Worlds Apart Reimagined – or – The Unexpected Virtue of Catchiness
I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, but I don’t think we take song order seriously enough. By “song order,” I mean literally the order in which songs appear on an album or playlist. You can call it whatever you want – song order, track listing, album organization – you get the point.
I don’t want to point fingers here (lookin’ at you, shuffle button) and hey, there’s nothing wrong with letting algorithms decide what song you listen to next on a given day. That said, constructing a deliberate musical journey is an art form; perhaps a peculiarly subjective one – but an art form nonetheless.
Some of my favorite albums became my favorite albums because of how they exercised and demonstrated this art form. Occasionally though, I come across an album that fails to live up to its own potential simply because the songs haven’t been arranged according to my exacting intuitions.
It was just one such album that inspired this post.
Leading up to its release, I was downright excited – 3 of the singles had already become near-instant favorites. I couldn’t wait to see these songs in their natural habitat and explore the work as a whole. And maybe that was my mistake; building my expectations a bit too high. The album – Worlds Apart by Make Them Suffer – is not a shambles by any stretch, I just couldn’t help but feel that it suffered from the aforementioned problem of suboptimal song order. It also came out July of 2017, so this post should implicitly illustrate how hard it was to shake that idea.
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I decided to build a playlist with the songs in the order I would have imperiously chosen, were the choice left with me. Below you will find links to said playlist(s), as well as a breakdown of why I chose the order I did.
A quick word on the lyrics: we’re dealing with a concept album here, so lyrics are more than usually important in tying everything together. My reimagining of this album was driven largely by the music and my personal ideas about musical dynamics and has thus resulted in a nonlinear, Tarantino-esque take on its story. That said, I have tried to maintain some semblance of lyrical structure throughout as you’ll see below.
A final word about/for/to the band: while I’m being critical of this release, I don’t come from a place of spite or condescension. I really believe in this album, and I say that as someone who got kind of bored with the djenty-deathcore sound of previous albums. Full disclosure, I had gotten kind of bored with the entire band. Then I heard “Fireworks,” made a point not to miss “Uncharted,” and…here we are.
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So if any of you are reading this, BookaNickJordanJayaSean, I hope you’ll take it as a compliment that I couldn’t get this album out of my head. And also I chose that order for your names because it sounded the best when I spoke it out loud.
I give you, Worlds Apart – Reimagined (copyright The Contortionist)
Listen on Spotify or Google Play
Vortex (Interdimensional Spiral Hindering Inexplicable Euphoria)
The First Movement
Midnight Run
Power Overwhelming
Fireworks
Contact
Ether
Dead Plains
Grinding Teeth
Save Yourself
Uncharted
So, we start things off with a nice, naked drumline (complete with cymbal swell!) that could go in literally any direction.
If you’re a recovering metal elitist like myself, you’re still wondering where this is headed. Assuming you haven’t heard any of the singles, the band’s previous material leaves you expecting something in the vicinity of Bleeding Through by way of Born of Osiris. Your expectations aren’t super high. Then. The rest of the band comes in with these dreamy keys and this could-still-kinda-go-anywhere guitar work. As the song evolves and unfolds, it drip feeds you an almost-overture of the rest of the album, which is exactly what an opening track is for. You get a preview of what Booka is going to bring to the album (and band as a whole). You get the full range of Sean’s screams/growls/vocal ALLCAPS. You get the djenty-deathcore guitar riffs, and for the most part it’s nothing you haven’t heard from Make Them Suffer before. But there’s something new, a kind of Deftones factor – prog sensibilities married to nu metal’s torrid affair with rhythm in an all-purpose-core marinade.
