Supernova Asylum

Abandon Hope, Part Deux: "Doom" Review

2010-06-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

Film: Doom (no, you don’t have to typeset the movie in capitals. Nor does it deserve it)
Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Running Time: 100 minutes
Release Date: October 20th, 2005
Budget: $70 million

Y’know, I realize that it’s only been about a week since I tore into DOOM 3’s bloated carcass like a pack of starved hyenas…but after sitting through the Doom movie again, I almost feel like I owe it an apology. Yes, it’s trapped in the gameplay equivalent of a mid-life crisis, and aptly suffers for it, but even when it strays the farthest from the path, DOOM 3 at least can remember what DOOM should be about. It’s about Hell quite literally breaking loose. It’s about one man standing alone but unperturbed against a seemingly endless army of assailants. Strip away its vestigial features, and even DOOM 3 is about such things. What it is NOT is everything that Doom the movie IS; a molasses-slow soft-sci-fi tale with less respect for the integrity of the franchise than Jack Thompson. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason DOOM 4 hasn’t been released yet is because whatever little dignity that the series retained after this movie has locked itself up in the bathroom and refuses to come out until John Romero says he’s sorry.

Not an easy task. He’d rather make you his bitch.

Then again, it’s not like anyone should be surprised by the film’s poor quality. It is a video game movie, after all, a subgenre of cinema universally notorious for sucking more balls than Lindsay Lohan on a drinking binge. There are a number of theories as to why seemingly no one can create compelling movies out of beloved video games, but there’s two that really stick out in my mind as the root of the problem, both of which Doom demonstrates quite well. And the first of these is simple to understand: the makers of these films are lacking in appreciation. In a film adaption of any sort – but particularly the rabid, attentive, and critically-inclined fanbases of subcultures like video games – respect for the integrity of the source material is vital, and the lack of it is a death sentence. This should have been apparent a couple decades ago when some idiot decided that the best way to bring the universally-adored Mario Bros. to the silver-screen was to give them rocket boots and ray guns in order to battle subterranean dinosaurs. Hell, arguably the closest a video game movie has come to capturing the essence of the games themselves was the Silent Hill movie, and even that film missed the point so badly that merely mentioning it around Silent Hill purists (such as myself) induces more blinding fear and personalized pain than a trip to the Otherworld. Or maybe that was the point.

Pictured: the murder of Dennis Hopper’s career.

But Doom doesn’t even come close, and it knows it damn well. You don’t even need to see the movie to understand how loosely it grasps the basic tenants of the classic it’s based on, because even reading the bare-bones plot synopsis leaves the impression that a most vital component is missing. There is no Hell in the Doom movie. There is no Satan, no demons, not even zombies (well, not in the traditional sense, anyway). Every single reference to the occult and the damned – y’know, the basis for the ENTIRE CONFLICT OF THE GAMES – is siphoned out for theatres. It’s just about the least necessary and most confusing plot perversion I can think of. Why did they do this, to piss us off on purpose?! The film didn’t even intend to make the grab for a profitable PG-13 rating, so that certainly couldn’t have been the motivation. The only reason I see for why they would have done this was to avoid any potential controversy, at which point I have to ask: you guys do realize what made the first game so famous, right?

HINT: It wasn’t the fluffy bunnies.

So what’s the origin story for our flesh-eating monstrosities if Beezelbub is out of the picture? Well, fasten your seat belts and strap on your helmets, my beloved readers, because here comes a brand new crash course in stupidity.

In the film, as it turns out, Mars happened to be home to an ancient, advanced humanoid alien race; granted, this is a silly plot point that even DOOM 3 brought up every now and again with the Soul Cube malarkey, so we can let that bit slide. Unlike in the game, however, this species was essentially genetically identical to humanity, with one small twist: a synthesized 24th chromosome that granted them superhuman capabilities, including immunity from disease and the ability to heal from grievous wounds almost instantly. However, the chromosome is apparently attracted to unmapped centers of the genome which correspond to genetic indicators of both good and evil; people exhibiting a genetic predisposition for good retain their human traits, while the more psychotic and immoral individuals become transformed by the gene into mindless monsters who can, in turn, infect their victims with the chromosome. Inevitability, the Union Aerospace Corporation begins tampering with this 24th chromosome, and predictability, these genetically-enhanced mutants start a panic on the Martian facility.

You got all that? Good. Now, please take a moment to take out your repressed frustrations of idiocy-induced rage upon something other than your computer screen. Once finished, you may choose to continue reading, OR, because you should recognize by this point just how hopeless this movie really is, you can stop now and exit your browser before the remainder of your faith in the artistic spirit has evaporated. Just hit the little red X in the corner.

That one.

For those of you still with us…hoo-boy, where do we even begin to discuss how monumentally brainless this concept is? First of all, the idea of a gene being affected by ambiguous and conceptual establishments such as “good” or “evil” is astoundingly foolish, without question. Sorry. Secondly, I don’t know just how many of the writers working on this film passed any sort of biology class in high school, but they should all at least have a general understanding about how the human genome works. Chromosomes aren’t a fucking virus; they can’t be injected through a hypodermic needle, they can’t be passed on through fluid transfer (seriously, when was the last time you were bitten by a dog and had your DNA structure remapped?), and they sure as hell don’t cause mutations over the course of a few minutes. Thirdly, and perhaps most glaringly…uh, 24th chromosomes already exist, guys. Except those individuals with an added pair usually don’t inherit superhuman traits or transform into monsters. No, they usually end up with less cinematic and more legitimately horrifying conditions, like Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Down Syndrome, Triple X Syndrome, and Klinefelter's Syndrome, among others. Congratulations, makers of Doom, you’re all a bunch of insensitive dicks.

Of course, this pitiful revelation doesn’t fully unravel itself until much later in the movie, so the uninformed might hold out through the beginning in the false hope of seeing some kick-ass, demon-flavored action. Even so, you’ll probably have your hopes dashed in the first few seconds when you see a flock of bad actors…er, I mean scientists running around plasticine sets stolen from Ridley Scott’s backyard, trying to escape from some unimposing camera angles. Of course, this disaster calls for some backup, so the UAC calls in a troop of marines to quarantine the base, search for survivors, and retrieve their valuable property. You may notice that I said marines – as in more than one – and you may find that odd considering how you can count just how many notable human characters exist across all three major games of the series on one hand. Well, that just brings us to the second major reason why video game movies don’t work: because the two mediums are incompatible with one another.

A video game tells its story in a much different fashion from a movie. Because of the power of audience interactivity, you don’t need a large cast of characters nor long exchanges of dialogue to explain the plot; properly done, it is possible to tell winding and epic tales through a game even when no one is speaking, and at the player’s own pace, no less (the Silent Hill series, Portal, and Shadow of the Colossus are all great examples of this). Games like DOOM serve as an even more alarming revelation that games can remain entertaining even with little-to-no plot at all. Films, by contrast, cannot function this way. Transmuting a story (or lack thereof) intended to be told through a considerably less linear and structured medium towards a complete different format, as you might imagine, causes issues; it results in restructuring the essence of the narrative to the point of unrecognizability just so that it can fit onscreen. And there are few better examples of how devastating this transformation can be than the Doom movie.

So yes, there is now a cast of characters in the DOOM universe (if you can really still call it that). All you really need to know, however, is that one of the marines is played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and another is portrayed by the guy who played Eomer in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Pretty much everyone else is a bit player destined to serve as an expositional dump truck or to be brutally murdered for our, ahem, amusement. The other soldiers are particularly unmemorable because they encompass almost every one-trait stereotype to be found in the ranks of cinematic military forces. The young, inexperienced rookie with the heart of gold? Check. The hollering adrenaline-filled warrior who treats lethal combat like a game? Check. The silent religious nutjob? Check. The asshole? Oh-ho-ho, you better believe that’s a check. Seriously, around the time this motley crew of clichés was boarding a dropship and exchanging insults with one another, I was starting to question whether or not I was actually watching Predator by mistake.

“C’mon guys, this pose will be great for the trailer!”

And perhaps I wouldn’t have been bothered so much by this if they had used the expanded cast to tell a compelling tale. But as we’ve established, DOOM never really had much of a story to begin with, and the aforementioned, blisteringly-idiotic changes they brought to it aren’t exactly enough to pad out the size of a feature length epic. So what exactly does our badass clique of heroes do when they arrive at the monster-ridden lab?

NOTHING! You get NOTHING! About 75% of the Doom experience is about watching these battle-hardened soldiers stumble about in the dark searching in vain for plotpoints and the occasional ineffective scare (oh yes, Doom thinks it's a horror film, isn't that cute?). Every now and again the agonizing boredom is punctuated by a line or two of mildly significant dialogue explaining the soft-science nightmare that is the plot, and the marines certainly are trigger-happy, riddling shadows with bullets at the drop of hat. But honest-to-God action sequences are few and far between, and everything in between serves as mind-numbingly dull filler. Do you want to know how long it takes before a marine is attacked by anything resembling a monster (slightly crazed zombie-like survivors not-withstanding)? 40 fucking minutes! Seriously! And even then you’ll be reeling from the abysmal special effects of the baddies far too hard to enjoy it. It’s like the filmmakers modeled their movie directly off of the complaints about DOOM 3, rather than the game itself.

In one of the more accurate scenes from the movie, The Rock wonders where the hell all of the duct tape is.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the urgency of the story is slowed to a slug-like crawl right from the word go, it gets worse. The scenery, like I mentioned, seems pulled straight from Aliens or Blade Runner, only about 50 times less interesting. Compounding the problem, the laughably small number of sets and the poor, choppy editing leech all sense of scope from the UAC base; hell, we rarely even get a reminder that most of the action takes place on Mars, so the film practically feels like it’s taking place in a two-story house that forgot to pay the electric bill. Meanwhile, the script is pathetic, yet another symptom of converting a largely plotless game into theatric form. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I said that one of the marines tells another, “I gotta take a dump” without any sort of provocation, but yep, it happens. It’s even worse when, a few minutes later, that same marine drops his rifle’s magazine and spends about thirty seconds of the completely tensionless scene retrieving it…only to be killed for completely unrelated reasons a few seconds later. For goodness sake, the DOOM comic was better written than this!

OK, maybe that was a lie.

There are, of course, the few shameless occasions where the director throws a bone to the game’s fanbase in a futile attempt to keep their interest. As far divorced as the movie is from the game, it does sneak a reference or two in there. One of the scientists, for example, happens to be named Dr. Carmack, an obvious nod of the head towards id Software’s co-founder John Carmack. The Rock also happens to stumble upon the infamous BFG…although the movie attempts to retcon the weapon’s official name to “Bio-Force Gun”, it shoots a blue glob of caustic goo instead of a green irradiated explosive, and the only target he manages to hit with the damn thing is a group of unarmed civilians off-screen (seriously movie, fuck you). And course the monsters are pulled from the game’s roster, though thanks to the religiously-cleansed new background only about three different kinds show up, and they rarely do more than swipe at the marines for a bit before running away, lest there be any intense fight scenes in this movie.

And then there’s the famous POV section, Doom’s purported coup-de-grace. For about five minutes towards the end of the movie, we inhabit the first-person perspective of our protagonist as he trudges through corridors, blasting everything in sight. In all fairness, it’s probably the closest the movie ever comes to feeling like DOOM, but it’s all too little, too late. The cheesy special effects and shoddy camera work simply inhibit the effectiveness of the sequence, not to mention that it appears out of nowhere, has nothing to add to the story, and slows the build-up to the climax of the movie (which, if you can believe it, is essentially a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style fistfight. In a DOOM movie!). And apparently our good friends Mac and Bob were stationed at the UAC’s Ark complex as well, because during the sequence our hero stumbles upon not one, but TWO chainsaws lying about haphazardly in the research facility, one of which he uses to brutalize the Pinky demon (pretty much the only interesting monster design plucked from the games).

Well…at least it kind of LOOKS LIKE the game…the decade-old game…

Overall, it comes across as a rather desperate last-ditch effort to make the Doom label seem appropriate, even if it is the most interesting and action-packed scene of the whole thing. Here’s an idea, filmmakers: maybe the next time you want to attract movie-goers with a neat gimmick, maybe you should try to utilize it for most – or maybe even all – of your movie instead of just the last few minutes. It would be difficult, sure, but I guarantee you it would sell better than the bland, soulless turd you ended up making, and I can think of at least one other movie that pulled it off.

I never thought I’d see the day where I would reference one of my all-time favorite films in comparison to the Doom movie, but…there ya go. Maybe just watch this instead?

So that’s Doom, the movie: yet another forgettable relic to inscribe upon the pantheon of terrible video game adaptations. At least Uwe Boll movies are watchable with a big bag of popcorn, a group of friends with good taste, and a running MST3K-style commentary; by contrast, the only ways you can make fun of this movie just remind you how generic, inaccurate, and unnecessary it truly is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my hands of this whole debacle by playing the first good ol’ DOOM. Those hell barons aren’t going to gib themselves!

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here: "DOOM 3" Review

2010-06-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

Game: DOOM 3 (Yes, you do have to capitalize the title consistently. It bugs me, too)
Platform: PC, Mac, Xbox
Genre: First-Person Shooter / Survival-Horror
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: August 3, 2004 (NA), August 13, 2004 (EU)
Players: 1 (2-4 online, though enterprising modders managed to boost this paltry number up to 16)

It’s been 17 years since the release of the very first DOOM, a game that arguably has a claim to being one of the most historically significant and influential of all time. Don’t believe me? Just think about everything DOOM did for the industry. It popularized and cemented the first-person shooter genre into gaming culture, so much so that most FPS’s for years afterward would be referred to as “DOOM clones”. It helped spark the fires of the violent video games controversy that lives on even to this day, no matter how often Joe Lieberman fails to secure a presidential nomination. It gave rise to the early days of video game piracy, back when torrents and file-sharing programs took the more primitive form of floppy disks swapped amongst kids in the back-alleys of school like an illegal drug. It was one of the first games to inspire a legitimate mod-making community, rife with unauthorized pop culture insertions from The Simpsons to Ghostbusters. And of course, it had that undeniably awesome theme music, one of the most iconic tunes in gaming history. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the original DOOM (and to a lesser extent, it’s sequel DOOM II) has a laundry list of milestones and achievements, and the industry owes it a debt that can never be truly repaid.

Ah, those were the days…

It’s been five years since the release of DOOM 3. And, it, umm…it...it looked real nice at the time, I suppose. I, err…I guess that’s it, really.

OK, let’s be honest here, there’s not much more that the so-called third game in the series can do but look upon its glorious ancestor in awe-struck splendor. And considering the many degrees in which the FPS genre has evolved since 1993, for there to be no noteworthy hallmarks upon the résumé of this game is, quite frankly, rather pitiful. There have been multiple takes upon whether this truly diminishes the impact of the game, though; it was, indeed, given a strong reception upon initial release despite its lack of innovation. But personally, that’s not even what galls me about DOOM 3 the most (although that is most certainly a part of it). It’s that, somewhere in time, starting from the moment it began development to the moment it hit store shelves, DOOM 3 stopped being…well, DOOM.

