I think there are quite a few songs on HI and TW that served as a bridge for this new album/sound. I think both of those albums have some songs where I was happily surprised it was a TBS song. Like, We Were Younger Then and Nothing At All were quite a departure from earlier stuff - even It Takes More to an extent. You Can't Look Back, imo, is one of the best songs the band has ever written - straight up Tom Petty vibes and then I Felt It Too and really, the last four songs of TW start veering in a direction that the band didn't normally go into.
Yeah, Like You Do is such a bad track and really disrupts the flow of the album there at the end. It's by far the worst song on HI, and really the only bad song on there tbh. Reminds me of Live Young Die Fast from Agony and Irony for Alkaline Trio in that sense, the only bad song on an album that is otherwise pretty pristine.
I don’t mind LYD. Its nothing special, but its an easy listen after the pretty dour mood of Better Homes And Gardens.
I admittedly have never really got into this band after all these years, and they were always just the band I'd see a bunch cause they were opening for whoever I was seeing. For some reason just never clicked. HOWEVER, I'm all in on this album. It is very good.
Have really never been able to get into this band, beyond a song here or there, so I'm kind of shocked at how much I'm digging this album a few songs in.
I liked it on the stream last night, albeit the audio was bad. had a lot more electronic elements going on than I expected.
Agreed about how it disrupts the flow of the album because everything up to that point is hit after hit. I made a HI playlist on Spotify where How I Met Your Mother opens the album and Can You Feel That takes the place of Like You Do.
Its definitely the record I was hoping for post-reunion. The S/T is still my least favorite but when the HI dropped I was like “okay, now we’re cooking with gas”.
I think some of what makes happiness is suffer (for me, anyway) is the two different producers they had going on. Most of my favorite songs on that record were produced by Marc Hudson (who’d been doing their live sound for a bit) vs. the Sapone tracks.