i've decided to try the initial, single-disc tracklists TR and co. were trying pre-Bob Ezrin (go read ninwiki). they are... well, if the final tracklist can be said to "make sense," these versions definitely make far less sense. some of the transitions are too jarring — somehow more so than many that are actually on the final sequence — but others make a lot of sense: "La Mer" and ITV obviously (same tempo/key/melody crossfade), "Complication" into "Please," TWOIT into "Starfuckers," JLYI into 10MH... but ending with "Pilgrimage" just makes for a quizzical ending. it's clear "Ripe" (with or without Decay) ends with the right feeling and statement, and that those tracklists ending with "Pilgrimage" are a jumble of half-understood pieces. by the time Ezrin cobbled them together, even if i'm not a huge fan of his sequencing, they were absorbed enough to make sense together, which was apparently impossible when the band put the work-in-progress sequences together.

it's also a far weaker album without "The Frail," WITT and "The Great Below."