The best part of DOOM 3. Yes, really.

I’m going to go out on a limb and proclaim that you might have played a video game or two at some point in your life. I’ll presume further that there’s a very good likelihood that, for reasons clearly iterated in the first paragraph of this review, the original DOOM may have been one of them. And if you’re the type of person who fancies themselves a “gamer”, then I sure hope that is the case; if not, then I would suggest doing so right this second before even considering using that term to describe yourself again. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait. This article isn’t going anywhere.

…

…

Okay, you finished? Good, now assuming once more that your memory hasn’t decayed to the point of complete incompetence, you almost certainly possess a grasp on what the DOOM experience is composed of. The very mention of the title should give rise to visions of speedily running about in mostly well-lit, occasionally open-ended areas swarming with fiendish, over-the-top-cartoony monsters. They stand between you and where you need to be…and they also happen to be standing on the receiving end of your shotgun. As the corpse pile up, shells are spent, and totally radical MIDI-ized metal riffs wail in the background, masking the screams of your fallen foes, you vaguely recall a brief mention of some kind of story that instills method to this madness. Then you immediately cease to care and continue your odyssey into pure, unmitigated violence against the forsaken hordes of Satan.

So upon booting up the DOOM 3 disk, a warning light should flicker on in your head when, right from the beginning of the game, it becomes apparent that it’s going to attempt to have a plot. It touts itself as a re-telling of the tale from the original game, but what was once a brief write-up translating in essence into “Hey, there be demons here. Go kills them.” now takes the form of extravagant cutscenes, featuring characters and dialogue when the need for such a thing clearly does not exist. Among the ranks of the game’s compelling cast are a doctor you know is evil from the second you meet him because he lacks a pupil in one eye and speaks in a voice you might hear from the hidden intercoms at a carnival’s haunted house, as well as a authority-figure-type counselor who the game tries desperately to establish as a fake-out villain, but who clearly isn’t because…well, he isn’t the unambiguously evil doctor.

Seriously, how do you even get hired looking like that? Does “evil cackling” make an attractive feature on the résumé of an aspiring scientist?

As if the cliché-o-meter isn’t full to bursting already, there are also no less than two grizzled, gravely-voiced veteran lieutenants, one of which escorts the counselor with the aid of about six lines of dialogue, and the other of which spends the first half of the game sitting in his office, giving you orders and eating all the Easy-Mac until he remembers that there’s supposed to be a story, at which point he turns evil for the purposes of creating hopelessly non-existent dramatic tension. And then there’s you: a nameless, mute, disproportionately-muscle-bound meatslab of a man who holds no interest or emotion in anything taking place around him. Of course these supposedly interesting new characters and concepts need to be introduced, so whereas DOOM had you pumping lead into zombies by the ten-second-mark, DOOM 3 marks its clear intention to shamelessly integrate the ideas of other, better, and more recent FPS titles by leading you through a lengthy, bloodless introduction scene similar to (i.e. almost identical to) the one in Half-Life. Then again, Half-Life didn’t allow you to murder innocent scientists without anyone else even giving you a weird look in return.

“Yes, can I help you? Wait, what are you doing with that revolver? No, stay back, I…GAAAH!”

Inevitably, of course, all Hell literally breaks loose in the Union Aerospace Corporation facility, and you, the player, have to fight your way out, figuring out what went wrong in the process (spoiler alert: it may have something to do with the evil scientist cackling uncontrollably in the corner of the room). It’s at this point that you expect the balls-to-the-wall action you remember from your nostalgic memories to finally arrive and make the game fun again, but it’s not too much longer before you’re disappointed. This simply isn’t DOOM as you remember it, and while change isn’t inherently a bad thing, you’ll find that the series isn’t so much “changed” as it is “trapped”: sandwiched between the game it’s supposed to be and the game it wants to be.

To be fair, there are some ways in which, for better or worse, DOOM 3 is actually very much the same game you played in 1993. The scientific complex you venture through is rendered in a stunning total of about three different shades of grey (discounting the numerous spatters of red, of course). You stumble across armor, med-kits, and ammo with every alternate step. The level design is standard and linear, only occasionally manipulated in the form of a key-fetching quest or a brain-dead puzzle. The monster designs – many of which are simply monochrome variants of the classic baddies encountered in the old titles – range from only mildy disturbing to downright juvenile when placed in the more realistic context that the game strives for (not to mention one of the bosses – I kid you not – is a former marine general whose torso has been grafted onto tank treads for seemingly no reason).

Skeletons with rocket-launching shoulder-pads and flaming, jetpack-adorned skulls were rad in the early 90’s, but now…?

Furthermore, the AI is as laughably single-minded as it was back in the day, never amounting to more than “run at guy, bite at face”. Even the weapons arsenal is nearly unchanged, plucked straight from the Generic FPS Weapons Handbook 90’s Edition. The only notable deviations in your armory are the series trademark BFG, a demon-slaying plot-MacGuffin known as “the Soul Cube” (don’t ask), and the chainsaw…though really, within the framework of the newly dead-serious story, what a chainsaw is doing on a Martian research outpost is really anyone’s guess.

UAC Employee #1, Mac: Hey, did you get those hydrofusion battery order forms I asked you to mail out? We need those in the lab by Tuesday.
UAC Employee #2, Bob: Uh, yeah, about that…I DID mail them out, like you asked…but there was kind of a mix-up in the post office, and we accidentally ordered about a hundred chainsaws instead.
Mac: Damnit, Bob! First you “accidentally” triplicated the quantity of our shipment of security armor and back-up ammo, then you spent company money on a rocket launcher that we will never , EVER need, and now THIS!
Bob: Well…we could just scatter all that stuff around the base. Y’know, hide it in inconspicuous places, around corners…no one would ever know!
Mac: Yeah, I guess you’re right. No sense in stockpiling all that stuff in some dusty supply room somewhere. And hey, at least you managed to successfully order in those NON-flammable, NON-exploding barrels this time, right?
Bob: Uh, yeah, about that…

But then again, as boring, cliché-ridden and conventional the gameplay may be, it is at least acceptably functional on a mechanical level, and may very well have served as an appropriate springboard towards a no-holds-barred spamfest shooter romp…or at least it could have been, were the classic DOOM elements not attempting to occupy the same space as a survival-horror game.

Yes, DOOM 3 grabs hold of the retrospectively silly notion that the original games were as scary as they were furiously intense and runs with it to the ridiculous extreme. So now, instead of boldly and recklessly charging through open-ended levels filled to the brim with hordes of ferocious demons, the fully-armed space marine finds himself steadily creeping through claustrophobic labyrinths, only occasionally stumbling into the one-odd pitched battle with a single Satanic minion. Meanwhile, the awesomely plagiarized tunes of the classics are replaced by the quote-on-quote “atmospheric” silence of the base, sporadically broken up by the sounds of combat or the periodic cheesy horror-movie-trailer-voiceover courtesy of that evil doctor archetype telling you just how many ways you’re going to die.

“Oooooo, look! Now your screen is reeeeeeed! Are you scaaaaaaaared yeeeeeet? OooooooOOOOOoooo!”

Most notably, nearly every event in the game hinges on cheap scare tactics, a most detrimental fact in regards to combat; seemingly every demon in the game is stationed in place like a spring-board display in a theme park ride, waiting until you cross some form of invisible line before leaping out from behind a door, around the corner or – my personal favorite – an otherwise-empty sliding-door compartment in the wall. Here's a question: why are the bloodthirsty spawn of the Malebolge patiently waiting for passers-by in a fucking pantry? And what the hell were those closets necessary for before the demonic invasion?

Mac: Hey Bob, the atomic collider just malfunctioned. Do you have any spare flux capacitators lying around your office?
Bob: Nah, sorry man…but hey, why don’t you check the metal-shuttered closet in the hallway?
Mac: Y’know, I never did understand why the UAC had these built in. Hell, it seems more like a violation of building code than anything el…dude, there’s just a shitload of board games in here!
Bob: What, really?
Mac: Yeah, who woulda thought? Candyland, Mouse Trap, Stratego, Yahtz…oh my God, fucking Hungry Hungry Hippos!
Bob: Score!

Then of course there’s the darkness. Every last corridor of DOOM 3 is simply flooded with shadows, a fact just as inconvenient to the player as it must have been to the chronically-depressed former employees of the UAC. Seriously, for a facility touted to be at the cutting edge of human knowledge and understanding, nobody there seems to know how to create a productive work environment.

“Look, all I’m saying is, a bigger janitorial budget might improve morale just a little.”

This, in turn, introduces the flashlight mechanic. Yes, we’ve all heard the flashlight jokes, from how a well-funded research facility seems to lack any duct tape to graft the damn thing to your gun to the obvious inquiry of why space marines stationed in a noticeably poorly-lit environment (in the future, no less) wouldn’t be issued weaponry with built-in visual aid…but rather than harp on these fallacies of logic, let’s discuss its harmful ramifications on the actual game, shall we?

Does no one else find it ironic that the lighting effects were one of the most publicized features of DOOM 3’s new engine? Because, y’know, there’s barely any light to begin with?

The goal of the flashlight mechanic is fairly obvious and well-intentioned at heart. By making the player choose between the gun or the flashlight without overlap, it creates a dichotomy between visibility and defensive ability, attempting to induce fear in the process. This works in theory. In practice, however, it’s downright infuriating, for several reasons. For one thing, it’s distressing to leave player success or failure up to the hands of their very natural limitations, i.e. their vision. In other words, it’s one thing to lose in a death-grapple with an imp due to skill, and quite another due to the fact that the player couldn’t aim the chaingun through impenetrable darkness; this is especially true since, as implied earlier, there is isn’t much initial threat from an enemy when you happen to be armed to the teeth and coated in body armor, and thus the sight disability serves as the only real challenge in many confrontations. Also, the aforementioned over-saturation of shadow makes the flashlight essentially necessary to see at all in certain spots, which more or less removes the critical choice from the player. Again there’s a distinction to be made here to the developers: it’s one thing to impair the player’s combat readiness for the sake of horror, but it’s quite another when you create the illusion of choice regarding this impairment. And lastly, it’s just downright clumsy implemented; having to constantly have your thumb hovering over the button while you wait for the game to schizophrenically decide whether it’s going to maintain the quiet integrity of the atmosphere or just throw a cacaodemon at you is annoying, as is the rather awkward animation you’ll constantly witness as you flip back-and-forth from your weapon to the torch. It’s really just a frustrating mechanic from start to finish, and reinforces the belief that the game is attempting to be something that it’s not.

And really, that’s the most glaring weakness of DOOM 3; in attempting to branch out towards a genre almost inverse in style to its roots, it sours the remaining aspects of the source material. Had the developers more consciously chosen to extract the remaining FPS lifeblood from the game and transform it into a purely survival-horror experience, it might have worked; as it stands, the DOOM brand stands averse to the elements that make a horror game function. Compare the hybrid, half-heartedly frenzied horrorscape of DOOM 3 to a true master of the genre such as the Silent Hill series; sure, the former may startle on the first through playthroughs with its one-time funhouse scares, but the latter’s fog-drenched, unsettlingly lifeless environments create an atmosphere of sheer, pulsing dread just from the player picking up the controller…and that’s a game series where you can shoot and have a flashlight on at the same time!

That’s right. James Sunderland is more competent at multi-tasking than a trained space marine.

Even more action-oriented horror gameplay along the lines of DOOM 3’s thought process has been successfully achieved by the likes of Condemned: Criminal Origins, which equipped you, the player, just as well as the psychotic (and shockingly intelligent) foes, making every confrontation a matter of life or death. Here, alas, the predictability and repetition of the game’s handful of scary tricks soon bog it down, forcing it to rely on the shooter elements which, thanks to the terror-emphasis, went sadly underdeveloped.

But I haven’t even mentioned the most obnoxious aspect of DOOM 3: the PDA. Oh, sweet-buttery-Jesus the PDA. You’re granted a free personal-data-assistant as you enter the base; whether this is a free promotion from the station’s gift shop or a simple act of kindness, I really could never tell. It serves little help on its own, but you can upload the files of other employees’ PDAs upon finding them, through what I can only assume is an infrared communications port akin to the Game Boy Color. Of course, you’ll stumble upon plenty of unattended devices as you progress through the decidedly empty base, whereupon you can shamelessly rifle through the audio logs and emails of the deceased. Respect for the dead, who needs it?

“I’ll trade you my breakthrough research notes for your private insurance information!”
BONUS CAPTION: What? IMP is evolving!...Congratulations! Your IMP evolved into HELL KNIGHT!

It’s really nothing more than a variation on the audio logs popularized by System Shock (confirming once more that the game would rather ape innovations of influential late-90’s shooters rather than devise any itself). But whereas other games with such a system like System Shock, Bioshock, and Metroid Prime possessed an interesting plot, shrouded in the cloak of a mystery to be unfolded, I must remind the developers that the only intrigue to the plot of DOOM is exactly how evil the clearly evil scientist actually is, and that the most startling revelation the logs ever unveiled for me was that the UAC seemingly only has one female employee (apparently the feminist movement receded in on itself somewhere in the early 2100s). No, there’s a much more sinister purpose for the audio logs of DOOM 3 than simple story embellishment, and it can be stated in one word: lockers.

The worst part of DOOM 3. Yes, really.

See, the understandably nerve-wracked denizens of Mars clearly figured that something unholy (quite literally, as it turned out) was about to go down, so they decided to store their munitions and medical supplies for safe-keeping within the confines of massive, encoded storage lockers, each with a four-digit entry code. And because nobody thinks to use the primitive devices of pen or paper in the future, the only way anyone recorded these passwords was within the files stored on their PDAs. This means that, in order to be at maximum strength throughout the game, you’ll need to pause the game every time you pick up a new PDA, scroll through the text files and listen to the mind-numbingly dull recordings to find these all-important codes, whereupon you can retrieve the grab-bag of goodies inside the lockers. You can, of course, choose to listen to the audio files whilst still venturing through the facility, rather than simply sitting at the PDA-menu screen twiddling your thumbs like a fool while you pretend to feign interest in Dr. Gripesalot’s thoughts on the new plasma gun’s alpha-wave combustor-core, or Mr. McFussypants’ watercooler gossip about how that dick Jim from accounting stole his best stapler when he wasn’t looking, or whatever…but guess what? If you happen to the miss hearing the actual code from behind the sound of an explosion, or demonic scream…or, y’know, the sound of the game being played, you have to start it over from the top. Most insultingly of all, the lockers themselves are almost never hidden at all, always found a couple rooms away – or, even worse, a few measly feet – from the PDA that holds their passkey, rendering the whole exercise pointless, futile, and a direct affront to my intelligence. There’s simply no excuse for the kind of flow-breaking tedium this system invokes.

