"I enjoyed it, but I'm hipster scum with a beard and I'd never admit to enjoying anything that isn't recorded by an obscure Nigerian in 1972."
Biased poll is biased.
3 is more accurate description wise but I honestly would give TH an average rating - totally average, about a dead 5. It's just that the description is off there as well, so I guess I won't vote.
My score is 5 - Disappointed. Has some moments that feel like legit BoC, has some high spots, would have worked much better as an EP with less filler (which is the version I actually listen to for the most part), "palindrome" gimmick doesn't do it for me.
Much less layering, absence of the same sort of textural love we got with the previous albums, and finally very cold - which is not an inherently negative thing. It's that they didn't utilize the cold feeling in a way that I thought benefited the album. They seemed to try and make it in the same old "warm" way but with that sound. They got to doing that part right with Uritual, they almost did it with Split Your Infinities, but it falls short just about everywhere else.
New Seeds is still by miles my favorite track on the album. Personally, I preferred it modified with a little bit of stereo widening and EQ'ing it differently (to circumvent the thing I was talking about) but although repetitive, it's a track reminiscent of TCH that definitely says BoC. Unlike some of the moments such as Cold Earth where it comes off like a BoC-alike, that track has it where it counts, and I have listened to it quite a bit.
I just can't help but feel if it were about half the length, mastered a bit differently and slightly less repetitive, I could give this a solid 6.5 or so like Trans Canada Highway. I think if they'd retained the signals and whatnot that we heard in the promotional stuff, the tone of the album would be much better. I think the promo version of Seeds of the Dead is a lot better as it adds texture that was otherwise missing to it. All in all though, while it's undoubtedly the worst official release yet for me, it's not some sort of tragedy by any means and it's pointless to get too upset about it. Its existence doesn't ruin Geogaddi or something. Still, it's very disappointing, not as much as it might be for those who literally waited 8 years in the sense that all they did was keep checking BoC's website (I've never understood all of the "UUUUGHHHHHHHH COME OUT ALREADY...just go on with your life until it's over), but disappointing nonetheless because it's a 5/10 record from a 9/10 band. The band that released Geogaddi. The band that released MHTRTC. The band that released Hi Scores. Etc.
It wasn't an atrocity, an "I fucking hate this band now and can't believe they did that" by any means, like Random Access Memories by Daft Punk which deserves probably a -1 out of 10. As such, I'm still looking forward to what BoC might be up to in the future and hopefully it'll be at least as good or better than TCH this time, which is what about nine billion people were saying about TH before it came out. Tomorrow's Harvest was just very average and the whole experience was just one long hype train fueled by the third rate Year Zero clone ARG that was supposed to take us to Six Flags but dropped us off at a traveling carnival - probably the best analogy I can make. It was one of the big disappointments for me in 2013, a year that was probably the worst for music in my entire life, just barely redeemed in the fall.
That's all, and that's just my opinion on it. Of course if you're one of those people who are offended by the fact that I have that opinion, that probably doesn't matter to you.