I'm in a different place than I was with the last one. There's been a lot of watching people fall apart around me, a lot of people flailing around as a result of their poor choices. It's a celebration of life and death, failure and success, how those contradictions are beautiful and poetic. The rough version of Feast given to me by the band reflects the ambivalence lurking in the above quotes. It's not as assured or polished, nor as dense.
Piano drives most of the songs, which swing from elegiac beauty to swaggering bravado.
Less concerned with the dark underworld of the mind, it's a wistful, paradoxical, much more human record. It's quite a stylistic change for the band, but one that is pulled off with remarkable aplomb. The future holds just as much transformation, and if the number of books the band carries with them is any sign, a number of new artistic concerns and topics. The afternoon waned at last, and the conversation drifted to Nietzsche and the question of nihilism in the modern world. Much of this was too obtuse for the laymen's eye, and besides I didn't write it down.