Negative Positive
Title: A shadow of the first one, but still a great band
Review: If you're thinking of buying your first Manassas album, by all means skip this one and pick up the self-titled album that came before it. If you were blown away by the first one -- rightly! -- and are hoping this is more of the same, take your expectations down a couple of notches and enjoy the same basic sound deployed in the service of a much inferior set of songs. If you could pinpoint where Stills lost his genius, it's somewhere between Manassas and Down the Road. There are a couple of lovely songs in Spanish here, and this band had Latin-inflected chops to spare, but there's a wasted weariness to the whole affair, as if the band had spent too many nights in the hotel bar snorting the lint out of Joe Walsh's pockets. For completists only.
Is the review positive or negative? 