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"The Optimist" is the eleventh album by rock band Anathema. The album was released on June 9, 2017, through Kscope, three years after their last release, Distant Satellites.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 82, based on 6 reviews, indicating "Universal acclaim ".
User Album Review
With a definite thematic pulse running through the thing, and sound effects pinning the story at different places throughout the record, it’s obviously very prog. Not a bad thing really, but if you’re after an easy going album, this probably isn’t it. A kind-of condensed version of Floyd’s Wall, but without the meandering psychosis, and played primarily by a metal band, The Optimist has lofty ambitions, and succeeds in the most part, scuppered only by a few mis-steps which, looked at in the grand scheme of things don’t really matter, but you do get the nagging feeling that if left on the cutting room floor, the record would’ve benefitted. ‘Ghosts’ maybe ambles along for a little too long, and on ‘Close Your Eyes’, a haunting piano-and-bowed guitar vehicle for Lee Douglas’ sultry croon, a smokey jazz-noir waltz appears out of nowhere, and immediately flips the atmosphere from a drifting darkness to a sentimental pastiche. The almost-Oasis string section on the otherwise epic closer ‘Back To The Start’ over-eggs the pudding ever so slightly too, switching gears from gloomy prog to terrace sing-a-long territory.
Anyway, that aside, on The Optimist, Anathema really do cement their title as one of the UK’s most revered rock bands, prog or otherwise: it’s a big jumble of ambitious ideas, executed near-perfectly - a mess, but a big, sprawling, dense, euphoric, beautiful one. Reviewed by drownedinsound.com
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