On to The First Movement (whose title most plainly gives away my tampering with the lineup). It’s a bit more accessible than its predecessor, but this is not to its fault. After an initial overture, it’s not uncommon to commence an opera or musical in earnest with a familiar theme or recognizable melody. Booka gets more air time, the song has a somewhat uptempo energy well-suited to building early momentum in the album, and it continues the “new” sound announced by the band in Vortex, just in case we were worried it would only be an intro thing. Finally, the song resolves in this delightfully odd way. If music ever paints pictures for you, the picture painted by the last few seconds of this song is a balloon spiraling in that frantic, haphazard way balloons do in their dying moments, then veering off into the corner behind a book shelf where it will remain – alone and choking with dust – forever.
We’re back to square one, in a sense. The album could go any direction from here; will the next track be driven by momentum from the previous song’s melody or cacophony? Here my recovering metal elitism steps in and argues for BROOTALITY. The album has already proven it knows how to make pretty music, what better time to punch the listener’s ears in the face?
Hence Track 3, starring Midnight Run
Ears still ringing, now is the perfect time for a curveball. Track 1 promised heavy stuff, pretty stuff, and proggy stuff. The first two are covered, so Track 4 is the perfect spot to put a song whose reach exceeds its grasp, if ya got one, and I think ya got one with Power Overwhelming. I don’t really like this song, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a perfect spot for it in this lineup. Plus, with its cyberpunk dreamscape outro, it’s the perfect wingman to a big single, which follows.
Fireworks returns the listener to some of the territory outlined in the first two tracks, thus fulfilling obligations to consistency and coherence. The album already has a distinct identity, we’re just now reaching the midpoint, and the best is still yet to come.
How about a breather?
Power Overwhelming hinted at ambient soundscapes and we have an uneven number of tracks. With Contact we get a brief respite from the intensity of the full band while retaining the sonic character that’s already been established. And like I said, we have an uneven number of tracks; something about the symmetry of an instrumental break between two 5-song collections – like a two-part miniseries – just feels good on my brain.
About that uneven number of songs though… Worlds Apart has ten tracks, so what am I talking about?
Ether. Originally released as a single, then released with the Old Souls/Lord of Woe compilation, Ether is one of my aces in the hole. Not only does the opening riff dovetail *perfectly* with the closing seconds of Contact, the single sounds right at home with the rest of the band’s aforementioned Deftones factor. Sean is also on record as having said he wished it could have been a part of this album, so now it is. Its outro, too, dovetails nicely with the track that follows.
Dead Plains feels like the heavier but slightly less adventurous cousin of Power Overwhelming in that it’s one of the album’s less compelling moments. Still, there’s some lyrical connection to the previous song (perhaps Izanami took Sean up on his offer). To its credit, it does feature some of Sean’s deepest growls on the record.
Grinding Teeth brings back Booka, and not a moment too soon, along with those soaring melodies she throws like knives into heaven.
Save Yourself does an almost match-on-action cut with the ending tempo of Grinding Teeth, which is about as much thematic coherence as can be coaxed from this unfortunately unimpressive track. I say “unfortunately” because Save Yourself is meant to close out Worlds Apart, and it’s just not anywhere near the best track on the album. It’s also unfortunate because Sean bares his soul in a near-breathless spoken word piece that’s meant to serve as the album’s climax. With all the sincerity in the world, Save Yourself simply doesn’t bring the album’s previous promises to a satisfying culmination, not for me anyway.
Never fear, however, I’ve got one more ace in the hole: Uncharted. This song is my absolute favorite from the album, and in a neck-n-neck contest for career favorite with Let Me In and Widower. Plus, this way, the tragic piano motifs that close out Save Yourself get a mulligan in the wonderstruck piano motifs that herald your arrival at the apex with Uncharted. All of the album’s musical foreshadowing is fulfilled in this track, and its lyrics are made all the more enervating as a sendoff for the album rather than another single embedded somewhere in the middle.
But wait, there’s more!
Put this bad boy on repeat and you’ve not only got the perfect lineup, but the perfect loop. Uncharted sends the listener off into the great beyond, while Vortex sucks them right back in. You could say…Vortex completes the cycle.
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And that’s that.
Thanks for reading!
