fluff here and there, and instead of having four 20 minute songs on two disc with a lot of great stuff and some filler, they could have had 4 15-20 minute songs with only awesome material.

Storm is the best song on here by far. Consistently good for the first 17 minutes. The first section, the album's title track if you will, is one of the most brilliant and beautiful pieces of music ever written, especially when thedrum kicks in at around 3:00. After about six minutes of dense horn/guitar/strings/percussion, the song goes quiet for a two minute buildup to the next part, consisting of simple violins and guitars. The part that follows is really spacy and beautiful, so good. After that, another short buildup and then 'Clatters Like Worry-' a rollicking, almost scary part. After that ends, there is basically five minutes of pointlessness, taken up by spoken word recordings and a few piano chords. Blah, but the first 17 minutes make up for it.

Static is the worst on here, they could have cut probably a good 6 minutes off of the intro and outro which are just pointless noises. Some more spoken word on here about God and stuff, doesn't add to the song. The actual musical part is good, kind of spooky, really good though.

Sleep is a sad song, beginning with the only good spoken word on the album: Murray Ostril, some old man, talking about how the world today sucks (he doesn't actually say that) and reminiscing about Coney Island. Very beautiful this song, although parts seem a bit dragged out at times. Not bad by any means.

Antennas to Heaven is a very sporadic song, with all these different sections. The first, Baby-O, is some guy playing acoustic guitar and singing a country-ish folk song for about a minute, then Edgyswingset acid takes it away with some walls of noise for a short short amount of time. Then comes a cool sounding glockenspiel part, really good, then some crappy spoken word from a bunch of canadian/french kids speaking french. Pointless. The part after is awesome however. First a slow slow violin part, consisting of long single notes, then one of the best parts of the album, maybe the best. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the slow violin part, there is this fast rollicking emotional part, led by some AWESOME lead guitar. It lasts like less than a minute though, but its still great. Some more slow, moving parts close the song, including an awesome bagpipe like part at the very end. Ah.

So all in all, a very good album with a fair amount of filler, but enough good stuff to be excellent. Best tracks are Storm and Antennas to Heaven. Beautiful stuff.