A City By The Light Divided

Coming from the file of CDs I was originally completely disappointed with,Thursday’s new (well, relatively new) “A City by the Light Divided.”
After the amazingness that was “War All The Time,” I was really excited for this CD. The name sounded good and I was looking forward to being into a new CD for a few weeks. You know those albums where that’s all you want to listen to nonstop? Well I really, really needed one of those. And this wasn’t it.
The day the CD released, I hit Best Buy on the way home from work, ripped off the impossible-to-open wrapper and plugged that baby in. Now my car isn’t worthy of pimp my ride or anything, but it has a GOOD sound system. I made sure of it when I bought the thing. So when the first few notes hit in this thunderous crescendo to open the album, I was psyched. So then when Geoff Rickley, the lead singer, unleashed what is usually a rivetingly unique brand of vocal mayhem, it came through my speakers as more of a whisper. Still the music was thrashing for the first 2 tracks so I was willing to give the rest of the CD a chance. By track 3 however, the disk was out of my player. It was a quiet song, you couldn’t hear the vocals and it just wasn’t good. My hopes and dreams for this CD were shattered.
Still, the first 2 songs stuck in my mind as good hardcore music that I had enjoyed listening to. A few months later, one of those first 2 songs came across my shuffle on my computer and the sound was better. Rickley was still quiet, but not to such an unnoticeable extent. I checked the reviews on the internet and many others were complaining about the same issues with the vocals. I stopped blaming the band and started blaming the producers. They didn’t have the levels on the vocals high enough and that’s what caused the CD to suck.
So anyway, I ended up throwing the CD into the clock CD player in my bathroom. BINGO. Without too many equalizers or settings, the small speakers in my clock radio had the perfect tone to make this CD finally sound the way it was supposed to sound. Even track 3, the song that previously killed the CD for me got pretty good. So once I could get past 3, I got to experience track 4, “At this Velocity”, which is classic Thursday “screamo” and archetypical Rickley lyrics like “We're placed on a plane pointed straight down/Traveling at five hundred feet per second/Five thousand feet from the ground.” The imagery and the metaphor is just what you expect from these guys in their lyrics, it’s just too bad you can’t hear them.
A City by the Light Divided feels like an addendum to the first 2 full-length Thursday albums. “At this Velocity” and the opening track “The Other Side of The Crash” are obvious references to previous songs. It’s almost like they didn’t fit all they wanted into those CDs so they released this CD of afterthoughts. It isn’t a bad thing; in fact, it’s kind of interesting to watch their thought process and evolution throughout these albums.
My favorite song on the CD is “The Lovesong Writer” not because it’s an especially interesting sounding song, but simply because of these lyrics: “Sitting alone in the dark of a stadium/He whispers his secrets into a cheap guitar/With the flick of his wrist he turns words into melodies/Chords into church bells, fill up the allies/Lovers entwine in the heat of the night/And by dawn are apart in the shivering silences/We will pretend
That it’s all just made up.”
Here’s the bottom line: If you’re a Thursday fan and you haven’t heard this CD, definitely check it out, and play it on a player with small speakers. If you’ve never heard a Thursday song, I would suggest buying "Full Collapse", falling in love with it, then buying "War All The Time", becoming obsessed with it, then in about a year or two, buy "A City By The Light Divided." Hopefully by then, they’ll have the sound worked out, and by then, you’ll have a better appreciation of just what these songs mean. Have fun.

p.s. Since I’m now hooked on running and will be spending at least 2 hours running at least 13.1 miles this coming January, I’m working on a 2-hour playlist for what I’ll be listening to during the half-marathon. I’ve got some great ideas, but it’s 2 hours and I’ll need help.
I figure that I need 35-40 songs and I’m going to need to organize them in 4.3 mile (or about 40-50 minute) sections. My attitude will be changing during this race from excitement, to needing a steady rhythm, to needing to ignore pain, to needing to dig deep, to needing a triumphant few songs to finish the last half mile or so. I have some ideas, but I’d love some help. I’ll be posting a main blog for this soon and keeping a running (no pun intended) tally of all the ideas I have, until the playlist is finished.
Here’s my idea for track 1: Tom Petty – Running Down a Dream. What are your ideas?