Mac: I was thinking of running down to the coffee room for a donut, you wanna…umm, what are you doing?
Bob: Oh, sorry, I was just recording an audio log of my research for the day. Plus I stored all my left-over sponge cake in the locker over there, so I wanted to remember the passcode I set for later.
Mac: That WAS damn good sponge cake. But listen, why’d you record a secret code in the one device that anyone on this base can access without any sort of authorization of their own? And couldn’t you have just written it down on a sticky note and kept it in your pocket or something?
Bob: Well sure I could have, but then how would the player know how to get to it once he’s found his way here?
Mac: YOU DAMN FOOL! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!
Bob: Wait, what? WHAT?!
Mac: THE FOURTH WALL! IT’S…IT’S BROKEN!
Bob: Oh god! I’m a MONSTER! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!
Mac: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!
Bob: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

The saddest part is that many of these annoyances can actually be partially avoided by forsaking the single player campaign and jumping online. Mind you, the competitive multiplayer is a joke, nothing more than basic deathmatch with a pathetically small player count (by default, anyway) and the same ol’ dark, cramped map layouts. But when tackling the hordes of Lucifer in online cooperative play (strangely found only in the Xbox version), the attempts to polish the game down into a shorter, more stream-lined experience surgically remove many of the aforementioned hindrances to the fun. There are far more monsters packed in far more open spaces, making for a more action-packed adventure, and the addition of a second player transforms the flashlight from an annoyance to an actually interesting mechanic; one player guides the other through the dark labyrinths, counting on the partner to defend him/her from beasties.

It’s simply a shame that this won’t be the game that will be remembered through the annals of gaming history. Instead, it will be the game that crushed light-hearted, over-the-top monster-slaying fun under mundane concepts, confused gameplay, and cheap scares. People unfamiliar with both first-person shooters and horror games (as I once was when I first played the game, in what seems like eons ago) might enjoy a one-time, mildly-atmospheric march through DOOM 3, but anything beyond that and the game loses its luster, ceasing to be little more than a tech demo.

But in spite of all of that, it’s hardly the worst thing to hold the DOOM name. Why, that would have to be…

…oh God no.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Dustbuster: "Phantom Dust" Review

2010-05-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

Game: Phantom Dust
Platform: Xbox (backwards compatible on Xbox 360)
Genre: Err...
Developer: Microsoft Game Studios (with designer Yukio Futatsugi)
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios (Japan), Majesco (USA)
Release Date: September 23, 2004 (Japan), March 15, 2005 (USA)
Players: 1-2 (2-4 online)

So intent are we, as a culture, to categorize everything that it’s currently difficult for a unqualifiedly “different” form of music, film, or video game to be declared. So when a game like Phantom Dust comes along and creates a hybrid of styles too outlandish in concept to fill any established genre niche, we tend to ignore it, as if it disgusts us by virtue of the way it defies our flawless system of artistic taxonomy. Besides, experiments fail all the time; surely the safe and familiar establishes a better insurance policy for disappointment, right? Alas, the falsehood of this common belief is one of the key lessons I’ve learned in recent years. And thanks in part to recent run-in with a brilliant but infamously overlooked video game title by the name of Psychonauts (which is something I won’t be reviewing here, though perhaps this guy could tell you all about it), I’ve been reminded of just how delightful certain titles can be even when the majority of the populace has eviscerated them from their hearts and minds in favor of Vaguely Sci-Fi-ish Alien Shooter Gore Fest 3 or whatever. And so, I present to you what I feel to be the most unheard-of little gem in my treasure chest of games, Phantom Dust.

But I perhaps I should confess that I stumbled upon this glorious title completely by accident. It wasn’t even a conscious purchase, but a gift, probably one persuaded by its $20 budget price. But Mario-Party-hatred not-withstanding, let it never be said that I am completely opposed to the virtues of chance, because without it I never would have been able to preach the virtues of a game that allows you to, among other things, telekinetically hurl bombs at people, generate flaming swords out of your hands AND make a pact with Mephisto for in-game bonuses (if any of the above premises made you either raise your eyebrows in confusion or pump your fists in a fit of manly excitement, then please, continue reading).

Phantom Dust is not only a very, very fun ride, but it’s also a very, very perplexing one that, even several years later, I still have a hard time describing on a whim. Were I forced to pigeon-hole the game into an official genre title – in accordance with society’s whim to drain the fun out of anything – I would call it something along the lines of an real-time-arena-fighter with competitive trading card game elements. And the truth is, it’s actually a little more complicated than that.

This guy is the protagonist, by the way. Make of that what you will, but at least be thankful he doesn't talk.

The story starts out simple enough: it’s yet another post-apocalyptic scenario with the last remnants of humanity left on the fritz, framed in the styling of surreal Japanese anime. This is no Fist of the North Star, however; in this particular rendition of the end of days, the surviving members of our species have lost all of their memories and been driven deep into the underground thanks to a mysterious, memory-draining (and dare I say, phantom-like?) dust that covers the surface of the Earth. Sure, it’s common for the protagonist of a game to start out with an empty head, but it’s a whole other story when the entire cast is filled to the brim with amnesiacs. In fact, the only memory left that everyone seems to share is of some enigmatic ruins…along with the inexplicable urge to go there. And so you join the ranks of the Espers – those who have learned to concentrate the power of the dust into psychic energy – in order to search the dangerous surface world for clues on the location of the ruins, and eventually unraveling a revelation far more shocking than you bargained for.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how exactly do these trips to the surface pan out in-game? Well…that’s where things get a little tricky.

See, each Esper brings to the surface with them a set of psychic skills, known collectively as an arsenal. These skills gradually spawn in the form of capsules on the battlefield, three at a time, at which point they can be assigned to one of the four face buttons on the controller. These skills are used to combat enemy monsters and beings, each with their own set of skills…assuming, of course, that you have enough energy to use the skill, which regenerates over time but must have its capacity increased by collecting Aura particles, which are also incorporated into the arsenal. Oh, and as a reminder, all of this pans out in real-time.

It's processing the sheer amount of raw data that appears on screen like this that should theoretically give me my OWN psychic powers.

Still with me? Well, then there’s the issue of creating an arsenal prior to charging out on the battlefield. An effective arsenal must strike a perfect balance between offense, defense, and that ever-present white Aura stuff that glues it all together. And with 300+ skills available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options on hand.

First there are your attack skills, with can strike at various ranges (long, medium, or short) and have various patterns (shot in an arc or a parabola, falling from the sky onto your enemy’s head, in the form of a blade, etc.). Then there are defensive abilities that can protect you from the aforementioned attacks, shielding your front, sides, or all around you, or perhaps even sending the attack right back where it came from, among other possibilities. There are skills that boost your stats and skills that decrease those of your foes, or even a skill that allows you forcibly trade your stats. There are skills that erase, stripping the skills right from your foe’s hand or devouring their capsules…but watch out, because the price for many of these abilities might involve erasing so of your own possessions. There are skills that allow you to dash, levitate, teleport, heal, turn invisible, turn invincible (briefly), paralyze, freeze, confuse, distract, summon a precision strike from a satellite-mounted death laser…the list goes on. Hell, there are even skills that allow you to change the rules of the entire game, altering what skills everyone can use, how much damage everyone does, or even just reversing everyone’s analog controls (which inevitably results in everyone drunkenly wandering off cliffs). Oh, and another thing: each skill is divided into one of five classes, and you can only have a certain number of classes in any one arsenal at a time, depending on the size of the arsenal case, dictated by…

…yeah.

Make no mistake, the learning curve for Phantom Dust is not so much a “curve” at all as it is a jagged, foreboding cliff face. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the game’s unique brand of combat, it suddenly morphs from a bewildering experience into an engrossing one; after growing acclimated to the bizarre system, you begin to realize the vastness of possibilities the it presents. Sure, I’ve made my fair share of vanilla “shoot-things-move-until-they-die” setups, but the true fun of the game is getting really creative with the more esoteric skills available.

For the sake of example, I was once able to develop an arsenal that revolved around me boosting my speed to such ludicrous levels that I could dodge most homing attacks by simply running away from them. I’ve created vampiric decks of skills that bolster my health and Aura levels by draining it from my enemies. I’ve made arsenals that focus on depriving everyone of energy so that my weaker, low-cost skills could reign supreme…and, inversely, ones that purposefully boost my enemy’s energy to insane new heights so that I could later use a skill that did damage equal to their Aura levels for one-hit-kills (I call that one “Backstabber”, in case you were wondering). But perhaps my favorite is one that doesn’t even have any attack skills in it at all; the goal is simply to sneak (or sometimes, teleport) into the enemy base, steal or destroy all their capsules, then flee, repeating the process until the opponent completely lacks for both skills and, well, hope. And let me tell you this with certainty: just one victory utilizing such a devious, cerebral scheme is more satisfying than any number of frag kills in any number of generic first-person shooters you could ever play.

Sadly, I can confirm that even in such a brilliantly strategic game, cheese tactics still exist. You wouldn't know from this picture, but you are actually witnessing the Phantom Dust equivalent of a "Zerg rush".

Once you’ve grown addicted to the Dust’s power, and subsequently hooked some of your friends, the skirmishes that unfold are truly a fantastic sight, especially with additional players over Xbox Live (try using the skill that allows you to listen in on the enemy team’s headset conversations…classic). It’s a shame, then, that the single-player campaign – where you must unlock the capacity to even make arsenals and acquire skills in the first place – is such a tedious chore.

The first two or three chapters in single-player are essentially an epic-length tutorial, which is perhaps necessary due to the sheer bulk of knowledge necessary to fully enjoy the game. But even after that, the missions rarely boil down to anything more complex than “go here, kill everything, and come back”. It doesn’t help matters that the various monster types rarely differ in anything other than arsenal setup and health amounts, and that there are a mere seven levels available, only five of which you’ll ever visit on a regular basis. Granted, the levels that exist are brilliantly designed and tie into the surreal, post-apocalyptic setting quite well – ranging from an abandoned mall (that the game’s characters refer to quite certainly as a “palace”) to a true mindfuck of a city where gravity and perspective are flipped by ninety degrees – and the end of each chapter usually has a hulking boss battle to spice things up. Nonetheless, only the joy of testing and fine-tuning new arsenals on the battlefield will carry you through the repetitive scenarios, essentially leaving the burden of having fun on you.

Even worse than that is the underground city that serves as your hub between missions. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the design of the place, nor the functional aspects of it (namely, the zones where you can buy new skills or edit your arsenals), there IS something wrong with having to play hide-and-seek with mission availability. See, while you’ll get the majority of your assignments from a specific NPC tasked with exactly that job, occasionally he’ll run out of errands for you to run and suggest that you talk to someone else for new quest. And because that someone could be essentially anyone, it forces you to play duck-duck-goose with NPC dialogue boxes until you finally find the guy who will allow to progress the story along. It’s boring, it’s unnecessary, it brings the game’s pacing to a screeching halt, and it kind of makes me want to use my dust-fueled telekinetic powers to detonate the heads of whichever game designer thought that adding a marker on the map telling us who to talk to next was too much.

Like this. (gotta love Scanners, by the way)

But, surprisingly, all of these flaws actually end up fairly irrelevant. In the end, what you pay for in Phantom Dust is its unique gameplay, and the system it developed for that purpose couldn’t be any more perfect. It sets out to found a startlingly new form of in-game combat, both fast-paced and rich in strategy, and accomplishes its goal with flying colors. As stated before, the game was discount price upon release, ensuring a cheap bargain deep at the bottom of your local discount bin; the graphics still look impeccable, despite being a generation behind and five years of age; and the cries of its surprisingly robust underground community have cemented its backwards compatibility on the more modern Xbox 360, so it’s far from too late to enjoy this rare and undeniably unique experience.

There, now maybe somebody other than me will own this damn game.

OHSHITDIDISAYTHATOUTLOUD…

Awesomely-Bad: An Introduction to Movies That Are So Bad That They're Actually Good

2010-04-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

The monster that the movie has been waiting to unveil finally jumps onto the frame in an attempt to startle – and rend the flesh of off – the helpless teenage protagonists. The only problem is that you, the viewer, saw it coming from a mile away…along with the Party City price tag on the monster’s neck.

Actors deliver their cheesy dialogue with all the grace and subtlety of a caffeinated gerbil. The plot is a hodge-podge of pseudo-mythological nonsense, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, and/or Star Wars plagiarism, derived from a screenplay most likely penned by the producer’s eight-year-old son…and the budget seems to have been procured from that very same boy’s piggy bank savings. Yep, there’s no mistaking it at this point: you are watching an incontrovertibly bad movie.

So why the hell are you having so much fun?

It’s certainly not a point of shame; besides, even if it were, I would be the last to admit it. This may surprise many, but I absolutely adore certain bad movies. That’s right: for all the time I spend ragging on certain instances of art that fail to actually be art, I’m much further charmed by the pleasantries of 1980s B-movie fodder than I am by the majority of today’s modern theatrical releases. Hell, if you were to break into my room when you knew I was about to watch a movie, it’s probably just as likely that I’d be popping in the DVD for either The Godfather or Street Fighter The Movie.

Well...of course.

You might be questioning why this is so, and if that happens to be true, then welcome aboard the S.S. Who the Hell Knows, because we’re on the same boat.

I apologize profusely for the above sentence. It was late and I was tired.

I’ve pondered long and hard about why people can enjoy themselves watching a film that they know, deep down, is an unquestionable piece of shit. How is it that one bad film causes deep displeasure and the other does not? Are they not both equally damaging to the infrastructure of film? And if the “bad” movie makes for good entertainment, does it then cease to register among the damned and rise to the sacred level of…good?

Ultimately, though, I came to a realization, one born of distinction. You see, there are truly two breeds of bad movie in existence: bad-bad movies and awesomely-bad movies.

Alas, we will spend the majority of time in the theaters experiencing the former category, and they truly are a detestable breed. The common bad-bad movie fails to entertain for many reasons, and I could spend the rest of this article listing them in full: bad acting, stupid story, half-baked morals, poor special effects, appearances by Paulie Shore, involvement from Michael Bay, etc. These movies emotionally drain us and leave the empty husks in the theater to rot, usually for the sake of a quick buck.

...not like I'm pointing fingers or anything...

The line separating these monstrosities from the awesomely-bad movie is a thin and blurry one. An awesomely-bad movie can possess any of the above traits (with the exception of Michael Bay, for obvious reasons) and still manage to entertain. There is no exact science to the distinction; rather, one simply feels the unique aura of good-heartedness about the film that renders it fun to watch in spite of its flaws. This aura can arise from excess silliness, in both premise or event; the charms of a low-budget production; or perhaps even a single moment that makes you sit up and laugh out loud. The unfortunate truth, however, is that these films grow rarer every day, consumed by Hollywood’s endless march into genericism and blandness over true enjoyment.

