![]() They tend to work best on the songs where they're used to create contrast with the heavier sections, like "Driven" and "Grateful". Keyboards make a much larger appearance on this album than any of the previous ones, generally to tremendous effect. There's never a point on this thing where the listener will think "Oh, well, here's the filler." Any filler is nonexistent, and the prospect of every song on this coming up next is exciting. Screams and Whispers doesn't have every single good point of the band's other albums, but it's a tremendous synthesis of the lot of them. The catchy songs shine through on here more than any other Anacrusis album, striking a near-perfect balance. That sense of having mastered the conventional song and then going beyond is something few bands have (one obvious one to my mind is Rush). The band here does something rare: they demonstrate the ability to make seemingly effortless extremely catchy songs, but then then deliberately don't do this in places, instead opting for stranger fare. The urgent chorus of "Sense of Will", the progressive keyboard interludes on "Too Many Prophets", the desperate hopeful negativity from the Manic Impressions holdover "Tools of Separation", the list goes on. From "Sound the Alarm" all the way to "Brotherhood", there's not one song I would rate below 8/10, and most are a good deal higher than that. Every single song on it is an absolute work of art, the culmination of a career. I'll reiterate: this thing is very nearly perfect. But then came Screams and Whispers, which is, in a nutshell, one of the closest things to a perfect album I've ever heard. Suffering Hour had a certain lack of polish and one genuinely bad song, Reason had a certain youthful stylistic whiplash throughout that impeded listenability, and Manic Impressions had a truly terrible production. Before Screams and Whispers, Anacrusis had a string of exemplary albums behind them, but all of these albums were, in some way or the other, flawed.
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