6/19/2023 0 Comments Collective soul songsJoel Kosche did a decent job until he left in 2014, and I honestly don’t like Jesse Triplett’s signature twangy classic rock style since then. If you have no soul in the music any more, why not wear the color and soul on the outside, right? Second, when original guitarist Ross Childress left the band in 2001, the remaining members struggled to find their sound again. Both are fine with me, but I do feel like it was, at first, an attempt to compensate for the music becoming a little stale. First, as the band aged, frontman Ed Roland seemed to get more spiritual and more eccentric, at least in how he dressed and performed. The band has been around for basically thirty years now, and this feels like a tribute to that fact. I like every single song to some extent, and it feels both fresh (for the band) and also like a mature and veteran sort of affair. And you know what? This is a great album. I wasn’t going to listen to it at first, but pulled the trigger after seeing some positive press. The choruses, too, felt uninspired to me.Įnter 2022’s Vibrating, an album that the band finished some time ago, but was delayed due to the pandemic. I felt like those albums lacked the enigmatic personality and expressive guitars of everything that had come before. While I really liked Afterwords, the other three albums just didn’t connect with me, mainly because I felt a classic rock style emerge in their sound, and it didn’t work. In that time, they released Afterwords, which I didn’t hear until some time later, and three other albums. I lost track of the band from there, probably because I discovered progressive music and didn’t look back for a few years. So, this Collective Soul show was my very first concert experience. As the child of very strict and religious parents, I wasn’t allowed to listen to much music (none, basically), and certainly wasn’t allowed to go to shows. Anyways, the show was fantastic as the band balanced their hits with some of their deeper tracks, and it felt like it went on for hours. It also happened to be on the evening of my sister’s wedding, so thank goodness she had an early wedding and I was able to take off that afternoon. I saw them at a Rib Burn Off in Canton, Ohio in August 2005, and the show was completely free. About that time, and I assume because of their new indie status, the band was playing quite a few shows, some of them free. After 2000’s Blender, I actually thought the band was done, but they reemerged as an independent band under their very own label in 2004 with the excellent Youth. I had their 7-Year Itch compilation, and played it all the time. I remember being obsessed with Collective Soul for a couple years in high school. Every single song on that album is perfect, in my opinion, and it includes my favorite CS song, the emotional “Crown”, though my favorite version is on the live release Home from 2005. My favorite, and the one I still listen to regularly, is 1999’s Dosage. I, of course, know the wildly popular “Shine”, and had that album along with Collective Soul and Disciplined Breakdown, two of their popular 90s releases. I remember them chiefly as my older brother’s favorite band-they may even still be, I’m not sure. I have plenty of Collective Soul in my past. The current lineup is Ed Roland on vocals, guitars, and keys Dean Roland on guitar Will Turpin on bass Johnny Rabb on drums and Jesse Triplett on lead guitar. For me, it is their best album since 2007’s Afterwords. The band is still alive and well, and they just released a new album called Vibrating on August 12 th. Collective Soul is a band that I’ve always respected, even when they weren’t making music that was for me.
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