Some of the best things in life come with caveats.
You ignore Paul Reubens's minor legal indiscretions because Pee-wee's Big Adventure is one of the best movies ever made.
You ignore Randy Moss's off the field issues because he might be the most talented football player ever.
You ignore the fact that you have no idea where tapioca pudding comes from (fish eyes, right?) because it's delicious.
When something is really good, you learn to look the other way.
This is the best way to listen to the Fall of Troy and the band's new album, Manipulator. The musicianship, namely the guitar work of Thomas Erak, is enough to overshadow the screaming.
Erak is one of the best guitar players I have ever heard. I don't mean "he's good for a 22-year-old" or "he's good for some guy in a prog screamo band" or any sort of limiting milieu. It's not hyperbole. Thomas Erak is really freaking good at playing guitar.
Really good.
Though Erak is young and hasn't been playing guitar for a terribly long amount of time, listening to his hands flit and flutter across the neck of his guitar wouldn't sound out of place on a Rush album, not to mention the occasional Geddy Lee-esque falsetto.
The trio takes itself just seriously enough and they push hard enough to make incredible music without being pretentious or condescending about it, excluding naming a song "A Man. A Plan. A Canal. Panama."
Erak is undoubtedly the band's breadwinner, but neither bassist Timothy Ward nor drummer Andrew Forsman is content simply going through the motions.
Neither can really hold a candle to Erak's technical proficiency or experimental complexity, but they're no slouches, either.
Where the band has grown from past work is in the diversity of the music.
At its core, it's still progressive post-hardcore, but with songs that range in length from under two minutes to more than eight, as well as ranging in style and mood, the overall genre of the music is much tougher to pin down.
Manipulator is not a bad album, but it feels like a frustrating waste of potential because Erak singing voice is actually pretty good.
I know how much better it can be, if only all the words, or even most of the words, were sung and not yelled.
Grade: B
-- Reviewed by Adam Clair
