I’m sure it would have been better completed. The finished Black Parade songs absolutely smoke the demos
Some fun facts: Leaked from the same place the original snippets did back in 2022. Birthday Girl was teased in the intro music before they took the stage during the 2019 RETURN show. Elements of “Paper Swords” are used in both the A Summoning and An Offering tour teasers from 2020. War Beneath The Rain was performed on tour last year. Fake Your Death is also distinctly a demo version compared to what was put out officially. There’s a lot of evidence that they were planning to release some version of this and tour on it before the pandemic took hold. A short clip of the intro of what is now known to be “Witch” was used in a Warner Music Instagram post that was taken down some time ago.
At the show happening right now in Argentina they just played "To The End" for the first time in 20 years
Is there a list of song titles anywhere? Always curious about that kind of thing. Of the leak, I mean.
Fake Your Death 0:00 Witch 3:32 Bike Thief 9:02 Operation Day 14:00 Falling Down 18:30 Birthday Girl 21:30 Dark Cloud 24:43 Wake Up! 30:53 Louder 34:05 Narita Airport (Interlude) 37:52 War Beneath The Rain 40:24 Paper Swords 44:33 Dive 50:05 High Hopes 55:34 Dogs 1:00:30 Perfectly Well 1:05:00
There is a much better version out there now btw. Someone attempted mastering, split the tracks without losing the transitions, evened out the audio spikes. Peak.
Just gave it a full listen. I really enjoyed it. There are some solid songs on it and I could only imagine what a completed album could have been like.
Also just finished. It's a lot to process, but my immediate reaction is (obviously with the power of hindsight) that I can see why the band scrapped it for the reasons they've stated-- the mood is really dark and really doesn't let up, and if their hearts really weren't in it at this point, I feel like this would be a difficult world to want to return to again and again (either in the studio, or in tours down the line). Sorry for being a bit corny and groan-inducing, but the whole thing just sounds eerie and haunted. That said, even in its current state, it's a really stunning piece of work and I think this would have blown a lot of folks away in 2013, had it been completed/released.
The more I listen to it, the more special I think it is. It’s dark for sure but there are so many fun musical elements. I love the brass arrangements and the spooky synths.
these are definitely way higher quality than those though. they were demoing black parade in the back of the tour bus with ray doing all the engineering himself. there's some old doc from maybe mtv or fuse where they're on the 3 cheers tour and you hear a snippet of what's clearly the demo that became tbp title track. but this paper kingdom leak is clearly done in a studio or studio quality environment. also worth mentioning digital recording technology grew by leaps in bounds in the decade between those not disputing that it would kick even more ass finished tho! but to my ears this is pretty close to a finished album lol
whoever remastered these can go ahead and tackle the leaked Wrens lp4 demos, since that's obviously never coming out.
not sure what they did to these but i've been meaning to fuck around in logic pro with those wrens ones for a minute haha technically whatever they did to these, it isn't "mastering" but that's annoying and I should be told to shut up
nah you're right, but not sure what the proper term would be lmao. also they already released a v2 with more fixes. love that this is a thing.
whatever they're doing it'd be akin to basically what a mastering engineer does at the end of the process, checking levels and tweaking eq and whatnot to make sure it sounds even and good across the board. i'm listening to v1 with my studio monitors and very few notes 2/3 of the way in lol, sounds mostly great. i'm decidedly an amateur though
this is a weird fucking comp but this reminds me of the dune soundtrack at times lol. definitely very cinematic couple of the "rockers" i probably enjoy more than most of their post-tbp output tho, at least at first blush