All I want to know is how diverse this record is in terms of genre. Is it as experimental as it sounds?
I've spent the last year in the throws of everything George Antheil. My barometer for "experimental" is wayyyyyy fucking whacked up right now.
Alchemy Index-y, electronics, maybe some horns or longer song structures. These are things I consider experimental when talking about Thrice.
Does it jump around Thrice's palette of sounds more than TBEITBN? I think most of us want a little bit of fire, water, earth and air in every thrice record. TBE set out to remix those sounds, and to a degree, the record accomplished it. However, they could've pushed the concept even further. At least, that's what I was hoping for from 'Palms.' And yes, as Cameron and I have both stated many times –– longer, weirder song structures are preferred as that's when they're at their best as far as I'm concerned.
Not really. It's as a whole a slower and melodic album, it has more of a groove like Beggars than the last, but I wouldn't say anything's very AI-y. There's some nice dual vocals that have, I guess, what could be considered a bit of Air to them, and there's some different instruments used on the album, and some cool Thrice drum patterns, and bass lines, but I consider this just to be who Thrice is as a band after all these years and all these albums, it's not really experimental. I think the album takes what they did in their last and fleshes it out a little more. But with maybe three exceptions, I don't think any of the songs would be that out of place there. They're not doing anything weird. Most songs are under or around four minutes.
I'm always like, uh ... do you mean like "here's a song with a xylophone for 10 seconds" or some 22, a Million like weird sounds? Heh. Like, there's a cool little part that reminds me of EITS, but I wouldn't consider that "experimental" ... it's just a cool atmospheric sounding part of pretty straight forward rock song.