…which is why I’ve compiled a little primer of movies that I personally to be “so bad that they’re good”, so that their kind does not fade into obscurity outside the reaches of the Internet. So the next time you have a free moment and want to watch a movie, but don't feel up to being depressed by a good movie like Fargo again, then you can always turn to…

The Official Supernova Asylum Introductory Guide to Awesomely-Bad Cinema

Troll 2
Often considered the holy grail of hilariously awful films, Troll 2 is a film so universally incompetent that it even manages to get its own name wrong (not only is the film completely unrelated to the original Troll, but it doesn’t even use the word “troll” once). Between the burlap-sack-masked villains, the bizarre morals (vegetarianism is evil?), and the worst line-reading in the history of cinema, Troll 2 has been elevated from its humble, low-budget origins to cult status. There’s even a documentary detailing the fervor surrounding this movie, entitled Best Worst Movie. Consider this required viewing for anyone entering the realm of “so-bad-it’s-good” cinema.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Battlefield Earth heralds the arrival of subpar filmmaking into the 21st century…and it is glorious. Striving to be a colossal sci-fi epic, its ambition collapses in on itself in every conceivable way over the course of the film. From the bafflingly off-kilter camera angles to John Travolta’s worst over-acting ever, every last frame of Battlefield Earth is a prime example of unintentional comedy. It’s been universally panned across the board, but don’t let that inhibit you from seeing it; I guarantee it makes for a much more entertaining science-fiction flick than…oh, say, Avatar.

Manos: The Hands of Fate
When a film is created based on a bet and the screenplay is drafted upon a napkin in a Texan coffee shop, the results are almost immediately bound for the dust bin. But thanks to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the archaeologists of obscure movies, you, too, can now enjoy this once-lost piece of theatrical blasphemy. There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps the shoddy editing that occasionally keeps shots of the clapboard in the film? The completely irrelevant sideplot that mostly consists of a random couple making out inside of a car, several miles away from where the “action” is taking place? The fact that the title literally translates out from Spanish into Hands: The Hands of Fate? Overall, it’s best if you simply accept and embrace these facts as you laugh out loud to the sight of a misplaced bet shriveling and dying onscreen.

Dragonball: The Magic Begins
Before there was the big-budget 20th Century Fox adaption of the famous anime series, there was the bootleg Taiwanese knock-off. Try in vain to cling on to your treasured sanity as a monkey child, an obese shape-shifter, a wise-cracking cockatoo and a pedophilic turtle-man set out to save the world from a Power Rangers villain castaway and make veiled references to rape. And you know what the crazier part is? I’ve told that this is actually the MORE accurate adaption of the series!

Hobgoblins
Yet another fossilized turd returned to the public conscious by the MST3K team, Hobgoblins is most famous for being a dark, twisted mirror into which all your deepest fears manifest themselves as agents of chaos that converge into the blackened void of a new age. By which I mean the film makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I could attempt to detail the plot of this movie to you in full, but such an attempt may prove dangerous without a strait jacket and a cache of drugs on hand to soothe the senses.

Night of the Lepus
The horror movie genre was created with the noble goal of making humans fear that anything and everything in the world has the potential to murder you. And so it is that we have Night of the Lepus, which, for those of you not familiar with animal taxonomy, concerns giant killer rabbits. Yes, rabbits, almost as if that one scene from Monty Python and Holy Grail became self-aware and mutated into its own film. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s difficult to conjure up the slightest bit of terror when the face of death looking down upon me possesses floppy ears and adorable beady eyes. But it’s hardly the most insane and ludicrous of premises, not when there exists a film like…

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
I swear to you I am not making any of this up. There really is a movie out there about a sentient bed that digests its victims, proving that, in Hollywood, the sky really is the limit. By all accounts, this is pretty weird as it is. Weirder still is the fact that the film took about 26 years to release after its completion. Even weirder is that the movie actually takes the form of, not a cheesy horror film, but a grungy art house epic, complete with inner monologues, stone-cold acting and trippy dream sequences. But to really, truly get a grip on how batshit-bizarre Death Bed really is, allow me to describe the most intricate, overcomplicated way to defeat a monster in a movie ever: to destroy the demon bed, one of the protagonists has to draw a circle of blood around the bed, create matching circles in the outside yard, gather the bones of the bed’s victims and carry them into the outside circles nude, which teleports the bed outside and destroys it…somehow. Why not just throw a match in the room and set the damn thing on fire?!

Yor: Hunter From the Future
Paper-mache dinosaurs. Purple cavemen. Laser-shooting cyborgs. Fire mummies. The single manliest thing to ever happen on film. Yor: Hunter From the Future is an amazing movie for all of these reasons and more, and if you disagree, I may have to hunt you down and destroy you, for it is clear that you have no soul.

Pretty Much Anything By Bruno Mattei
The surprisingly robust filmography of Italian director Bruno Mattei is like an endless library of laughably awful creations. The movies range across many different exploitation genres, from zombie films to Nazi porn (no, seriously), but I refer mainly to his blatant plagiarism of many classic American films, including Predator (Robowar), Jaws (Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws), and Rambo (Strike Commando). Of course, my favorite is the movie which plays out like a shot-for-shot recreation of Aliens, and goes by the name…Terminator 2. Again, I’m dead serious. He even beat James Cameron to the punch by two years!

Pretty Much Anything By Uwe Boll
If you know anything about Uwe Boll, you know why I’m bringing him up here. Needless to say, he’s become legendary for his ability to take popular (or sometimes, not) video game franchises and castrate everything that was ever holy and sacred about them for their film adaptations…and yet we all still come crawling back to see them, possibly because we know we’re getting a good (read: bad) product. It’s a sad indicator when your career highlight is having a cameo in your own film wherein you get shot to death by police officers…along with all the innocent children the room. I swear I’m not lying!

Pretty Much Any SyFy Original Movie
Though the 1980s golden age of B-movies may be long gone, its tradition lives on through the glorious vessel that is the SyFy channel. Flip it on late at night and you’ll likely be greeted with the sight of horribly CGI-rendered beasties being shot at by clueless actors in their late 40s with grenade launchers. I guarantee that almost any one of them is bound to be a laugh-out-loud masterpiece…it’s just a shame you have to wallow through hours of Wrestlemania to see them.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
OK, I’m not going to lie: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is the single greatest movie ever made. Yes, yes it is. How could it not be? Think about it: Jesus Christ teams up with a Mexican wrestler and a spandex-wearing secret agent nun to defend the lesbians of Ottawa, Canada from surgeons, atheists, and skin-harvesting vampires. What, exactly, in that sentence does NOT sound like the greatest thing ever?! Watch this movie. Like seriously, right now. It’s the best.

Now go forth, my friends. Go forth, and embrace the awfulness!

A Rant Concerning the Horrifying Implications of the Mario Party Series

2010-04-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

I am certainly not a stranger to being the odd-one-out in a debate. Though not by choice, I often end up as the black sheep when discussing the many facets of popular culture. In a conversation with me, exclamations of, “How can you not like X?” or “What’s wrong with Y?” are fairly commonplace. By no means is this intentional, but I’ll defend my opinions to the death anyway, with a fervor that one might not expect from such conceptually unimportant topics.

And never was this more apparent than when I declared my hatred of Mario Party.

A thousand curses upon thee, foul box art!

Upon the release of this crucial information, a feverish frenzy of words soon followed. And since I always explain myself much better in written form than in the hot seat of such an active conversation, I figured I’d take the time to fully exposit what Mario Party, and Nintendo as a whole, has come to represent.

Now, unless you were born at any time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know these games well. A string of eight titles (currently, and not including handheld titles) ranging all the way back to the humble Nintendo 64, Mario Party was just one of many new spinoff genres through which Mario could snake out of actually being in a platformer again. At heart, it was an electronic manifestation of the classic Milton-Bradley board game setup; players rolled the die, moved their bulbous-headed, big-eyed mascot of choice an according number of spaces, and watched the consequences play out. At the end of each round, a minigame would occur that players could win for an added bonus. The goal was to gather as many stars as possible (because, as an influential critical hero of mine has stated, it is always stars); whoever has the most when the last round has finished wins. This simple concept has remained popular and lucrative to this very day.

But let not the simplicity of the concept nor the colorful cuteness of the graphics blind you from the fact that, at heart, the Mario Party franchise is a dark, unfeeling entity. After all, there’s much to be said about such a basic idea having spawned seven rather unnecessary sequels over the course of three console generations, serving little more purpose than to add minor revisions to the already well-rounded formula at the expense of a $50-$60 tax per victim to throw onto the Official Nintendo Money Pile™. But that’s not even the true source of my distaste. No, the Mario Party games, in my mind, represent something far grander and more sinister than that.

Although I'd also like to point out that these games are also partially responsible for creating this abomination.

To understand why, you have to mentally wind the dial of time back into the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo was a very different entity back then, as was the home console market. The former, having finally secured a safe future for the latter with the good ol’ NES, was thriving profitably in the limelight. Of course, the market was also young, and it largely maintained the sensibilities of its arcade predecessor, i.e. the desire to siphon every quarter from every pocket of every dumbstruck grade school reject. And of course, the best way to ensure that kids would keep on pouring coins into the slots of arcade machines worldwide was to make the games damn near impossible to beat in one try. Unfortunately, even with the dawn of gaming machines that had no need for such a thing, this tradition lived on. These days, my friends, were the days of “Nintendo Hard”.

Also known as the "Ninja Gaiden Effect".

One-hit deaths. Limited respawns. Bosses that took up half the screen and had a health bar eight times the size of yours. Such were the hidden trademarks of this time in history, casually hidden behind the inviting 8-bit graphics and memorable MIDI sound effects. But while these types of games could be frustrating, they were, paradoxically, entertaining at the same time. Every time you heard that ominous “game over” tune in Super Mario Bros., you weren’t sad that you died; you were excited to see how much further you could get next time. It was all about mastery through repetition, gradually taking hold of the game’s inner mechanics and bending them to your whim, just so you could have the satisfying reward of eventually overcoming the challenge, or at least finding out if the princess really was another castle. “Nintendo Hard”, in many ways, was a blessing for the culture and art of video games as much as it was a curse for the average, weak-thumbed consumer.

And nothing is a further testament to the long, strange history of Nintendo than just how ironic this phrase has become. Because while the age of “Nintendo Hard” has long since passed, the demand for the gradually mastery of games lives on in many (if far-less unfairly difficult) modern titles…except most Nintendo games. And while this current situation has had a number of factors behind it, if there’s any one scapegoat I can blame for this transition, it would be Mario Party.

In essence, Mario Party is the exact opposite of “Nintendo Hard”. There is little to no room for improvement; ultimately, your fate is controlled not by you, but by the almighty die. In general, the minigames are the one area of game in which actual skill comes into play, and surely enough there is a fairly noticeable advantage to anyone who can actually play these games the best (however simple-minded they may usually be). But in the end, all of your well-earned coins and stars (the currency by which you are intended to win the game) can be stripped away from you in an instant, most times not by a mistake on your own part but by a simple twist of fate.

Worse yet, the game delivers rewards to those who don’t deserve them. Simply landing on the most of certain colored spaces – a factor, once again, controlled by that big ol’ die in the sky – can earn you a precious star in the end, which in itself may be enough to secure victory. You can even win a star for having the most coins at the end of the game…when you stole almost all of them in the last round by playing a battle game and winning by sure luck. What are you trying to say Nintendo? Are we rewarding last-second burglary now? And let’s not forget the infamous Fortune Spaces, which randomly (I can’t help but use this word as much as possible for emphasis) assigns one player to cough up their goods to another. It may just be a game, but when I see all of my hard-earned stars handed over to some schmuck who couldn’t even figure out how to make a single combo in the Mario’s Puzzle Party minigame, well…

Yeah, pretty much this.

All of this, in my mind, vehemently assaults a key tenet of good gaming: when you fail, you should feel like it is your own fault. Random factors come into play in almost every game, that much is certain; however, a well-designed game will not make you feel as though you were doomed to your ultimate end for any other reason other than your own ineptitude. This is the very same drive that invites players to try again with a new approach, actually improve their capabilities and, when done properly, render random chance a non-factor. Mario Party, on the other hand, revels in its chaos. It considers the arbitrary nature of the game as a vital element of its fun. Ultimately though, part of the fun in competitive games is a sense of order and understanding of the rules, and to be a given a chance to utilize whatever skills they may have that pertain to the game. In so many different ways, Mario Party desecrates this ideal.

You may claim that game remains fun regardless of its chaos, but just think about the philosophy in-and-of-itself. Who would play football if the success of every play rested on a dice roll? Or if the pins of bowling randomly re-aligned themselves before every round? Or if in baseball, occasionally, just occasionally, a bomb would fall on first base and kill the runner if he happened to be there? Do these games remain fun? Or does the soul-siphoning realization that every action can be thwarted by dumb luck drain every bit of dignity from them?

And it’s not just Mario Party, not by a long shot. As a whole, Nintendo has chosen to move all of gaming in this direction in order to appeal to the “casual gaming” crowd. Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii have both received lukewarm or even downright hostile reactions from many fans of the original games, and from my experience this rests solely on the house that Mario Party built. Hell, the Wii itself thrives on the concept of accessibility over depth and mastery. I can’t help but emphasis once more the irony of the whole situation.

They have certainly proved, of course, that this is a lucrative path. And, hey, despite my twisted ramblings, most people will still claim that they love these games. And power to them! I can understand why; the emphasis on multiplayer shenanigans and sheer wackiness of it all makes a direct callback to that aforementioned era of board game dominance, just without all the choking hazards. But at the same time I can’t help but feel like they serve as a detrimental antithesis to many of the aspects that make video games interesting and more evolved than their tabletop cousins: constant discovery, evolving gameplay, and the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles. These are elements that connect the art of gaming to that of the film medium, allowing us to personally reach highs and lows in the same way a character might in a movie.

I guess if Mario Party were a film, it would be kinda like Meet the Spartans.

EDIT: It just occurred that this comic strip essentially sums up everything I just wrote in about three panels.

2nd Annual Stavers Awards Presents: Best of Everything 2009

2010-01-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

Stating the obvious here, I should note that I'm sometimes a little resentful of the reputation I've earned amongst acquaintances as being "that guy who hates everything". My rejection of many pop-culture facets has absolutely nothing to do with some kind of internalized drive to spew bile over all that I see. In fact, I'd go so far as to blame the high bar I've set for culture as being due to loving too much. Certainly, nothing would improve without some disgruntled voice in the background pointing out the flaws in any human development. That's what critics are here for: to promote that which drives us forward, and by virtue cast out that which drags us down. Without attempting to sound too self-centered, we're doing you guys a favor in some ways. You wouldn't want to see every film be as bad as Battlefield Earth, right?

