#ok2

The Fall Of Troy - OK#1 & OK#2

Ever since he released ‘The College Dropout’ in 2004, Kanye West has never had a shortage of imitators. Most notable, of course, is the sadboy rapper trend that followed ‘808s & Heartbreak’ and still fuels Drake’s style to this day, but every record has been followed by a stylistic shift in hip hop.

Not so with ‘The Life Of Pablo’, though – Yeezy’s latest didn’t quite offer enough new sounds to rip off. But instead of shifting the genre, it’s done something even more important – it’s shifted the very format of the album.

‘TLOP’ wasn’t finished on release. Kanye’s tinkered with it here and there throughout the course of the year, re-uploading a new version to Tidal fairly regularly. And that’s bold – viewing an album as an ever-shifting work, open to reinterpretation and changing following feedback from listeners, rather than as a thing that’s released and then left alone, feels like where we should be right now. This will be Pablo’s legacy.

Why is this important right now? Because The Fall Of Troy’s first album for seven years (oh yeah, The Fall Of Troy reunited. You knew that, right?) was released for free online as ‘OK’, and then when fans moaned about it being a little bit slick and overproduced, was remixed and re-released for free online as ‘OK#2’ a month later.

Both albums are still free to download, with added instrumental versions of each one now available as ‘OK#3.1’ and ‘OK#3.2’, in a beautifully un-precious display of generosity from a band who don’t really have anything to prove anymore. Hopefully more bands will do this sort of thing.

Reunions, when they’re done right, should be about giving the fans what they want. Sure, it’s nice to make some money or play together again, but such pleasant side effects should be earned by treating the fans with some goddamn decency. With live sets crammed full of their most popular record, and four free versions of a new one to choose from at your leisure, this is exactly what The Fall Of Troy are doing.

So, how is it? Or, rather, how are they? With both versions clocking in at just over half an hour, the first answer is short – but it’s no less crammed full of pretty much everything that ever made the band great in the first place. After the poppier tendencies of ‘Manipulator’, the beautiful sprawling epic of the ‘Phantom On The Horizon’ EP (still arguably the best thing they’ve ever released) and the try-and-please-everyone-and-end-up-pleasing-no-one wonkiness of ‘In The Unlikely Event’, ‘OK’ mostly tries to return to the dense and frantic chaos of ‘Doppelganger’.

Chaos has always been The Fall Of Troy’s best asset. Much of their best work fires straight out of the gate, riffs tangling themselves in knots underneath Erak’s anguished screams, before stumbling into spacier breathing spaces where all involved can get their breath back before starting all over again. ‘Doppelganger’ came across like if the members of Botch had slowly morphed into Minus The Bear, rather than come to a full stop and started afresh, and part of the reason their other full-lengths never quite matched up was because they moved too far away from that formula.

Still, at least they tried, rather than growing stagnant, and both versions of ‘OK’ do feel a little stagnant. The absolutely ridiculous riffs, high-pitched wails, start-stop rhythms like crashing into a wall again and again – it’s all there, but it’s lacking a spark that was there at the beginning. Tragically it may be one they can never get back – a lot of it’s down to the youthful energy that came from still being teenagers when they made their first couple of records.

But that’s not to say it’s a bad listen – if anything, it’s a very welcome start afresh, a blank slate to figure out who The Fall Of Troy even are in 2016. It’s an incredibly self-assured record, solid from start to finish, packing a remarkable amount into it’s tiny timeframe. But that’s also a downer, too – a lot of the songs don’t have enough time to really expand. Spacier passages are too short to get lost in, the best riffs could do with one or two more repetitions to really drill themselves into your skull. They’re being nostalgic, rather than truly pushing themselves, and sometimes it shows.

Still, there are moments that provide incredible reminders of The Fall Of Troy at their best. It’s not quite a return to form, but it’s the first step on a road to finding a different one. If they carry on, and take a little more time with the next one, they’ll soon outstrip every version of ‘OK’, and most of the rest of their discography while they’re at it.

The big question, of course, is if you’re only gonna listen to one, then which do you pick? ‘OK#2’ is probably the better of the two mixes, a little rougher around the edges in all the right ways, and listening to them side by side does show up more of the original version’s shortcomings. ‘OK#1’ does suffer a little from loudness and compression issues – not that you’d really notice them without anything to compare it to. Honestly, it sounds absolutely fine, but ‘OK#2’ does pop a little more. The bass stands out a bit better, and everything has some more room to breathe.

But a different mix doesn’t fix all of the album’s flaws. Pick ‘OK#2’ and you’ve got a fantastic record of wild, angular mathy post-hardcore that apologises for nothing (despite it’s very existence pretty much being an apology) and does everything well. But The Fall Of Troy never sounded this complacent – is a safe bet better than another swing or a miss at this point?

and then

"also order mozzarella sticks on your birthday"