Flame? certainly not, if you only liked one album, you're still a fan and your opinion is worth as much as anybody else'sUHF wrote:I think Live Miles is the album where TD start to sound distant to me. The sequencer takes over too much of the direction, stiff tempo and unremarkable drum programming. They almost don't sound like they're there. I do actually like Live Miles and Optical Race, but I'm afraid I'm an old school TD fan and for me 87/88 is pretty much the end.
Feel free to cheerfully flame!
It could be argued that sequencers at this time (87-88) didn't allow any improvisation, therefore that led to uninteresing compositions (I don't think it explains everything though). Unremarkable drum programming? hmmm yeah there's an element of truth in that, certainly some of the sounds are weak, but that's more down to the manufacturers...afterall you can only use whatever technology is infront of you, and TD's music has always been about change. At this point TD were programming from keyboards (as in playing stuff in, in real time and then quantising and cutting and pasting blocks of drums...perhaps that, and Chris leaving showed up their lack of drumming nounce...until Jerome and Iris joined). Optical Race was something completely different I agree, with music writen in a traditional way. I would like to point out that it was Chris that was pushing for a compositional sequencer as early as 1982, so as much as he was part of the solution he was part of the problem as well. If he felt TD had lost their fire, then he should have done something about it whilst in the group. Judging his sequencer stuff 'after' TD he never found it again.