That's why I've decided to do things a little differently with this round-up of last year's greats. Consider this as the indication that I do, in fact, enjoy art a great deal, and that these are some examples of what exemplify that love. And in addition to music, I've decided to throw in movies and video games as well, which I'm planning to expand on in the blog's future. I know some people seem to like my album reviews specifically for some odd reason, as if I'm not qualified to dig into other media...but hey, if that's the case, just read the music stuff while I pave the way for my own personal self-indulgence. Err, I mean...the future.

Each category is ordered alphabetically; ever since the regrets circling my last awards session, I've inhibited the listing system altogether. Note that I may edit this list later should I encounter something from 2009 that I missed earlier that I feel deserves a mention.

Music

Behemoth – Evangelion
You can always count on Behemoth to unload some refined, passionate blackened death metal to the public, and so it is once more with Evangelion. Though their sound hasn’t changed very dramatically since at least three albums ago, you’ll be too busy trying – and failing – to keep up with their punishing riffs to notice. Though constant thrashing can occasionally get tedious, Behemoth is a little better at keeping things interesting on this album; not to mention, it always helps when your drummer is one of the best drummers in metal today. If you’ve enjoyed Behemoth before, or simply want a reprieve from all of the sloppy Suffocation clones out there, this one’s a keeper.

Between the Buried and Me – The Great Misdirect
2007’s Colors was a critically acclaimed tour de force that shattered expectations and secured a place for BtBaM as one of the forerunners of experimentation in metal. In fact, it was predicted that whatever followed Colors would be lost inside the shadow of its predecessor and be seen as nothing but a disappointment; unfortunately, a lot of critics have labeled The Great Misdirect as such. Personally, though, even if it’s not a career best, The Great Misdirect is an epic, dynamic, and impressive release that expands upon BtBaM’s more esoteric influences. The metalcore and prog-rock foundation that sustains the album is intermixed with musical styles from all over the spectrum, including jazz, classical, death metal, folk, and even Western (trust me, you’ll know when that moment pops up). Great lyrics, immensely talented and technical musicians, some truly touching moments…what more do you need? Forgo the haters and pick up this excellent, excellent album.

Devin Townsend Project – Ki and Addicted
The Canadian wonder has been pulling all the stops as of late; between an upcoming sequel to Ziltoid the Omniscient as well as two more releases from the Project in 2010, he’ll have created five albums over the course of two years. Fortunately, if you aren’t already aware of this master musician’s works of wonder, there are no better two works to start with than these. Ki is an intentionally hushed and restrained work than doesn’t burst with the intense energy Townsend is known for, instead working with careful subtlety and pulling back whenever it’s about to explode. Addicted, by contrast, is a (gasp) outright poppy album with crunchy guitar, extravagant keyboards, and the beautiful guest vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen. Both are welcoming without sacrificing the zaniness and experimental feel that Devin Townsend strives for, and are excellent additions to his already enviable release library.

Giant Squid – The Ichthyologist
The Ichthyologist was originally self-released by the band and limited to a mere 1,000 printed copies, making the actual disc a rare find. Now that it’s been re-released on a record label, I implore you to listen to it in any way you can. This conceptual masterpiece, following the story of a man who deprives himself of his humanity as he travels out onto the far reaches of the ocean, is incredibly original, startlingly coherent, and a massive leap forward from Giant Squid’s preceding debut. Though featuring chilling cello shrills; grungy guitar riffs; folky, banjo-ridden interludes; and a wide array of bizarre vocals (both of the male and female variety), the many clever tricks pulled by the band in no way inhibit its mighty storytelling abilities, making the music entertaining, new, and emotional simultaneously. If you missed this one the first time around (and you probably did, statistically speaking), do not miss it again!

Gorod – Process of a New Decline
You may have gathered that I am a huge fan of technical death metal, enjoying the excellent combo of metal’s glamour and power with jazz’s precision and technicality. So understandably, it takes a lot to impress a guy whose favorite genre exhibits daily miracles of virtuoso playing. Well, Gorod has done it. Their flawless playing is enough to make my jaw drop…and this is coming from a guy who listens to Necrophagist. That being said, Gorod’s true claim-to-fame, with this album in particular, is their ability to add a heaping dose of melody and pseudo-philosophical musings to these proceedings, making the album as catchy and engaging as it is ridiculously over-the-top. Watershed, in particular, was one of my favorite songs this year.

Karl Sanders – Saurian Exorcisms
From the same genius who brought us the songwriting and guitar mastery from the band Nile (see below) comes an excellent solo project that takes us around the ancient world through song. Drawing influence from the music of ancient Egyptian, Tibetan, and Indian cultures, and featuring an arsenal of instruments originating from those times and places, Saurian Exorcisms is an ambient, instrumental window into history. Everything apart from the clean and polished production job is intended to make you feel as though you are living in the past, and the fact that it succeeds so readily in this modern age is truly a success to be applauded. This was probably soundly rejected by a fair chunk of the fevered metal maniacs that form a part of Nile’s interests, but if your own interest in world music glows strong, then this album is an essential.

Nile – Those Whom the Gods Detest
I’ve already detailed the majority of my love for Nile in last year’s review, but it’s worth remembering the sheer mindbreaking awesomeness that they deliver with their latest opus. As always, combining brutal death metal madness at break-neck speed with worldly Middle Eastern influences has resulted in another powerful, addictive masterpiece. Again, it doesn’t divert from the Nile formula too much (aside from finally delivering an exceptional sound production), but all you really need to know is this: if any self-proclaimed “metalhead” isn’t headbanging within seconds of the first riff on Kafir!, then they may have to reconsider their goal in life.

Oranssi Pazuzu – Muukalainen Puhuu
For an album whose name is such a mouthful, its goal is fairly simple and straightforward: launch black metal into space. The result is a dark odyssey into the spacey realm of Oranssi Pazuzu. However, though a good percentage of the album is devoted to tremolo picking and sharp screeches reminiscent of traditional black metal, this is still a fairly accessible album in comparison to, say, Wolves in the Throne Room. Largely keyboard-driven, the album often zones out into open emptiness that very much reminds the listener of deep space. It’s strange and often incomprehensible to be sure…much like the universe itself.

Propagandhi – Supporting Caste
Proving that punk rock need not always dwell in the same swamp of irrelevance wherein Green Day and Rise Against seem intent on camping in, Propagandhi demonstrates that the true spirit of punk is miraculously still alive, and even evolving. Intense, energetic, and surprisingly technical, Supporting Caste makes a series of grand social statements without sacrificing catchiness and head-crushing machismo. Though clearly drawing from hardcore influences that exist far beyond the realm of the initial punk movement, Propagandhi is perhaps the best living “echo” of this age, and deserves a great deal more respect, in both musicianship and penmanship, than its more famous contemporaries.

Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions
The album art of Monoliths & Dimensions features an enormous, gaping black hole; truly, few things are more reminiscent of the sound Sunn O))) creates. This is not the kind of music you dig into with active intent; listen to it in the wrong environment, and all is lost, reducing the music to seeming like little more than noise. But it you set aside the proper time and place to really sink your teeth into the album, the grand majesty and impeccable atmosphere of M&D begins to unfold and devour you. The humming bass and droning sounds that make up the bulk of the experience, usually without any percussion backing them, create a massive wall of sound that is both calming and disturbing at the same time. Frankly, describing the encounter any more than that is nearly impossible, so I suggest you, yourself, attempt the bold experiment that Sunn O))) has produced for us to tinker with in our own special way.

Movies

Avatar
Just kidding! OK, I haven't even seen Avatar, so it's not like I can complain about it either...but for a movie that's on track to be the highest grossing of all time, my interest is exceptionally low for a movie that looks to me to be "Ferngully in Space: Revenge of the Elven Colonialist Smurfs"

District 9
Let me get this out of the way: in no way did I think that District 9 was nearly as inventive or flawless as many other critics across the world did. It’s a little ham-handed in its anti-discrimination theme, it juggles the documentary-style bits with the character-driven action somewhat awkwardly, there are some massive plot holes scattered across the story, the “villains” are fairly stock, and most of the third act revolves around mindless violence and some pretty illogical character motivations. So, why do I even like it all? Because you have no idea how refreshing it is to see a sci-fi action film with a brain in its head. For all its faults, District 9 is packed with enough wall-to-wall, nail-biting action to match all of its summer competitors rolled into one, not to mention that it’s absolutely relentless with its gore (you don’t grab a profitable PG-13 rating with guns that liquefy the human torso with lightning); at the same time, it has a heart, a message with good intent, and – most shocking of all – sympathetic characters. In comparison to the glut of lobotomized, pointless dull-fests that infected the cinema in 2009 (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, that godforsaken Transformers sequel, etc.), District 9 is a shining beacon, and as a debut for newcomer director Neill Blomkamp, it’s pretty impressive.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox
In a world where CGI can conjure up any perfectly crafted image the heart desires with a few simple mouse clicks – and one in which the species that has mastered this technology uses it most prominently to tell dumb stories about talking penguins – it’s nice to see a film that dares to be ugly…and, by virtue, beautiful in a different sense. The stop-motion visuals of The Fantastic Mr. Fox seem so delightfully homemade that the film has you hooked aesthetically from the outset, meshing greatly with the fairly retro musical presentation. Surprisingly, it also makes for an excellent story, morphing the fairly brief Roald Dahl story into a feature-length crime-drama presentation that’s equal parts Ocean’s 11 and Chicken Run. Though the tale is simple enough for children to follow, I’m willing to bet that the film is even more enjoyable for adults, thanks in part to the interesting characters but mostly thanks to a very surreal and mature sense of humor. This one may have been very easy to overlook before, (fearing the butchering of another Dahl classic, I had to be dragged into this one, myself) but don’t let it slip you by forever.

Inglorious Basterds
Taratino likes to make things difficult for his critics, doesn’t he? I spent a few hours after my first screening of this film debating with myself constantly over whether or not I even enjoyed the damn thing. And while there’s a lot of it I detest, the details of which I will spare you for the sake of brevity – some new, others inherent to Tarantino’s directorial style – there’s no denying in the end that it’s a finely crafted movie. My main problems arose from reviewing the overarching story as a whole, where I feel some issues are present in the ending and the character development, but in retrospect Inglorious Basterds is really about “moments”. Like any respectable Tarantino flick, it features some incredibly sharp dialogue, which is really what makes the movie; in some scenes there’s so much tension built up in a room by the characters’ expressions and words that you could practically cut through it with a knife. It’s also an aesthetically appealing film that recreates a specific time in history while simultaneously rewriting the timeline itself. I suppose that the overall statement that the movie is trying to make is fairly empty to me, or even non-existent entirely, but the dialogue alone is worth the price of admission.

Up
You may have noticed my attempts to distance myself from a ranking system in both my traditional reviews and these itemized lists. I do this primarily to avoid controversy and to adjust for potential changes of personal opinion after the fact. That being said, Up is probably the only kind of film that could make me declare it, without hesitation, “Movie of the Year”. It’s just phenomenal; between this and WALL-E, I’m fairly certain there’s no better and more passionate group of filmmakers out there today than Pixar. I mean, this is a movie about a crotchety old man (whose initial cynicism reminds me a great deal of myself, mind you) and an annoying tag-along youngster…and it’s far wittier, more action-packed, and more emotionally powerful than anything else released in years. It’s also one of Pixar’s riskiest moves, juggling fast-paced action and pop culture references with some pretty deep themes and feelings lying underneath…but it pays off, big time. There’s really nothing I can say to deride this film; it’s funny, engaging, and, most significantly, even sad. I have absolutely no shame in telling you all that I spent the first ten minutes of this movie bawling like an infant (for reasons I wish to keep secret from anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet), and if you don’t as well, I think something may be seriously be wrong with you. I simply cannot understate the greatness of Up. Watch it. NOW.

A Bunch of Things That Probably Would’ve Been Good If I Ever Did See Them, But Never Actually Did
Man, I need to get to the theater more often.

Games

Assassin’s Creed II
The first Assassin’s Creed had one of the most mixed and varied reactions I had ever seen from a game; with unique gameplay and presentation buried under an abnormally repetitive story campaign, it was a game you either loved or hated. But assuming you enjoyed the first game’s few moments of clarity, it’s nearly impossible not to walk away impressed by Assassin’s Creed II. This is the perfect textbook example of a good sequel: it fixes nearly all of the original’s major flaws and adds a massive amount of new features to boot. The result is an enormous sandbox game with nearly endless things to do and, more importantly, a game that really puts you in the shoes of a badass master assassin. Yeah, the combat is still pretty mundane, usually alternating between hammering on the attack button or waiting to counter your enemies, but the game is usually very good at letting you choose your own approach to a mission, and a wide array of new tools and moves at your disposal will make either careful stealth or bull-headed aggression a viable option. The game lets you put these skills to the test in a long, winding campaign with a huge variety of different scenarios – solving the biggest problem about the first Creed – while keeping the tight controls and excellent storytelling that’s equal parts Italian Renaissance simulation and sci-fi-flavored conspiracy-theorist’s dream. I could go on about the awesome moments this game let me par-take in – like when I kicked a guard off the rooftops whilst soaring through the air on a flying machine invented by Leonardo da Vinci, or when I ran halfway up a wall, jumped sideways over the heads of the guards blocking my pursuit, and stabbed both of my targets in the throat simultaneously as I dropped down – but really, there’s only one thing I need to say to purvey the greatness of Assassin’s Creed II: you get to fight the fucking Pope.

Batman: Arkham Asylum
It’s frightening how much the quality of Batman’s gaming career has mirrored that of his film legacy. For decades at a time attempts at a critically successful game based on everyone’s favorite Dark Knight have come and gone with only disappointment in their wake, and the reason is one that we’ve seemingly only recently identified: none of them really made you feel like Batman! But just as Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster reboots have brought the darkness and inner demons of true, comic-style Batman back to the cinema, so has Arkham Asylum finally captured the essence of controlling the Caped Crusader. Using a combination of ingenious gadgets and impeccable stealth – probably the best stealth gameplay I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing, actually – the game allows you to strike fear into your opponents without them even spotting you; even if they do, an excellent freeflow combat system makes taking on waves of goons and thugs a snap without diminishing the challenge. Fuse this glorious gameplay to a top-notch atmosphere and presentation (particularly during Scarecrow’s Eternal-Darkness-esque nightmare sequences), a worthy plot with a line-up of classic Batman villains (with Mark Hamill reprising his role as The Joker…awesome), and a motherlode of hidden secrets and memorabilia, and you can fully understand why Arkham Asylum made a huge splash last summer. My only complaints lie within the lackluster boss fights and some occasionally shoddy writing (say what you want about Bale’s growls in The Dark Knight, but at least he never uttered lines like, “I eat punks like this for breakfast”)

Blazblue: Calamity Trigger (yes, I know the arcade release was in 2008, but since when did anyone relevant care about arcades?)
Arc System Works became renowned as gods by the fighting game community thanks to the excellent Guilty Gear series, and that legacy clearly lives on through BlazBlue (pronounced “BLAZE-blue”…yes, I’m sure). Like Guilty Gear, it thrives on overtly Japanese anime kookiness – I cite such examples as the vampire whose cat morphs into an umbrella during combat, the ridiculously loud and brazen ninja whose super-ultra-special attack has its own theme music, and the shy police lieutenant who has an inferiority complex about her breasts – but thanks to the fantastic American localization, it actually translates out to a plot that’s both interesting and even hilarious, though figuring out the complex intricacies of it might require rigorous study, complimented by flowcharts. Just as fine-tuned are the graphics, in the form of pixel-perfect 2D-sprites against fully-rendered 3D backgrounds, and the soundtrack, featuring riff-tastic compositional masterpieces courtesy of Daisuke Ishiwatari. Of course, the core of the action is the hyper-quick, hyper-polished fighting system, endowed with a berth of options and excellently balanced and unique characters. As is the Arc Sys tradition, this is a heavily skill-based fighter with a tremendously steep learning curve, but in a land ruled by more sluggish, dull, and convoluted 3D-fighters like Tekken and Soul Calibur, Blazblue’s gorgeous 2D presentation and near-perfect combat are an absolute godsend.

