ARTiST: Alberta Cross
ALBUM: Broken Side Of Time
BiTRATE: 197kbps avg
QUALiTY: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.97 Final / -V2 --vbr-new / 44.100Khz
LABEL: Ark / PIAS
GENRE: Rock
SiZE: 66.37 megs
PLAYTiME: 0h 44min 34sec total
RiP DATE: 2009-09-19
STORE DATE: 2009-09-18
Track List:
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01. Song Three Blues 3:18
02. ATX 4:45
03. Taking Control 4:21
04. Old Man Chicago 3:08
05. Broken Side Of Time 5:15
06. Rise From The Shadows 6:49
07. City Walls 3:36
08. The Thief & The Heartbreaker 4:41
09. Leave Us And Forgive Us 3:22
10. Ghost Of City Life 5:19
Release Notes:
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Serious adversity calls for serious ammo: Alberta CrossÆ Broken Side of Time
often sounds as if the band is trying to jar itself awake from a nightmare. ôI
just want to leave/Is that a crime?ö sings Peter Ericson Stakee, who with
bassist Terry Wolfers moved to New York from Britain last year, where the pair
quickly found themselves homeless and poor in a part of Brooklyn where being
broke is often a fashionable pose. Their bandÆs proper introduction to American
audiences chronicles their own rocky introduction to America: ôCome on take me
home/ÆCause I just wanna feel/ÆCause I just canÆt relate,ö Stakee sings on
ôATXö; ôWe were out of touch/We were out of feel,ö he cries on ôRise From the
Shadows.ö The problem is, the band generally expresses the suffocation and
disillusionment that can come from city living with stock metaphors like closing
walls, rising tides, and haunted streets; it is the albumÆs music where the
bandÆs frustration finds purchase. Its distorted guitars and quick tempos
underscore the desperate tone of the lyrics, which often play more like a series
of choleric diary entries. This makes the album more true to the tale of
ambitious foreigners getting kicked around in a new country, but it also makes
it less funùBroken Side of Time is as inhospitable as New York itself. This is a
big shift from the largely acoustic sing-alongs and bluesy style of 2007Æs The
Thief and the Heartbreaker EP, a fact made all the more obvious because the EPÆs
most infectious tracks are included among this albumÆs dark ballads. With the
band plotting a move to Austin, you have to wonder whether the grungy angst of
Broken Side of Time will come along, or if it will stay in New York where
Alberta Cross found it.