The Story of Our Lives

by

The Echoing Green

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This may be the 'single' for the song "Story of Our Lives," but this 10-song album carries more than the song and a radio mix!

The album starts with an 8-minute epic remix of the title track, with four more remixes by Echo Image, Syrian, Virtual Server, and Tecnoman SF. But you could tell that from looking at the song listing above. The epic's synthpop sound fills the room with even a modest stereo system, the other remixes take a little drum 'n bass and bring bouncing melody into the picture.

The 5 extra tracks include 3 more remixes. Sequencia took the somber "Winter" track and made it jump with a darkish trance sound. Variant made "Blind" see a whole new light with a halting groove that'll electrify the space between your ears. The harsh sound of the new "Fall Awake" remix by Random Access Memory rounds out the remixes.

And if remixes weren't enough, Joey put 2 pieces of new material on this album! Seaside is a gentle synthpop ballad in the vein of "Heidi's Song" from _Winter_of_Our_Discontent_. Whereas EG worked with Sheltershed to put together the dark and motivating "The Sparrows and the Nightingales" which makes you question your purpose in life.

A little darker than their early material, this Echoing Green release deserves more credit than just being called a 'single.'

This review was originally written by my husband, Daniel Aeschliman, who has given me permission to post it here:

The long-delayed single for "The Story Of Our Lives" turned into a quite excellent EP by the time it finally was unleased on the world. The disc contains five mixes of the title track, plus remixes of three other songs from the album The Winter Of Our Discontent ("Winter," "Blind," and "Fall Awake") and two bonus tracks ("Seaside" and a cover of Wolfsheim's "The Sparrows & The Nightingales"). The standout track for us would have to be "The Story Of Our Lives [Epic]," which adds a fantastic piano-based intro and outro (played by Leiahdorus' Jason Smith) to an expanded version of the song with some interesting changes to the layering of the electronics. This is an 80's style extended mix, the way that they're supposed to be made and that I've missed. On the other side of the coin, Variant's mix of "Blind" was a tremendous disappointment. It felt more like an exercise in "how much effort can we go to in remixing the song to retain as little of what made people like the original track as possible, while just keeping enough around to make it undeniable that it's a remix of that song" than it was an actual remix of "Blind"; this is the same problem I've had with many Nine Inch Nails remixes over the last ten years, and it's disappointing to hear that on an Echoing Green release. The remaining mixes were relatively flat - not enough interesting things to make them exciting, yet not really bad mixes at the same time. "Seaside" shows a different side of The Echoing Green, having a bit more of a rock approach to it than we're used to hearing from them; guitars take the forefront on this track in a way they rarely have before for the band, and it's a good thing.