Chances are, if you were born past 1980 and you hear the words “concept album”, your mind automatically jumps to Green Day and their most recent two albums. However, they're not the only band making such albums today (and they were hardly the first), and other than a political theme, Tribal Machine shares nothing in common with the California pop-punk-sters, so before you listen to The Orwellian Night, get that thought out of your head.
It's necessary that you do this not just because of genre differences – The Orwellian Night is also phenomenally better than American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown (and this is coming from a Green Day fan). The album is broken down into acts - “An Emerging Shadow”, “The Sky Goes Dark”, “A Patriotic Family”, and “Love and Regret”, and each act tells a story in itself while still relating to the overall moral and story.
Songs like “Eye Spy” are like better versions of Green Day songs (“Holiday”, for example, a hit on the radio but probably not for its political morals). With lyrics like “And you thought the faith was bad/I control the press – so sad”, “Eye Spy” is a twanging, deep-voiced, anger-filled anthem and it doesn't sound trite or fake. The best thing about The Orwellian Night is that it works – all of it sounds like it's something the band wants to say – they're not just making a concept album to say they did.
Sever Bronny's vocals are always appropriate for the sentiment – no matter if they're singing, screaming, talking, whispering, hollering, or grumbling. Bronny's range is incredible without being show-y and it makes the songs what they are.
That's not to say the music, also done mostly by Bronny, isn't great, too. It's never too heavy or too slow, and each song moves fluently into the next while still making sense in the story-telling train of thought. The genre doesn't really matter – whether you like heavier rock or you don't, you'll like this music in this context.
People try to make concept albums and they either fail epically or they succeed brilliantly. Tribal Machine has succeeded where most fail. No matter what theme or idea you take from The Orwellian Night, you are guaranteed to take something from it, and there isn't much more you can ask from an album.
Key Tracks: Eye Spy, Disillusion, The Infiltrator
July 29, 2010