Borderlands
Borderlands sometimes feels like the twisted Frankenstein fantasy of the modern gamer; it takes the open worlds and abhorrent looting of Diablo II, the post-apocalyptic wasteland setting of Fallout, and the mindless shooter action and co-op play of Halo…and furthermore, somehow makes it work. It doesn’t exactly provide much in the way of new ideas, but in addition to all the mechanics of the game working in tune, Borderlands is just downright devilishly addictive, especially when you’ve got two or more players to help cut down on your questing time. Why exactly these “loot-tastic” games, wherein you have to spend five minutes after each treasure chest comparing damage values, manage to stay so engaging is really beyond me, but it’s at least slightly more apparent with Borderlands, wherein those weapons have some pretty creative and equally awesome powers (like poisoned sniper rifles, or shotguns that shoot rockets). Its paper-thin plot and occasional feeling of repetition detract from it being this year’s epic, groundbreaking shooter, but it will likely remain in our memories for a long time as a co-op multiplayer standby.

Brütal Legend
Games have already conveyed a number of key emotions and feelings – happiness, anger, sadness, vengeance, regret, etc. – but until 2009 none of them legitimately made me think or say, “damn, that’s fucking metal”. Fortunately, apparent headbanger Tim Schafer – the man behind Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, which makes him awesome enough by default – was willing to make this fervent dream of metalheads everywhere into a reality. Granted, the gameplay itself isn’t perfect; the free-roaming world it presents runs out of new tasks to do fairly quickly, the story itself is startlingly short, and the core of the game is composed of a fairly watered-down real-time-strategy game. But at the same time, I’m willing to forgive these normally grievous faults because…well, because it’s so metal. The world and graphical style look plucked right out of power metal album covers, the voice acting and storytelling is superb and features a great deal of neat cameos (Ozzy Osbourne is the guy who upgrades your car and weapons…no, really, that’s how metal this game is), and the soundtrack is probably the best ever to be put to disc (every game should have Black Sabbath and Megadeth playing in the background). As for the controversial business of the actual game portion, I actually found it pretty enjoyable for a console RTS, as it sidesteps the needless micromanagement and allows you to fight alongside your troops (plus, you can’t really complain about a bladed wagon that impales your enemies’ hearts with a subterranean spike…again, totally metal). It’s not perfect by any means, but any game that makes me want to headbang and throw the horns has already earned my respect. \m/

So long, 2009. May 2010 bring us even greater innovations in the art form...and fewer Transformers sequels.

... : "I’m Not a Fan, But the Kids Like It!" Review

2010-01-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

Experiment #: 2304
Subject #: 4305
Artifact #: 001 (Codename Omega)
Purpose: To test the environment in which we hope to scientifically interact with the artifact without risk, and to observe the artifact's effects on an intelligent human being
Medium: Recording
Status: FAILED

[The following recordings were obtained from a device operated by Subject #4305, tasked with performing experiments and research operations on Artifact 001. He was allowed access only to broad data on the artifact in question, knowing not of its more…potent capabilities. These recordings will be studied in turn to observe whether or not the artifact can be studied in a controlled environment with expressed variables.]

[static]

Hello? Is this on? Test…test, one, two…OK…

This recording device will serve as a diary of my progress during my mission. I’ve been advised not to identify my name or who I work for, only recording data that pertains exclusively to my research. My employers are confident that my work could possibly prevent a great deal of pain and suffering from the world, and while I do not yet understand the degree of peril that this mission represents, I’m going into it with an air of caution and scientific sensibility, as I have been trained to.

The mission parameters are simple: to listen and record my findings on an audio CD entitled I’m Not a Fan, But the Kids Like It!, released by a band called BrokeNCYDE. I have never heard of these individuals up until this point, and I fail to see how a single CD could compromise a danger, as I believe my employers described it. Yet if I can somehow identify why this is, and perhaps find a way to avert it, then mankind may perhaps be saved.

To whoever may listen to this tape, wish me luck!

[static]

The cover art of this album depicts a set of four suburban males, attempting emulate both the tropes of "emo" culture as well as befitting the stereotypes of "urban" African-Americans. In addition, the first track of the CD seems to be a composite of creative-commons WAV files shamelessly compiled into an irrelevant, sci-fi-flavored mess, followed by a cliché explosion. Understandably, my hopes for something intelligible and cultured have already been dashed.

The first track began, and suddenly the keyboard meandering was pierced by a pre-pubescent scream. Good Lord…I had no idea that human vocal cords could produce something so abhorrently irritating. Was this, perhaps, why I was tasked to overview this album? Could the leading man of this band possibly be afflicted by a new disease that rots and decays the voicebox?

Whatever the case, the screams continued, overlaid upon singing so auto-tuned that it may as well not be human, but machine. Perhaps…it is. I will be sure to research into the identities of these talentless vocalists ASAP.

This combination of lame keyboards, lamer vocals, and random shrieking continued with nearly no variation for the next three minutes and thirty-six seconds. My hand quickly reached to pause the music at that point, apparently not just so that I could record my notes but out of subconscious drive that had developed in my brain over that time. Intriguing…

Despite my clear dislike of this music, I am devoted to finishing my research. Perhaps something hidden in this mess will provide something of remote use…or, at the very least, will make the music listenable.

[static]

Nothing has changed. The same behavior described in my previous record has continued unopposed for quite some time now. What had at first been mildly amusing as a hilariously terrible novelty has now grown into a worsening repugnance, and I fear I may not have the will necessary to continue. I still do not yet know what danger this record could pose to the world, however, and so must not yet regress my sacrifice.

In my spare time between tracks, in an effort to wash out this befouled recordings from my mind, I have researched the individuals response behind this terrible artifact. They have christened themselves with confusing nicknames, such as Se7en, Antz, and Phat J. The role of Antz, in particular, has become something of a mystery to me, for the liner notes list him as being responsible for “Rockstar beats”. As I fail to understand what they means, I have theorized that it is a cover for the fact that this man has had no true impact in this creation. I propose instead that he was the guy who served appetizers and beverages to the other members in the recording studio lounge.

I have also begun to investigate the lyrical content of this release, expecting that they may form some kind of code that exposes the aforementioned malice described by my employers. So far, I have found nothing but an abject rejection of the laws of English grammar and spelling, as well as repeated mentionings of the word “fuck”.

One particular line has me baffled. It states, and I quote, “Oh yeah i got my hurrr did nicely high top nike's always in my white tee”. I felt outright…defiled upon hearing this the first time. Besides making no sense, it seems to project an aura of outright evil and stupidity upon being said. I...can't quite describe it. Perhaps this is what I was warned of.

I can only pray that the worst is over, and that tomorrow brings me ever closer to salvation from this…this…thing.

[static]

(vomiting sounds)

Oh God…oh God oh God oh God…

(vomiting sounds)

(long pause)

What I have heard…cannot be unheard. This thing – I now refuse to refer to it as music – has damaged my mind beyond repair. I am…sickened by it.

The particular offense in question came after hearing a skit found earlier in the alb-…thing. For research purposes, I will now transcribe the script of this…abomination for the record. I quote:

Male Subject #1: Hey girl, why don't you, uh, come over and suck this daddy dick.
Male Subject #2: What the fuck (unintelligible sounds) what the fuck did you just say? (unintelligible sounds) You want me to suck that daddy dick (unintelligible sounds) You think I'm a fucking faggot dawg, I'll beat the shit outta you homey! (unintelligible sounds)
Male Subject #1: Oh shit. Fuck. Fuck dawg, let me try this shit again. (dialing sounds)
Female Subject #1: Hello?
Male Subject #1: Hey wassup girl, (unintelligible sounds) you wanna roll over?
Female Subject #1: (unintelligible sounds) you know I want that daddy dick.

(vomiting sounds)

…I was overcome with sickness the first time I heard it. My throat is raw from the vomiting…

Good God…what is this? I feel…I feel…

…raped!

[static]

That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. This BrokeNCYDE phenomenon is clearly nothing more than an outlet by which reasoned men such as myself can be driven INSANE.

Those awful screams haunt my nightmares, whispering lyrics so profoundly lacking in logic or rational human thought that I am beginning to suspect that they are nothing less than the product of demons. In one track, they repeat the words “booty call” so much that I was almost granted an aneurism to relieve of this wretched duty. In another, they describe the process of partying in a fashion as juvenile as that of a twelve-year who has just learned to swear. I had initially entered this project with the feeling that this atrocious monstrosity posing as music was just the product of an overtly-elaborate parody, or perhaps as punishment for the wicked, but now I don’t feel that way. These are human beings who truly believe that their craft, as inane and sadistic as it is, is truly a work of art. My brain aches from this thought, but I cannot deny the truth.

I have not been aided by the newly acquired knowledge that these terrors have referred to the genre in which they perform as “crunkcore”. To break my professional demeanor for a moment, I must ask: what kind of joke is that? What in the world is “crunk”? And doesn’t the “-core” suffix imply the presence of hardcore music influences…which clearly do not exist here? Is this genre an illusion?! Am I losing my mind?!

Worse yet is the knowledge that people are already being exposed to this dark relic. 6,000 copies were sold in the first week of release. People are actually buying this! Some may actually…like it! Gah!!

I get it now. The music itself is the danger. I’m only halfway through the album and have already begun to slip into potentially irreversible mental decay. This thing is siphoning my braincells, destroying my mind! And it’s happening to others all across the globe!

I’m leaving as we speak. People have to be warned. It is clear to me now that my life’s purpose will be to eradicate the plague known as I’m Not a Fan, But the Kids Like It! from the world.

[static]

It won’t let me leave. It won’t let me leave.

(sobbing noises)

This void of intelligence traps me here. I may be doomed to listen to this album forever, like some kind of purgatory of endless stupidity.

It is the worst! The worst thing ever crafted by human hands! What have we done…WHAT HAVE WE DONE!

(sobbing noises)

[static]

The singer just spent precious seconds of my remaining life listing, I quote, “bitches I fucked”. I am certain that these are the exact verses that were prophesized to call upon the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

[static]

I don’t know how much longer my sanity is going to last. I may very well die here. But I will spend my last moments analyzing the HELL out of this foul opposition to nature, so that when this recording is found, I will have done my part to prevent total disaster.

[static]

“I got these bitches on my jock dog”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!

Are they mentally deficient, or just exploitative and demeaning beyond comprehension? And why, in either case, are they so intent upon spreading the knowledge that they possess a male penis?!

[static]

I believe I have stumbled upon the utter epitome of human idiocy. Somewhere amidst the tortured screams, I managed to decipher the words, “You make my pee-pee hard!”, which are then chanted endlessly.

I mean, what in the fuck…WHAT COULD POSSIB…

No…I have to control myself. I won’t let this thing beat me…I won’t…

(sobbing sounds)

[static]

(sobbing sounds, broken up occasionally by unintelligible mutterings)

[static]

“Crunk”…all I hear is “crunk”…and the screams…and the FIRE…

It burns…the sound BURNS.

Maybe…this isn’t real. Am I already dead? Is this Hell?

Yes, YES! It must be! Nothing could be a greater pain than this!

It’s all in my head, yes!

It’s all in my head, It’s all in my head, It’s all in my head, It’s all in my head…
(repeats for several minutes)

[static]

Please…kill…now.

Doom…everyone…no escape.

(long pause)

Party…sex…crunnnnnnk…

Is the…end? Feeling…angry sad. Mind gone. Mind all gone!

(very long pause)

I’m not a fan…hehe…heheHAheHAHA…

But…haha…the kid’s...heheha…LIKE IT!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[static]

It’s over.

Everything. The noises. Gone. Erased.

My life is gone too.

Everything I’ve lived for. Destroyed. In the wake of that…thing…

I…

(pause)

I…I…I can still hear.

It’s in my head.

(pause)

IT’S IN MY HEAD!

NOOOOOO!!

HAHAHAHEEHAHAHEEEHAAHAHAAAAA!

NO! GET OUT! GET OUT!

KEKEKEKEOUTKEKEKEKEOFKEKEKEMYKEKEKEKEKEHEADKEKEKE!!!
NOOOOOOOO!! GRAAAAAH!!

OUUUUUUUTTTT!!!!!!

[static]

[The recording ends here. The subject was never recovered, though the recorder itself was found in a pool of blood that matched his own in subsequent DNA tests. We can only assume the kind of self-flagellation and mutilation that could have been derived from Artifact 001.

The artifact has been returned to storage. It is clearly unable to be researched in a controlled environment. We must turn our heads to the public, observe the damage being inflicted by the copies of the artifact…and pray for mercy from an unjust God.]

Aptly Named: "Angel Dust" Review

2010-01-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Album: Angel Dust
Artist: Faith No More
Genre: Avant-Garde / Experimental Rock
Length: 1:01:54
Release Date: June 8th, 1992
Label: Slash
Producer: Matt Wallace, Faith No More

Despite having just recovered from the rousing financial success of their 1989 release, The Real Thing, the wildly experimental rock group Faith No More denied the push for greater mainstream appeal, pulling a 180-degree turn and taking an entirely different approach to their sound. The result, Angel Dust, has proven to be one of greatest examples of success through experimentation and avant-garde mentality over stagnation and repetition.

It has also proven to be nuttier than peanut brittle.

Now, I’ve received some flak in the past for languishing on albums which hammer about on gimmicks and genre-benders rather than create a unique, self-proclaimed niche…not like I’m pointing fingers or anything [insert evil glare at Beck here]. At first glance, Angel Dust is nothing if not a “gimmick album”, sometimes completely hiding its hard rock foundations behind layers of bizarre genre insertions. Moments of thrashing metal or ballad-rock-esque riffage are certainly present, and indeed form the core of the Faith No More experience, but they tend to be masked by the outright twisted diversions the album often takes. Whether it’s cheerleaders chanting in the background of Be Aggressive, or the presence of sudden choir organs at the end of Jizzlobber (yes, Jizzlobber), there’s almost always something in each track meant to distract the listener from the band’s true roots. It’s often in these situations that I’m reminded of a magician performing a trick; it’s all about the spectacle and flair, meant to draw the eye (or, in the case of music, ear) from what’s really going on, never giving the audience a moment to wonder whether or not there’s any substance that lies behind the façade.

