- - - AFTERTHOUGHTS - - -

After getting through the entire album, I thought I’d take the time to share my thoughts on it in retrospect myself, and give some ideas and theories for the future, and even revisiting Vol. 1 in the future.

This story gives a great sense of progression, when it comes to setting the characters up in an interesting way, feeding them in gradually, in a droplet fashion, and not revealing everything from the get-go. I tried to encapsulate the unknown nature of the earlier songs of the album, by omitting some information, in favour of letting readers have a blind reaction to certain reveals and turning points in the story.

Everything from the conflicts, the rising tensions, and the ongoing nature of the arguments, feeling like they’d never end, to the climaxes and ambitious flourishes of the later tracks, where the arrangements get more and more skilfully handled, feel rightfully slotted in the correct places, I believe that Chonny did an amazing job rearranging and reimagining/reinterpreting older tracks to smoothly show off how the story rides along in chronological order.

Still though, I am aware of some inconsistencies to the official album, when it comes to correctly labelling voices, events, sections, and progression throughout the songs. But still, Jash expresses himself that any interpretation is welcomed and encouraged. So, taking a little bit of creative liberty to sell the project in a more encapsulating and engaging way, such as repurposing older, less customised tracks, and giving different ideas to ones that might be implied through the main videos, in my opinion, seems alright.

After all this is a lyrical analysis, not necessarily dissecting the true nature of the story. That’s up to everyone’s own view of the album. My goal was to give a little more clarity to the clouded nature of Jash’s writing style and give people a good gateway into both the music itself, and understanding where he’s trying to come from.

Now, onto a potentially common theory, but one I’ve had sitting in my mind for quite a while, concerning the second album that has yet to start development.

Calamity lacks an intro, and Concord lacks an outro. To say that Vol. 2 will be a regular sequel that continues events from where we left off would probably be wrong. Since Chonny has stated that this story is a loop, but has not stated at what point in which it loops back to the beginning, it’s unsure whether the loop is contained completely within Cacophony, the length of the album itself, giving a meta feeling of utilising the looping nature of music streaming, or if it’s currently unseen.

I like to imagine the loop’s start and end is currently unsees in the perspective of the songs we have now. Concord could continue off more in regular fashion, but an outro from it would have to connect to SOMETHING. Most likely option? Calamity. The intro to Calamity could be an event of terrible nature to our main three characters, seeing as the chapter is named aptly.

Since we only have two songs of this chapter, I imagine Vol. 2 will primarily focus on it, showing the progression and rising tracks that lead up to the climactic nature of ‘Time Machine Reprise’, and especially the finality and energy levels of ‘Dream’, since it is the outro after all. Another fact to back this up with, is that Time Machine is labelled as a reprise, despite Vol. 1 not possessing a regular iteration of the song.

This leads me to believe that Calamity will contain the regular song, with likely much higher energy compared to the lamenting nature of the former, giving a more sentimental value to the reprise for the audience, who would’ve been acquainted with the song for quite a long time, considering the likely big gap between the two album’s release dates (Vol. 1 releasing its songs incrementally over the span of almost two years).

Onto something slightly different, this album primarily focuses on fully covering every song in M’MMM from Tally Hall. In the ‘Taken for a Ride’ music video, a whiteboard is shown, confirming the character focuses for each song, along with the track list itself. After this however, it’s replaced with a new numbered list, fully blank as to not spoil anything. This time, instead of featuring 27 songs, it features 24.

Assuming the most logical option would be to make Vol. 2 an album featuring every (remaining) song in Tally Hall’s second album, Good & Evil, that would fill in 13 of the song slots. Knowing that Vol. 1 wasn’t exclusively Tally Hall related, featuring side projects of the individual members, such as ‘Mircale Musical’, unreleased TH songs and ‘Joe Hawley Joe Hawley’, we can assume that the remaining 10 songs (excluding the allegedly guaranteed Time Machine cover) could be a mixture of other H:PII and JHJH songs, TH unreleased/demo songs, and even other related albums, such as ‘Cojum Dip’ (referenced in ‘Dream’), ‘Not a Trampoline’ (With the existence of ‘We’re Gonna Win’), and even lesser known ones like ‘Sketches’.

But regardless of what happens, I’m very excited for where this goes next, and I hope I’ve helped whoever read this get into this awkward Aussie man’s extraordinary music. Thank you for reading.