A sonic blur of epic ballads, original soundtrack recordings, guitar fronted ambience with swirls of electronic cacophony, timeless samples and decisive vocals directing the entire aural soirée. It Was a Very Good Year is a complete show preformed high above in Sky City. Prince Vultan and his winged Hawkmen gathering for a courtly extravaganza. MEINSCHAFT is a consummate troupe delivering enthralling creativity in both song writing and performance. A composition filled with interconnecting doors, a place for the conscious to wander, experiencing both warm nostalgia and sonic waves piercing the threshold of thoughts.
With selections from It Was a Very Good Year spanning two compact discs, this sonic foray clocks in around eighty minutes. Amazingly there are no tracks over six minutes, making the entire listen diverse and magically fluid. MEINSCHAFT is somewhat elusive on identity (it’s Evan), but the credits for all who contributed are clearly delineated on the bandcamp page. Getting back to sonic description… like everything we listen to, the final consumption by absorbing minds is so beautifully subjective in that moment. At times It Was a Very Good Year sounds over the top, a spectacle of strobe lights and arms a flail in the space above, “Silence/Violence” for example. Book ended by “The Wondrous Boat Ride” and “Ultimo Tramonto”, the later with vocals from FKA ICE, there is an appreciated understanding It Was a Very Good Year needs much more than a brief sample listening. You can still try and roll through ten second samples and get a feel, but this composition really needs multiple full listens. This being said from an approach of exactly that. An even so, with writing this, there still is a loss or a feeling of how could i connect better with a written description. With amount of material and the diversity within, descriptive notes can only get you to the point of listening. Hopefully those reading this will. Gonna throw in one comparative thought because it’s part of the process, the longest track “The Winds of Demise” inspired me listen to Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth again.
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