Taproot - Our Long Road Home [Album]

RED

September 15, 2008, 07:50 PM

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“Our Long Road Home” gets straight to the point. Album opener “Path Less Taken” comes in with a heavy and dirty guitar riff then kicks forward into a more mellow verse. Then before you know it, less than a minute into the song, you are taken to this incredibly catchy chorus (after just the first listen of this song, the chorus was lodged in my head. Deservedly its still there.) The chorus lyric, “A past worth saving, at last we’re paving, the path less taken.” really represents that this band is trying to do something different and far more interesting than everyone else on the current music scene. In my eyes, they have been successful.

The album seems to start heavy but becomes lighter hearted as it goes along. This could be a bad thing for some people, who expect the weight of the first six or so songs to carry through to the end. However, Taproot manage to pull off ballad type songs in an incredibly melodic and sweet sounding way. “Run To” is a perfect example of this. It bears another chorus capable of bouncing around the head for days on end.

“Stethoscope” is one song that could have been so much better than it is. On the album it is 1:43 of a really easy on the ear chord sequence. However, instead of using this idea to make a full song, noises of a small child are added over the top. With the title and the child featuring on the song, there is probably some relation to birth and the early seconds of life. Perhaps the band just needed an extra track to fill out the album a bit.

There are so many other parts worth mentioning, like the eerie female vocals found in “It’s Natural”, or the crazy intro to “Take It”. But in fear of spoiling this album for any potential listeners, I’ll just say that “Our Long Road Home” is brilliant and all people reading this review should at least check Taproot out.

With Taproot’s album released in close proximity with Metallica’s “Death Magnetic”, you could safely assume that Hetfield and co. already have enough dosh stowed away in the bank. Buy this album instead for a far more interesting and less predictable listen. After all, if you really want “Death Magnetic” you could get your hands on it for free somehow and anger some rich, old and hairy men at the same time.

One thing that stands out about this album is that it never closes itself off into one genre. With this being Taproot’s fourth album, this may be their big break as “Our Long Road Home” certainly matches a lot of recent albums from some of “rock’s giants”.

P.S. Altsounds does not condone any illegal download of songs/albums, however altsounds does condone sarcasm.

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