10. Palace Posy (4:05)

[ryanhewitt]

https://soundcloud.com/ryan-hewitt-6/th-palace-posy1

had a play around, you can hear the voice a bit better. sounds like a daft punk style vocoder.. the best I can make out is that it's saying something like "my baby's - stoppin' me" in an american accent. listen loud and with headphones

also, listen to the creepy synth afterwards

[green calx]

Good job, thank you. Still untelligible, thought. TH is really hard if we're saying about those little speeches buried beneath waves of sounds.
Yesterday, I even imagined there's another story (or some kind of fulfiler) laying behind stuff we can easly hear.
The problem is it's all too freaking quiet!

btw. how did you do that? Could you do the same with Nothing is real, Cold earth or Gemini?

[ryanhewitt]

Good job, thank you. Still untelligible, thought. TH is really hard if we're saying about those little speeches buried beneath waves of sounds.
Yesterday, I even imagined there's another story (or some kind of fulfiler) laying behind stuff we can easly hear.
The problem is it's all too freaking quiet!

btw. how did you do that? Could you do the same with Nothing is real, Cold earth or Gemini?

Sounds very plausible.

All I did was youtubed how to isolate vocals on Logic and tried it out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8NlnD7W8SU) I gave it a go with all of those tracks (and the rest) and couldn't get the same result.

The reason it works (albeit only slightly) for palace posy is because there are two musically identical sections of the song - one with the hidden vocals and one without, to isolate the vocals using phase inversion it requires layering these two sections on top of each other. The reason I struggled with all the other tracks is because all the sections are fairly different, unless anyone more experienced than me can give it a go?

[Najlepsiejszy]

It must be a song or something. "My baby's stopping me" is constantly repeated.

[Najlepsiejszy]

I'm sure that voice returns when these drums at 2:45 start.

[sunshine recorder]

love the late 80,s early 90,s feel,could the voice near the end be saying "eleventh hour"?

[THE BOB]

random search for "eleventh hour elephant" returns an interesting children's book.

[arvy]

we have elephant we have elephant

[number-six]

Although I totally believe the "11" logo ident source, I sitll can't stop hearing "with the animals" myself. Seems everyone's hearing something in that phonetic ballpark.

Are these supposed to be aural rorschach tests deliberately do you think?

[CosmEffect]

The sound at 3:06, 3:20, and 3:33 sounds like it says "Sound the alarm!".

[noisy]

The sound at 3:06, 3:20, and 3:33 sounds like it says "Sound the alarm!".

Its just a wild guess but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAyWIzTFGM
Maybe speeded up pitched up/time stretched ?

Im a big fan of their stuff

[Jonse]

This track is the only one that has really only grown on me after excessive repeated listens and then eventually coming back to the album while not listening to it for quite some time. Same deal with Satellite Anthem Icarus - it's alright for its first two thirds, last third of the track brings it up to a much higher level.

A highlight from TH without a doubt. I would say with this in mind that I enjoy roughly half the record to varying degrees now as is, without trying to solve whatever its puzzle is. When that eventually happens, I'll likely appreciate it far more, but it's probably on par with Trans Canada as a whole at the moment for me due solely to Palace Posy and that's fair enough. I do wish the concept were a bit looser as I feel they may have restricted themselves from producing some truly amazing tracks. The bit at the end of Transmisiones Ferox is by far the biggest victim of their deliberate choice to make songs sound like they end before they're finished as part of that whole soundtrack feel and it is too beautiful a thing to not be released someday if there is more of it, even if it's just like two minutes long. The best cuts of the record as far as I'm concerned are the ones that don't adhere so heavily to the soundtrack concept and Palace Posy may just be the best example, even if New Seeds is my favorite track out of them all.

[portiss]

The sound at 3:06, 3:20, and 3:33 sounds like it says "Sound the alarm!".

Its just a wild guess but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAyWIzTFGM
Maybe speeded up pitched up/time stretched ?

Im a big fan of their stuff

Haha, I just knew it was gonna be Thievery.

Big fan of theirs as well.

