Search - Blue October :: Foiled for the Las Time (Dig)

Terrific music; annoying marketing

Ethan Straffin | Palo Alto, CA USA | 11/02/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"While I have great respect for Blue October, this is an unexpectedly exploitative release. Here's why:



1) The live disk is packaged with the original album, which I'm fairly certain at least 95% of the potential audience for this product already own. (Yes, we also get a remastered "Calling You" and two watered-down house remixes of "X Amount of Words." Wake me when they invite Rex the Dog to do a remix: I might just kill to hear that. Oakenfold still bores me to tears.) The price was low enough that I was willing to grant some slack on this one, but then...



2) The live disk has been "sanitized," with no announcement to that effect anywhere on the packaging -- and the editing is not exactly subtle. Not that Furstenfeld swears all that often, but when he breaks out the f-word in "Hate Me" and "Overweight," it's important to the song. The weird part is that the lyrics on the studio disk are preserved intact. GoshDARNit, Universal.



3) The "enhanced" material is a bad joke. The live disk is merely a "CD key" which will take you to a website where you might think you'd be able to wait forever to download a video clip or two -- but you'd be wrong. Still, if you are willing to give some random company your email address and a (fake if you have any sense at all) cell-phone number, you will be redirected to the mother lode: the public area of the official Blue October site. You might want to stick with YouTube.



4) The last straw: there are no fewer than three "FBI Anti-Piracy Warnings" on the back cover alone, plus two on each disk, one of whose font size is actually *larger than the title of the album*. Way to be paranoid, Universal. Keep taking advantage of your artists' fans like this, and you will only have increasing reason to be.



Are these things the fault of the band? Almost certainly mostly not, which is why I'm only subtracting one star for the combined aggravation. A solid live recording of everything from _Foiled_ but "Congratulations" (which clearly can't be done justice without the rather brilliant Imogen Heap singing backup) is not to be taken lightly. Still, I can't help but hope that these guys can leverage their well-deserved success into either better terms or better business partners."

From the Averge Joe...

Nichole | Edinburgh, UK | 02/25/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'm writing this review primarily because I find other reviews on this site are, for the most part, overly critical and analytical. I'm not that way, and I suspect everyone who reads these things deserves more than something that goes WAY too in-depth (not that those are bad for people who are like that).



Plain and simple: I love Foiled, I love live music. Therefore, I love Foiled For the Last Time. I haven't been able to see Blue October in concert yet, but this will suffice until that dream comes true.



One of the things I love about this CD is that the tracks aren't ridiculously long; on some Live CDs I've purchased before, tracks tend to go on for a minute and a half after the music stopped. ... I don't really need to hear fans cheering for that long.



A downside: the censoring. There are around two swears in the entire set lyrics for Foiled, why bleep them out? It's silly. Also, they make their Anti-Piracy statements VERY obvious and in your face--it is printed on each CD, larger than the title of the CD itself! I bought the CD, why bother yelling at me to not download it illegally?



But other than that I definitely recommend this album to anyone who is a fan of Blue October!"