Stephen
I never got into SERPENTINE's debut, I think it's just too average but then came their second album. Well, the album title is perhaps one of the worst in a century, but the album itself isn't bad at all. In fact, I'm quite excited in my very first spin as I think that this is too solid to be true, judging by the quality of their previous release, but after 2-3 spins, I think the euphoria started to fade out.
The reason probably most of the songs felt imbalance, some has great chorus but quite patchy at the verse, and vice versa. I've encountered many albums like that and most of them were eventually settled down in the 70%-75% scoring territory. Really great tracks here are perhaps 'Philadelphia' with a blissful keyboard; the tender ballad, 'Love is Blue'; the thunder-roar of 'Cry'; and 'Heartbreak Town'. Some promising tunes are 'Deep Down', 'Where Do We Go From Here', 'Best Days of Our Lives', and 'Forgotten Heroes'. If only the songs were tweaked more carefully, perhaps I'd have rate this higher.
Tony Mills, which also in TNT, performs very well here, but this is the last album of him with SERPENTINE as another singer, Matt Black, was filling in his shoes, although Black started singing for their tour and in the upcoming album. 'Living and Dying in HD' is one of those albums that perhaps weirdly started around 90% before falling down to 75%