[Ectonaut]

This track is the only one that has really only grown on me after excessive repeated listens and then eventually coming back to the album while not listening to it for quite some time. Same deal with Satellite Anthem Icarus - it's alright for its first two thirds, last third of the track brings it up to a much higher level.

A highlight from TH without a doubt. I would say with this in mind that I enjoy roughly half the record to varying degrees now as is, without trying to solve whatever its puzzle is. When that eventually happens, I'll likely appreciate it far more, but it's probably on par with Trans Canada as a whole at the moment for me due solely to Palace Posy and that's fair enough. I do wish the concept were a bit looser as I feel they may have restricted themselves from producing some truly amazing tracks. The bit at the end of Transmisiones Ferox is by far the biggest victim of their deliberate choice to make songs sound like they end before they're finished as part of that whole soundtrack feel and it is too beautiful a thing to not be released someday if there is more of it, even if it's just like two minutes long. The best cuts of the record as far as I'm concerned are the ones that don't adhere so heavily to the soundtrack concept and Palace Posy may just be the best example, even if New Seeds is my favorite track out of them all.

I agree completely on this, PP is the ultimate grower on the album. Something tells me that in 10 years, this track will counted among their most essential tracks

[clenci]

This one's hard. Sounds like at 2:59 a voice is saying "We are done", We are done. 3:05 sounds ilke "Keepin that beat". This is such a happy track.

[Jonse]

This one's hard. Sounds like at 2:59 a voice is saying "We are done", We are done. 3:05 sounds ilke "Keepin that beat". This is such a happy track.

Such a happy track titled "Apocalypse" when re-arranged for god's sake.

Speaking of which...

Romero vibes, Carpenter vibes, Fulci vibes. Everything relevant. Cold war. Economies collapse. Experiments gone wrong. Eventual zombie outbreak. Famine. Plague. Wildlife dying out. Population decreasing. The USSR and the United States destroy everything in their wake during a conflict for resources. United States endures a major pyrrhic victory, losing literally 95% of its infrastructure to the USSR and becoming unable to effectively combat the virus. Antidote fails. Zombies undergo some sort of evolution. Earth potentially facing extinction and what remains of the scientific community on the planet within the United States, United Kingdom and western Europe begin to consider nuking the entire planet in order to kill the virus off for the sake of the Earth's future. Top secret technology allowing them to preserve the human race underground as "seeds" for the future is revealed. Millions of years after the fallout has gone and Earth's flora has returned in full, the only survivor emerges to find himself alone in the most cheesy, cliche Mad Max type wasteland ever. His journey begins with no friends or foes, only TERROR. Deliberately old school, low budget and sepia stained semi-technicolor. Full on exploitation throwback...

TOMORROW'S HARVEST:
The Seeds of the Dead Pt. I

Coming to the cinema/drive-in near you possibly. Eventually. Probably never. Original score by M&M Sandison available on cassette and LP in local record stores near you! Limited edition CD version coming in approximately nine years exclusively to your nearest Blockbuster Music, because why the fuck not!?

[Jonse]

Also, I wanted to say that I appreciate this track's challenge to the listener. It's definitely a great track and (most) people know quite clearly the difference between growing to like something or just tolerating it so long they grow to accept it, whether they like it or not. I honestly will say it is theonly ambitious track on the album. TH was made in a post-Geogaddi/Campfire world where in the span of eight years the BoC sound became so frequently emulated, chewed up, spat out, recycled, borrowed and downright stolen. Little bits of it were influential to talented artists who would combine their sound with something totally new and later derive their own from it to make some fantastic music. At the same time, artists without a real name for themselves trying to fit in by gimping their own style in favor of theirs to some degree (EVERYONE who has shared their music here in a nutshell) have borrowed heavily to produce music that may be good but is never particularly influential or amazing. On top of that, you have untalented artists who regurgitated a total emulation of BoC one after the other. I can't imagine what that seemed like to them, especially when hype turned viral and they were recognized everywhere as a bigger name than they'd ever been. I get some sense of subtle to heavy response though with TH, particularly after reading the interviews where they emphasized how they'd "destroy" sounds to create new ones. Same thing they already had done, but their language from the get was a lot bleaker in tone.

