I’ve perused the record quite a few times by now, and “Memorial Park” is a trend setter instead of an exception. “Memorial Park”, the fleshed out version of the most tantalizing YouTube snippet, features a truly delightful, floating interlude, opaque instrument interaction and good dynamic work, but in spite of numerous listens, recalling any particular melodies is pretty challenging. The demo clips weren’t lying, as The Episodes are chock-full of vintage mid-00s Taproot musical backdrop, the quirky harmony, bizarre chord shapes and shimmering clean passages firmly in place… the problem is that none of it is really memorable. There’s just one problem with the material at hand – if it was of truly immense quality, like the sticker implies, it would be pretty safe to assume that the initial version of the record wouldn’t have gotten shelved in favor of Our Long Road Home in the first place.
#Taproot gift album cover full#
Thus, the band can’t be blamed for wanting to get this out into the open – after all, that’s a full record’s worth of material that let them easily regroup after the dud that was Plead The Fifth. A bunch of brief, mildly promising demo snippets have been hanging on Taproot’s YouTube channel for years now, and the reception was pretty positive overall. During those two weeks, the concept materialized, got split up into ten pieces corresponding to songs, and the entire musical/lyrical side of the tale got whipped up. The Episodes is actually a shelved “album within an album” that took up two weeks of the sessions leading up to Our Long Road Home. Fast forward to 2012, and The Episodes is hitting the shelves, complete with a pretentious information sticker – “Over six years in the making, The Episodes is a poignant and complex album which will cement Taproot atop the modern hard rock empire”. As KoRn is busy ticking off their fans by screwing around with dubstep, there’s no trend to latch on to, and Taproot discreetly put away their baritone guitars and went back to their prior musical direction, leaving a mildly ridiculous skid mark of an album on their track record. Taproot’s as far from being a household name as they were prior to their Victory Records debut, none of the painstakingly crafted wannabe singles blew up on the radio, and the album’s chart performance was the band’s worst to date. Guess what? Nu metal’s attempted 2010 revival didn’t work. Review Summary: Don't believe the sticker.