But in Faith No More’s case there is, and there are two simple reasons why: the risks they take are A.) justified, and B.) performed with elegance and class. You could certainly pick apart the album’s moments of mind-splitting, acid-tripping freak-outs and argue whether all of them are really necessary, but overall they tend to delightfully serve as means to an end, rather than the end itself. Take, for instance, one of the oddest of the bunch RV; here, multi-talented vocalist Mike Patton adopts the low-pitched, grumbling persona of a low-income, trailer-trash father, and describes – amidst the backdrop of a country-tinged guitar and fiddling piano – the utter amounts of sloth, stubbornness, and regret that define his pathetic life. You’re right to think that it sounds silly, and indeed the song will probably have you in stitches by the time Patton starts his lower-class rant about how his “pants fall down every time I bend over”, but there’s no denying it works. In addition to holding interest, this approach adds infinitely more credibility to the statement that the song is attempting to make about middle-America. Call it a gimmick, if you must, but while most gimmicks repel, this one sucked me in like a black hole.

Angel Dust is full of these brilliantly executed left-field moments, even in the times when the band is getting their rock on. Album opener Land of Sunshine is one of the more straightforward thrashers occasionally exhibited by the record, but when a series of descending keyboard notes give a dark, carnival-esque flavor to the proceedings, it makes even the straightforward seem intriguing and engaging. It even possesses some of the earliest proto-typical instances of rap meeting metal, lending to a nu-metal vibe that’s almost strong enough to promote mental images of Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst sitting outside the recording studio with a pen and notepad in hand, giggling wildly in hysteria. Other moments are simply, as the saying goes, “full of win”, such the track Crack Hitler (yes, Crack Hitler), which opens with guitar-scratching and funky bass so reminiscent of 80’s streetwise cop thrillers that it feels like it could be a suitable intro theme to Magnum P.I., or Midnight Cowboy, which is actually a cover of the theme of the 1969 drama film of the same name. And believe me, anything that could get to say words like this in a non-ironic manner is truly a few screws loose, if you catch my drift.

Of course – or at least as is my understanding – experimentation means nothing if the fundamentals aren’t in place, and Faith No More is at least competent in this area as well…unlike some people [insert evil glare yaddayaddayadda]. Patton’s aforementioned vocal talents are the strongest asset on display, capable of adapting to any needed role, from creepy whispers to fevered shouts to…yes, the rapping. The guitar tone and playstyle does not drift far from contemporary rock styles of the time, but it is executed with class, complexity, and even a few proggy outbursts. Interesting to note is that the bass and keyboards are practically just as prominent in the mix, if not more so, which lends a funky twist to the music. Surely, nothing about the music remains as interesting when the band’s experimenting gears aren’t spinning, but as far poppy, metal-tinged rock goes, it’s actually quite good in small doses, at least until the weirder stuff kicks in and things become deliciously haywire.

While this is certainly the magnum opus of Faith No More, and a prime example of how to properly create avant-garde music without complete failure, it is by no means perfect. In an album so rife with experimentation, it’s inevitable that some of them miss their mark with certain audiences; I, for one, did not gel with the rapping sections, though that may be because rap and metal usually mix about as well as pickled relish and raspberry jam. It’s also a tad on the long side, which may mean your interest may run dry over the course of a sustained listen. And indeed, as hinted before, one cannot shake the feeling that the underlying foundations aren’t nearly as stable without the extraneous layers to support it. And yet, for all its eccentricity, Angel Dust is still a work of art. With a bounty of clever ideas, thought-provoking lyrical themes, and even some catchy riffs here and there, it stands atop a pantheon of musical oddities to remain treasured as an influential classic. If nothing else, it’s good for at least one listen to absorb the kookiness that dwells within, as well as to affirm the idea that one does not need to be bland to be successful.

There is No God But God: "Those Whom the Gods Detest" Review

2009-11-09T18:56:00.000-08:00

Album: Those Whom the Gods Detest
Artist: Nile
Genre: “Egyptian” Brutal/Technical Death Metal
Length: 56:39
Release Date: November 3rd, 2009
Label: Nuclear Blast
Producer: Neil Kernon, Erik Rutan

…and so I entered that tomb of blackened pitch, a hollow artifact of a lost age buried deep beneath the sands of time. My hands grip the sarcophagus that hath contain the powers of which I seek. Trembling, gripped by a nameless fear, I slowly lift the obsidian stone, my eyes both disturbed by and beckoned to the unseen horrors within. Slowly, shadow gives way to the light of Ra, and in so doing ushers forth sounds and images beyond this world, horrors once immersed only within the burning pits of the Duat. I draw nearer, draped in terror yet unable to escape my own temptations. The sounds grow louder, and more feverish, until at last the barriers that withheld this ancient power shatter and unleash a sonic scream unlike anything imaginable to mortals, man or beast.

Within this brewing wrath hath reside the might of a thousand sandstorms, the militaristic might of a million pharaohs, the infinite flames of a million demons spawned of Apep himself. Both gods and men, past and future, cower before it as it destroys all who dare stand before it. Louder it grows, more frenzied, and from within I hear a single isolated howl, a demon’s voice that exclaims, “KAFIR!”. I look upon the hands that unearthed this ravenous pestilence and, amidst the chaos, ask myself, “What hast thou done?”

I already knew the answer. I hath unleashed Nile upon the world.

* * *

If you’re a regular to the world of extreme, you’re probably more than familiar with the sublime death metal innovator that is Nile. For those unaware, Nile is a brutal death metal band led by songwriter/vocalist/guitarist/musical genius Karl Sanders, revolving almost entirely around Egyptian and other Mediterranean cultures. To this end, the riffs are written in a number of various Middle Eastern scales, modes and instruments, and feature lyrics inspired by Egyptian mythology and history, or even excerpted directly from ancient texts (or those of famous horror-writer H.P. Lovecraft). It’s a formula that has shaken the death metal world time and time again, establishing Nile as leaders in metal songwriting and atmosphere. Unfortunately, many fans (of which I am one, in case you hadn’t quick picked up on the subtle hints yet) were disappointed in their 2007 release Ithyphallic. Here, much of atmosphere and interesting instrumentation were gone in favor of straightforward thrashing, capped off by terrible production values and an album title that gave way to more than a few penis jokes. I remained convinced, in spite of doubts dwelling deep in the back of my head, that Ithyphallic was the one-time product of a lack of inspiration, and that the inevitable successor would restore the band to their former glory. I was right.

I just didn’t know how right I was.

Those Whom the Gods Detest is an absolutely astounding piece of death metal gold. It’s the product of a trio renewed in their convictions and driven by their passion to create music that is as overwhelming as it is enthralling. And that seems odd, because in a manner of speaking, TWTGD doesn’t strongly alter the classic Nile formula in any way. So what exactly has improved enough for me to name this the best Nile album in years? Well…pretty much everything.

For starters, the production values are the best Nile has ever had. Much hyperbole was made on the toiling of the producers to craft the best Nile sound yet for this album, and there is no doubt that they delivered. Sure, their previous works achieved a dark, muddy sound that matched the music note for note, but something, be it the guitars on Black Seeds of Vengeance or the vocals on In Their Darkened Shrines, always seemed to get buried. TWTGD performs a miracle by retaining that same grittiness as the previous albums while simultaneously making every performer come in clear, crisp, and above all, powerful.

It’s also notable that this is probably the most technically demanding Nile album yet…which is saying an awful lot. Sanders and Dallas Toler-Wade are, as always, demons behind the six-strings; the rapid-fire guitar pickings and haunting harmonics in “Permitting the Noble Dead to Descend to the Underworld” have to be heard to be believed. The duality between their vocals works better than it did on Ithyphallic as well, even if Toler-Wades straightforward bellows receive more of the spotlight than Snader’s otherworldly growls on this venture. If any one member of the trio deserves props for his instrumental performance on this album, however, it’s George Kollias, the drummer. He’s quickly making a name for himself as one of the best drummers in the modern metal world today, and TWTGD is the best proof of that. His spastic drum fills are always entertaining and expertly precise, but he won’t truly blow your mind until you hear him pounding away at the double-bass at up to 300 BPMs (!!!).

Of course, Nile has always been less about the technical aspects of their music (at least compared to other similar bands) and more about that classic atmosphere, the ability of their music to sweep you away thousands of years into the past and transport you into the world of ancient Egypt. Where the previous album managed to fail in that regard for the first time, TWTGD brings it roaring back. It’s not exactly dripping with the shadowy atmosphere and unpredictability of ITDS, but it always incorporates enough unique ideas into each song to make them all distinctive and memorable in that old, “Sanders” way. The indescribable riffs that open “Utterances of the Crawling Dead”, for example, seem to be perfectly emblematic of the howls of spirits from beyond the grave. The title track opens with whispered ritualistic chanting alongside the playing of a sitar-like instrument, luring the listener into a false sense of security…before leaping for the throat in what quickly becomes one of Nile most vicious, most evil “epic” tracks (clocking at around eight-minutes, yet remaining gripping to the very end). Instead of opting for a couple of slower, doom-based riff monsters, the band cleverly inserts some doom sections into several of the faster tracks, with the only “4th Arra of Dagon” serving as the slow, plodding giant of the album. There’s even a non-metal instrumental very much akin to Karl Sander’s solo projects, and it’s probably one of the better ones to appear on a Nile album, featuring a number of unique instruments and creepy, chanting vocals to sell the ambiance.

If there’s any one track that serves as a representative for Nile as a whole, let alone the album, it is the opener, "Kafir!" (the subject of my little Lovecraftian-esque fiction at the start of this review). Over the course of roughly six minutes, it incorporates both the fast-flying fury and the slow, crushing madness that Nile is known for. Most notably, before the amazing solo and as the song closes, "Kafir!" incorporates beautifully sung Islamic prayer; the theme of song being the nature of Islam itself. Nile’s lyrics have always been deep and insightful, not to mention a learning experience worthy of the Discovery Channel (you know you’re good at song writing when you make a song about a Hittite ritual performed with dog crap seem interesting…no, really), but it’s songs like "Kafir!" that provide a social relevance quite isolated to this album in particular. The title would suggest a clear stand against religion and deities as a whole, and that context is certainly implied, but in a subtle way; rather than outright state their disdain for established faiths, as many more bone-headed death metal bands may attempt, they use the examples of the ancient past to make their case. It’s clever stuff, to be sure, and the inclusion of liner notes explaining the history behind the music will help the people who, unlike Sanders, don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of Egyptian religious reforms...or don't know who the hell Ra or Osiris are.

As far as flaws go, they are fairly self-explanatory to anyone familiar with Nile. As I stated, the overall formula for the music has not changed much, but has only improved from that basis; if you didn’t like the band’s bizarre fusions to begin with, there’s little hope for you here. And of course, brutal death has always proven to be a tough sell outside of the underground, so the tone and subtleties I’ve outlined here may be completely lost on the people who can’t stand the sound of a good growl or double-bass section. That being said, if you have even the remotest interest in death metal and/or Egyptian culture, you should be listening to this album right now. It has far exceeded my expectations, and may one day be listed alongside Amongst the Tombs of Nephran-Ka and ITDS as one of their greatest works, not to mention one of the best death metal albums of 2009. Consider this an unflinching recommendation from somebody who rarely ever gives them.

...Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing: "Embryonic" Review

2009-11-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

Album: Embryonic

Artist: The Flaming Lips

Genre: Alternative / Indie Rock

Length: 70:17

Release Date: October 13^th, 2009

Label: Warner Bros.

Producer: The Flaming Lips, Dave Fridmann, Scott Booker

Double albums are a rare sight in the musical landscape, and with good reason. A certain set of associations and expectations are usually attached to works that get the double album “label”; we expect the long road to the album’s completion to be riddled with variety, spontaneity, and epic might, as to compensate for the many hours they extract from our lives. As far as my knowledge extends, no double album has ever reached these proverbial stars, and in fact they tend to almost always come crashing back into the ground; the band’s attempts to fit this mold are almost always the hurdles that make the album tedious or even unlistenable. To this day I still don’t know the ingredients necessary to craft a truly compelling double album, but at least I know that The Flaming Lips are just as clueless as I am.

…which isn’t to say that they don’t try, of course. Notable attempts have been clearly been made to alter the signature sound of this psychedelic indie rock band into something different for their latest opus, Embryonic. It is perhaps the “busiest” work they’ve performed, not in terms of technicality but in the stacked layers of various samples, keyboard drones, and other sci-fi miscellany compiled within each track. This, compacted together with unorthodox drum and guitar production values, does indeed craft something different; the problem is that it also comes across as over-produced and over-done. Explaining the cacophonous sounds portrayed by such songs as “See the Leaves” and “Watching the Planets” is difficult, and may need to be experienced first-hand. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all, but in my eyes there is really no beauty here. Rather, when all of the various elements in each song collide, they most often react negatively and combust, destroying any chance at attaining the simplicity that might have been.

The complex, multi-layered style of the album almost seems to be compensating for the lack of actual dynamics within; strip away the random beep-boops, bells, and whistles, and you’ll find rather basic indie rock songwriting, with endlessly looped melodies and lyrics. This isn’t inherently a problem, mind you; many bands of this irk do not strive for detailed song-writing, but instead succeed in luring listeners into a sense of tranquility before enveloping them into a haunting, black void of calm. Unfortunately, The Flaming Lips spoil their chances at this form of success, too; even the most stripped-down, beautifully simple songs like “Evil” are poisoned by unnecessary sound bites haphazardly scattered into the mix, and by the end the listener is left with the distressing feeling that nothing was ultimately accomplished. With no chance to get lost in the music, nor much reward for paying close attention, there is little to reap from listening to Embryonic.

This missteps may have been forgivable if the album were a decent length, properly paced so that one could soak in the most memorable moments and have them still pulsing through the brain by the time the album accelerated to its climactic end. Here, my friends, is where the hideous double album demons rear their ugly heads, because the “epic” length utterly destroys this album. Without much in the way of variety or story progression to spice up the album or give it a theatrical punch, it devolves into what is essentially a marathon of tedium…and keep in mind that 70 minutes is actually pretty short for a double album! It begs the question, “Why didn’t they just cut out half the tracks and market it as a standard release?”

Well according to the band itself, the record was created in an attempt to solve their “dilemma” of what to include on each preceding album. They furthermore assert that the album’s creation was in debt older classics like The Beatles whose albums were decidedly “un-focused” and attempted a wide variety of styles.