So, even though Palace Posy doesn't fit in so much with the "soundtrack" concept, it fits this theme that plays out in one of two ways, where we either get bullshit like Cold Earth (there's more but this is by far the best example and the only one that quite honestly screams "ironic filler") that sounds as though it is BoC trying to emulate someone trying to emulate THEM. Comes off as a middle finger of sorts. Funny for about a day before it becomes a depressing weight. The method Palace Posy takes advantage of is far more interesting; throughout the whole album we're presented with this odd, synth or sampler sound that is repeatedly used to play strikingly similar repetitive melodies. It gleefully sounds like shit. Literally sounds like the death of every BoC-esque sound ever used by them forced into a woodchipper, torn to pieces, reassembled and then forced back in again. Then it gets used without being reassembled. This same lead/pad is used all over the album. Too many songs use it at least once. I can't say the ending result is particularly good all around, but it's absolutely perfect in PP and I really, really, REALLY wish the rest of this album had been this different. Nothing but constant mood whiplash and nothing but growers. Would have been so perfect. Palace Posy uses the element of initial confusion (people in the Skype group laughed during the stream when it came on, I remember it so well) and a whole bunch of sounds that are not like BoC in any way whatsoever and then throws the woodchipper pad in more and more until the track, which has done its best to use any samples contained within it in the most atypical way possible, gives its one sample that's definitively BoC-like in tone and it's literally just "EELEVEN, EELEVEN, E-E-E, E-ELEVEN ELEVEN EEEEEEE" over a melody that's taking two steps forward and then directly back over and over again. Hard or not, accessible or not, it seals the deal. This is like the proper middle finger and it paints an illusion of something mundane and unexceptional by someone totally else parodying BoC while structurally, almost unconsciously being BoC in full force and experimentation. If any of the other tracks with that pad and the crunchy, tinny, ugly "metallic and...oh wait, sorry, it's just plastic spraypainted gunmetal that was melted in a VCR..." sort of percussion were attempting to do the same thing, a couple of them failed miserably at it. The very distinct feeling that accompanies Palace Posy pulling it off so well is that its repetitiveness does not show at all, at least not to me. There are more interesting things going on more numerously in the track often seen as the "weird" one and I absolutely love it.

TL;DR: Palace Posy is the best BoC track that doesn't sound like BoC and it's so well made that I want them to go even further away from what most listeners are happy with if it'll be this fantastic track after track. The placement of the track strengthens the "out of place" foreign quality and leads me to believe there is no way this was a fluke.

[747Music]

Maybe you're right. I don't know the band, but I, personally, don't think BoC are such assholes. To basically say "F@#% you" to their fans in the form of not breaking the style of their music in some of their new songs, like Cold Earth, seems far fetched to me. Even if some of the fans are "ripping off" their style. On that matter, perhaps they are flattered so many people are influenced by their music. Again, even if some are borrowing from or even stealing from and "ripping off" their style. It happens. I doubt they are amazingly pissed off at that.

Honestly Rodheh, I like you, but I think you're becoming bitter in your old age.

That said, Palace Posy is indeed an amazing work of art. And to me, the whole album is.

[Najlepsiejszy]

Palace Posy is pretty boring, but the last part is good, very reminiscent of their earlier works

[nick47]

Maybe you're right. I don't know the band, but I, personally, don't think BoC are such assholes. To basically say "F@#% you" to their fans in the form of not breaking the style of their music in some of their new songs, like Cold Earth, seems far fetched to me. Even if some of the fans are "ripping off" their style. On that matter, perhaps they are flattered so many people are influenced by their music. Again, even if some are borrowing from or even stealing from and "ripping off" their style. It happens. I doubt they are amazingly pissed off at that.

Honestly Rodheh, I like you, but I think you're becoming bitter in your old age.

That said, Palace Posy is indeed an amazing work of art. And to me, the whole album is.

I cant remember the exact quote, but BoC have repeatedly said that they do NOT want to be pigeonholed, or be known as "that band with the kids laughing and stuff on every album"

I do not see it as FUCK YOU to the fans at all. They are making the music they want to make, and exploring new territory. Simple as that.