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Very minor friends cut! If you're suddenly defriended, it's not because I hate you. It's because we no longer share much in the way of common ground. Maybe I friended you for a fandom, and you've since moved on to another that I'm not in! Maybe whatever it was that joined us together has vanished!

Please don't whinge at me about it. I almost never, ever, ever post things under flock ANYWAY, so if you want to keep me friended and continue reading and commenting, that's fine! You will not miss out on anything! At all!

(no subject)

Many of you may know of my love for an obscure band named Five Iron Frenzy! I know runic_binary at the very least knows of them. They were and still are one of my favorite bands. They were together from 1995 up until they broke up in 2003. They are the reason why I had a mullet for about a year.

You've probably never heard of them. That's cool, they were pretty obscure.

Even more obscure is a side project by the lead singer and two of the other band members, Brave Saint Saturn. They played a different style of music from FIF (no horns, for one thing) and were a studio project, producing a trilogy of concept albums that they call the Saturn 5 Trilogy. The third one just finally came out earlier this year, and I took the opportunity to purchase all three!

Across these three albums (So Far From Home, The Light Of Things Hoped For and Anti-Meridian) they tell the story (through music and with the occasional poetic interlude) of the crew of the USS Gloria, a manned spacecraft on a mission to map Saturn's rings. While in orbit around Titan, a crippling disaster forces the ship into a geosynchronous orbit on the dark side of the moon, cut off from radio and sunlight. They're presumed lost, until almost two years later the ship finally drifts out into the sunlight, and contact is re-established.

One of the crew sacrifices his life in order to detonate the ship's fusion core, and jettison the ship's escape pod, the Starling, on a course back to home, saving the other two members of the crew, as well as the mission data. After being towed back to earth by a Russian vessel, the Invictus, the data is examine, and it's revealed that when the fusion core was detonated against the Starling's copper casing in the void of space, they had inadvertently created a process for creating antimatter. The Starling Method, as it's called, is formulated, and ushers in a new era of spaceflight and resolves the energy issues that had been plaguing mankind.

The ending's a little hokey, yeah, but that's just the summarized version (and most of this isn't made explicit in the albums itself; it's all in the manual, as they say). As it's told musically, it's really beautiful.

I am hosting these three albums here, for your downloading pleasure, because more poeple should hear them! After a few days I'll be locking the post to keep the copyright police from landing on me. NOTE, though: If you listen to these albums, and you like, them, then please, please, please, please go to their website and purchase the albums. These guys are not big-name recording artists who are rolling in money! They are the little guys and they need every sale they can get.

With that said.

Oh, and these albums all deal with Christian themes, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. Doesn't bother me because, well, I am one, but if you're allergic to religion in your music this is probably not for you.

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