@defaultmediatransmitter @EVEL Ah - I must admit that is really lovely to hear. :)

'Flesh' / 'Flesh Decomposed' are possibly favourites, or rather were when I know everything perhaps felt at its most imaginative, so the relatively muted response was strange to experience.

I completely agree about reviews more broadly - thinking back on albums I love by other artists that got shat on. There’s a particular kind of review that's especially irritating - that is less engagement with any audio and more like self-display. It takes the form "this doesn’t do x, has too much of y, not enough z - therefore it fails", where x, y, and z are decisions, not oversights! And thus the subtext is weirdly entitled - as though the music exists to satisfy their very specific pre-existing demands. It's not even hearing the sound, but a request for a different work altogether, disguised as evaluation.

The tragedy is that in doing so, they miss the actual encounter. The strange, particular, unrepeatable thing the artist made is right there in front of them, but they're kind of too busy exorcising it through a cultural prism and writing a wish list to notice it. 😂