![]() I moved to a nearby city to work for a year and saved enough money for a one-way plane ticket to London. It was enough for a while. Eventually, rural black-and-white thinking tainted my kaleidoscopic vision, so I left the year I turned sixteen and swore to never come back. There were long summers swimming in rivers. There were horses to ride bareback, motorbikes and fast cars to drive recklessly. Life for me was happening elsewhere. The vast landscape provided wide-open spaces to move around in. I was bored, restless and searching for a meaning to life that wasn’t offered in the classroom of our education system. I barely went to school as I couldn’t connect with any learning that was offered. We know how to chop the heads off chickens to feed the children and make pillows out of the feathers because our men are incapable of stepping up to their responsibilities. In late springtime, she picked asparagus. The women in my whanau (family) are strong and practical. My mother worked hard at several low-paid cleaning jobs. The only reading material was a Friday newspaper with a pullout racing-page guide to the best picks for the next horse racing meeting. My family was working-class poor. My father was a war-traumatized alcoholic with a gambling addiction who only fit in at the public bar of the local pub. There were no books in our household. To fit in socially, your family must have lived here for a hundred years or more. There are great swathes of land owned by a few elite families. Torn away from city life, a childhood of secure friends and routines, I was thrust headlong into an alien environment. The Rangitikei district in Aotearoa is made up of rolling hills and sheep. ![]() I arrived in this small town without a country bone in my body, right on time for adolescence. I wasn’t born in the Rangitikei district. People like me tend to drift through life like tumbleweed in the desert, scattering our seeds in all directions and hoping like hell the wind blows us somewhere meaningful. I have learned with age that although we can choose to create a different life in a different place, we always take our same restless selves with us. When you belong somewhere, you can plant your feet deep into the whenua (land), growing strong and vibrant and becoming the person you were meant to become. Disintegration 9.I once did not feel a sense of belonging in Aotearoa. Of course, Crimson II is thematically useless without its slightly superior first chapter, and though it may only nominally qualify as an Edge of Sanity record, right now that's all listeners have. Swano really pulls out all the stops, and whether you choose to condemn or applaud him in the end, there's no denying his amazing achievement - again. Of course, in a final, necessary twist, all of this is rendered whole via a single, 40-plus minute "song" (or "song suite") containing literally dozens upon dozens of riffs partitioned into oft-recurring themes, numerous soft/hard interludes, and synthesizer embellishments for added effect - all of it combining into a canvas of downright panoramic scope. Judged on a purely musical basis, the album indeed represents a worthy and natural successor to the original, successfully transporting the listener back to a fantastical realm of apocalyptic science fiction - brought to you by the wonders of progressive death metal. So what's a well-intentioned metalhead to do here? Clearly, there's really no satisfying conclusion to be had Edge of Sanity fans will simply have to make a personal choice (pick their poison, if you will) when approaching Crimson II. The second fact: yes, Crimson was also, for all intents and purposes, a solo effort by that band's dominant songwriter and undisputed driving force, Dan Swano, whose personal vision had guided Edge of Sanity's trajectory, though previously never as completely. The first fact: yes, Crimson (the original) was the work of a fully functioning band, Edge of Sanity. A means to a selfish end? Wait, it gets even more complicated. There are two ways of looking at Crimson II: optimistically, it represents a long hoped for, never expected second installment to Swedish death metal legends Edge of Sanity's greatest triumph pessimistically, it sees only one of said predecessor's original participants using his not inconsiderable talents and a few hired henchmen to usurp a band's good name for a personal project.
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