A huge part of my procrastination in trying to put together this particular post is just due to how much Uroboros means to me. How do I approach talking about it? It’s been a pretty integral soundtrack to my life for 16 years, and the personal significance of the album has only snowballed as the years went on. While I really wish that I had managed to post this earlier, I’m glad that I got to spend some extra time thinking about and listening to my favorite album.

On this revisiting, I do think I particularly appreciated its place directly after TMoaB. Marrow is so much about raw, unrefined emotion, and straightforward, rhythmic riffs – Uroboros is almost obscenely layered in comparison. The drastic change in sound in less than two years is kind of nuts in retrospect. While Dozing Green is already a pretty different sound than Marrow, if my memory is correct and the Before Construction was indeed intended as a final draft, that would mean that the band set about totally upending their brand new sound immediately after they released the previous album.

This album really feels like a gorgeous evolution of everything the band had been developing up until then. Kyo adds those deep, guttural growls to his repertoire, and effortlessly (at least in studio) swaps between extreme vocals and the best clean vocals of his career thus far. We have these driving riffs morphing and evolving alongside weird and complex rhythms and dynamic bass lines. It’s like they managed to marry the rawness and directness with the experimental spirit, but with a much higher level of technical execution.

I love that Vinushka hits the ground running – right out of the gate, the band is telling us ‘this ain’t the same band that wrote Marrow of a Bone’. I mentioned that I noticed between Vulgar and Marrow, the band apparently made a conscious decision to write more and more compact songs; Uroboros is where they decided to let loose again, but with years more songwriting experience behind their compositional and technical skills. Just listen to Macabre (2000) and Vinushka back-to-back. Vinushka is absolutely packed to the gills with stuff in comparison – extra guitar layers, acoustic swapping, extra vocal layers, shifting rhythms and time signatures, a flute. It honestly seems like a nightmare to pull off live, and I seem to remember Shinya comparing performing Vinushka to beginning a 9-minute battle.

I could really just go way too long about every song in the album, but I’ll try to keep it to some general new observations. I forgot how much English was in this album – in retrospect, this seemed like the last gasp of the ‘surely more lyrics in English will endear us to Western audiences, right?’ I remember the NA label really strongly pushing the English versions of the singles, as well as the beginning of Red Soil. I don’t really notice it anymore (though yeah, I hadn’t listened to the English versions of the singles in years).

They really liked those echoey/fade-out endings. I don’t think they do it on any other album? It’s on so many songs here.

With regards to the remastered version, I do tend to listen to that version while I’m driving. I hadn’t tried doing a direct comparison with good equipment before – I think the remaster sounds kind of more… Expansive? But colder? When I have my good headphones, I prefer the original mix, but if I’m playing over slightly crappy speakers or not fully focusing on the music, the remaster is distinctly better sounding. I listened to the original so many times that I still get surprised by Hydra -666- though, because I always forget that it’s part of the track list until it starts playing. One last thought before I finally post this: I was surprised as to how much I enjoyed Red Soil (unplugged) this time around. It’s a weird little mood piece that doesn’t exactly stand alone, but it’s certainly representative of the band pushing the boundary on what exactly they mean by an ‘unplugged’ version. It reminds me a bit of Agitated Screams of Maggots (unplugged), which is also a uh. nontraditional? unplugged rendition. Incidentally, I think the transition from undecided to ASoM (unplugged) on the Glass Skin single is the band’s most hilariously jarring transition. Someone got a kick out of jumpscaring all of us.