This, handily, explains most of the issues I’ve pointed out up to now. Essentially, then, there is no over-arching theme or story to the songs at hand, but rather just a jumbled compilation of ideas, smashed together then split into two discs. Such is not the proper way to create an epic; such creations demand structure and coherence, something Embryonic clearly lacks. Even as a “variety sampler” I feel that it fails upright in the face of the band’s ambition. Not only do I not feel a sense of variety and open-endedness running through the album, but I also feel that its inability to strive for and achieve a certain goal dooms it from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with being “focused”; it’s what has allowed many a band to become associated with certain emotions or themes. Embryonic, to me, leaves no lasting emotional impression of this sort; it’s as bland as un-buttered bread, and not nearly as delicious.

Enjoy the Show: "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" Review

2009-10-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Artist: The Beatles
Genre: Psychedelic Rock / Pop
Length: 39:42
Release Date: Jun 1st, 1967
Label: Parlophone / Capitol
Producer: George Martin

As I readied to start writing reviews again, I was hindered by the thought of what, exactly, should mark my re-entry. What album could I analyze that would conjure images of the epic and the daring, that would brew up the storms of controversy I tend to be well known for? After much pondering and consideration, however, the answer stood before me, intimidating and daunting: I would return to the roots. Not those of my own, mind you, but music itself; to the heart of the beast, the lifeblood that pumps inspiration through the veins of the pop industry. I would travel back in time to the 60s, when the new body of music arose from behind a shroud of marijuana smoke.

This is my greatest stand. This is my darkest and lightest hour both. This is my review of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But first, allow to quickly establish my position on The Beatles, if I may: contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually hate them. In fact, prior to this review, I knew nothing more of them than what has become public common knowledge. What I do hate, of course, are the fans, the cult birthed in the wake of their reign that sets out to make any accomplishment in music pale before the veil casted by their four gods. To this today I find the prospect of any band being the “one true master” to be absolutely ridiculous. Does it not divert the eyes of humanity away from new accomplishments in favor of those which have already happened? Does it not defy the concept of music being an abstract concept which can satisfy equally in more forms than one? This is what I despised, and yet to prove them wrong I would have to defile their sacred idol, to destroy that which they pray to. I would have to prepare an assault on what many call the greatest album of all time, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

So…let’s get started.

In my mind, it’s easier to summarize SPLHCB not by what it is, but what it isn’t. What it isn’t is the greatest album of all time, the sacred, untouchable masterpiece that it so consistently is made out to be. It isn’t flawless, it isn’t seamless, and it isn’t exactly “pure” (in the sense that one might expect the pinnacle of music to be an unmitigated product of the human soul rather than the by-product of substance usage).

And yet (and this is where it gets shocking, I know) I was quick to discover that it also isn’t bad. In fact, it seems to me more accurate to label the album not as the top of the musical pedestal, but the bottom: the foundation upon which nearly everything that followed it built up from. It has goals, and achieves them; it takes risks, and they work. It’s the jack-of-all-trades of the music world, a work that excels at little yet accomplishes much.

Really, on a technical and compositional level, there isn’t much to say about SPLHCB that hasn’t already been said. The sound of The Beatles, love it or hate it, is iconic, and all of the elements that form its compound are present here in full swing. The swooning vocal melodies, the air of psychadelia, the almost “bouncy” (if somewhat dull and unimpressive) drum beats of Ringo Starr…it’s all here. Many of the songs featured here are at the height of fame and public knowledge, particularly “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, and yet I don’t think the album operates solely on a song-by-song basis. It’s the little moments that create SPLHCB, from the almost comedic background noises of the title track to the Indian, tribal vibes of “Within You Without You” to the sweeping orchestral elements of “She’s Leaving Home”. The Beatles pioneered the use of new effects and complex arrangements on this album, and when it shows, it also shines; the bizarre and darkened orchestral moments that are interspersed throughout the otherwise happy and cheery “A Day in the Life” are almost haunting, finishing off the album on a high note by ironically sounding at its lowest. The weakness of the album, in my mind, is that it too often limits its ambition and devolves into simple minded pop (or, in the case of songs like “When I’m Sixty-Four”, the style of musicals…bleh). The aforementioned tracks stand out the most in my mind because they represent that which The Beatles have come to: change, the introduction of new ideas to old formulas. It’s a shame, really, that the pop industry as a whole has come to recognize the more bland entries of SPLHCB as models to follow.

That the album has stood the test of time for so many individuals surprises me, because within minutes I could see the tears in the stitches that hold this album together. For one thing, as a lyrical piece, the whole thing doesn’t hold up. The myriad drug references are cute at best, and everything else ranges from the average to the nonsensical (the words to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” were adapted almost word-for-word from an old circus poster…no, really). It isn’t exactly a masterpiece of instrumentation either, nor is it trying to be (though I must say the sudden guitar solo towards the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” was as decent as it was surprising). I just find it amusing that it has gone on to inspire thousands upon thousands of untold artists with nothing more than the beating of its own proverbial heart. There isn’t a single thing about the album that gave it such power; The Beatles just wrote a set of songs, and fate worked out the rest. For anyone to try to duplicate what they did would end in failure as assuredly as someone attempting to find two snowflakes that look exactly alike.

Perhaps I am not the one to talk about pointlessness; after all, look what I’m trying to critique here. Chances are, you, the reader, have already heard enough of The Beatles to know whether or not you follow their religion. I write this regardless, however, to dispel the myth that The Beatles are beyond criticism. As a matter of fact, nothing is; there will be no golden album, descending from the heavens, that every single individual on Earth will treat indisputably as the second coming. Flawlessness is a hypothetical concept; for everything else, flaws exist that can be criticized. Critics exist to project their own satisfaction or dissatisfaction upon the world, regardless of popular opinion; even if, in their unified voice, a single decision reigns most powerful, there can one, if only barely audible that chooses another.

I am that one voice. I am here to say that Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a good album. Not perfect, but good, or rather the essence of good. I can see how it is qualified as the measuring stick with which to weigh pop music, but certainly not all music, and certainly not how it is held with the highest possible regard.

Yet that I am able to respect it at all humbles me. In my travels towards that blackened heart, I discovered more than I anticipated. There are some good songs here, products of a band that worked well together (well, sometimes anyway) with a taste for many flavors of the musical spectrum. In my opinion, it isn’t the greatest in the way that most people say…but it is the greatest at something, and that is more than I ever imagined it would be.

That Which Has Fallen Will Rise Again... (My Comeback Post)

2009-10-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

So maybe a few people were somewhat confused when I euthanized my blog without warning sometime last February. Maybe some people are upset that they never got a chance to see it in action. Most likely, you are neither one of these people, since about a grand total of five individuals ever read it to begin with.

Anyway, that's all irrelevant now. A lack of inspiration led to me to shut down the blog before, and a surge of new inspiration (i.e. being bored and wanting to write something) has led me to reinstate it. I’ve got a laptop, I’ve got a pile of mp3s, and I’ve got an endless supply of critical bile to dispense. I have returned.

For those of you who are unawares, Supernova Asylum (http://supernova-asylum.blogspot.com/) was a blog I created about a year ago to serve as an outlet for my inner critic. People requested albums (sometimes) and I tore them to shreds (sometimes). This same system will return, but with some changes. First and foremost is the lack of any specified release dates; experience taught me that, even when doing something I enjoy, I work very poorly under time constraints. Expect to see at least one review per week, but don’t expect to see them on any sort of rigid schedule. I’ll post a status update alerting you to the presence of any new reviews. Simple!

Second, I’ve taken to prepare myself for a “submission drought”, by which I mean a lack of review requests. I’ll usually put requests first and foremost on my review list, but when worse comes to worse I’ll withdraw an album from my little “bank account”. So far, I have compiled these albums to be of interest to either myself or the viewing audience:

As I Lay Dying - An Ocean Between Us
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Devin Townsend Project - Addicted*
Faith No More - Angel Dust
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic*
Jay-Z - The Blueprint 3
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muukalainen Puhuu
Megadeth - Endgame
Muse - The Resistance
Nile - Those Whom the Gods Detest*
Pearl Jam - Backspacer
Porcupine Tree - The Incident
Scar Symmetry - Dark Matter Dimensions
Slayer - World Painted Blood*
Wolfmother - Cosmic Egg*

* indicates albums with upcoming release dates

If any of these albums spur your interest, please let me know in the comments section of this note. I’ll gladly review them sooner than normal if interest is present.

Ultimately, though, I must stress that the future of the blog relies mainly on you. Yes, YOU! I am motivated not just by my own cynical ego, but by your devotion to laughing at my cynical ego. If people don’t give me things to review or comment on the reviews I’ve written, there’s no way for me to feel like I’m accomplishing anything. Any kind of creative feedback is welcome, and you can post it either on the blog or my Facebook wall or status.

And with all that verbosity out of the way, I think that covers everything. Once again, my status will tell you when the first batch of reviews has arrived. Farewell for now!

The 1st Annual Stavers Awards Presents: The Top 12 Albums of 2008, Part II

2009-01-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

2008 was a great year for music all around, without question. From genre to genre, music fans were greatly rewarded with many pleasant surprises and much fewer bitter disappointments. And while the corrosive, festering plague we call the “mainstream music industry” continues to exist, and even after a diabolical menace known as Soulja Boy (*shiver*) once threatened to destroy the medium as we knew it, 2008 even showed glimpses of change there, most promisingly in the hearts of its people, the consumer. It seems apparent to me that they are becoming more open-minded, beginning to break loose of the restrictive chains the record labels have placed on them. Not just the business, but the art, is now poised to benefit from these gradual changes.

So how exactly does one choose a single album to be named “the greatest” when so many vital competitors exist? It’s a question all reviewers must face when they choose to boil albums down to their cores in lists or awards, and there’s no universal answer. To me, though, the winner deserves to be an album which reminds what music really is, because from time to time it is hard to lose sight of that common perception. Music is the expression of emotion through sound – a fair enough premise – and yet most artists in the medium limit themselves to just one of the infinite emotions we possess. We see love in Fleetwood Mac, depression in Nirvana, hatred in Slayer…but in some, we see these emotions ebb and flow together as naturally as the ocean tides, as they do in the human spirit. For outstanding achievement in ever-difficult task to emulate human nature through flawlessly executed song-writing, The Stavers Awards are proud to name this album to be the #1 Album of 2008:

1. Opeth - Watershed

So…where to begin on this one? I suppose it’s notable to mention for anyone who has never come into contact with the musical enigma that is Opeth that they have been producing almost universally-acclaimed albums since the early 90’s, and have since become nearly synonymous with progressive metal. But while they have never been ones to be restricted by boundaries or to avoid new pathways, Watershed is perhaps the most pivotal moment in their history. In almost completely changing the foundation of their sound which has been but tweaked and altered since its creation with 1998’s My Arms, Your Hearse, Opeth re-emerged from a silent metamorphosis this year to become an altogether better group of song-writers and performers. Is Watershed their greatest album ever made, as the name may imply? Most critics seem to think so, but it may a few years until I am ready to confirm my own beliefs. What’s more relevant as of today is whether or not Watershed better allows the band to more aptly present their formidable blend of brilliant, non-traditional song-writing and unparalleled emotional climaxes to the world, to which the answer is undoubtedly yes.

The changes are perhaps due in part to some critical changes in Opeth’s usually steady line-up. The loss of long-time guitarist Peter Lindgren and drummer Martin Lopez since the release of their last album was a drag, but the new entries bring fresh elements to the table in their stead. The explosive, tri-tone riffs that dominated the group’s more brutal moments are less prominent here, and the guitar in general takes more hints from classic and early prog-rock in regards to distortion and layout; the result is a sound that is thinner but more flexible and varied. The new drummer’s black metal roots more than account for any lost aggression, as the more sophisticated beats probably represent the best drumming the band has ever had. The most important change, no doubt, is that Per Wiberg, the keyboardist they recruited for 2006’s Ghost Reveries, finally feels like a core part of the band when playing in this style. Whereas many Ghost Reveries songs felt like classic Opeth with subtle keyboard sounds in the background, Watershed songs often find themselves driven by Wiberg more than or as much so as his fellow bandmates. This furthers the classic rock vibe, and really lets the band’s obvious Pink Floyd influences shine to a crystal sheen. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that Opeth isn’t still prominently directed by vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt. With flawless guitar prowess, an awe-inspiring growl, and probably the best clean baritone vocals I’ve heard, it’s hard to think of a more talented frontman.

But really, it’s hard to generalize how these elements work so perfectly when fused together, so we’ll have to breakdown the album by a track-by-track basis. It kicks off with Coil, a relatively short song by Opeth standards (roughly three minutes) that serves as more or less an intro the conceptual story Watershed tells of a grief-stricken royalty and his former lover. It’s a perfect way to segue into the epic masterpiece that awaits, carried not only by Åkerfeldt’s masterful vocals but also those of guest singer Nathalie Lorichs. Yes, the “guest female vocalist” horse has already been beaten into a puddle of smashed organs by now, but not only are the vocals beautifully done, they also make sense in the context of the song (a rarity, for certain). It begins to be apparent as her voice fades and the acoustic guitars carry out their final notes, however, that Coil represents both the eye of the storm. What follows is Heir Apparent, probably amongst the darkest and heaviest Opeth tracks ever written. Åkerfeldt's guttural growls and tortured screams serve as the perfect vehicle for the equally agonizing lyrics, whilst a torrent of dark energy conjured by the guitars and keyboards parlays the experience. There are many twists and turns along its nine-minute running length, but easily the best is when the acoustic breakdown halfway through suddenly explodes into a cavalcade of blastbeats, alternate picking, and insanely deep howls in what is probably the single heaviest Opeth moment. If that doesn’t get your heart racing, nothing will.

As hard as a song like that is to top, the band achieves just that with the next track, The Lotus Eater. Beginning with a graceful hum set to a backing of violins and ending with an eerie sequence of conversations and sound effects that would make Pink Floyd proud, the song is between is probably one of the best showcases of fluid and natural song-writing I’ve seen in my four-to-five year music-listening career. There are more stand-out moments in this one song that many entire albums have, yet the transitions between them never seem unnatural or forced (that’s right, we’re all looking at you, Beck). It’s a roller coaster ride of emotions, the perfect representation of the definition of music presented earlier. I wouldn’t dare spoil all of its magic moments, but one deserves special praise: during the mellow section in the song’s middle third, there comes a point where the increasingly distorted and quickened solo segment gives way to a keyboard rise. When that rise reaches its peak, the song suddenly drops into a keyboard-and-bass solo segment that sounds like a cross between funk and NES-style video game tunes. Yeah, I wasn’t kidding when I said that these guys weren’t afraid of boundaries. The Lotus Eater is my choice for the best song of 2008, bar none, and if you disagree…well, I certainly respect your opinion, but I also hope that you get hurt somehow. Perhaps by an aluminum bat. Held by me.

After that moment of genius passes by, there’s plenty more to be had, but in a different capacity. Ditching the hands-on approach held by the previous two songs, Burden drops the “metal” portion of the album and delves into the band’s mellower, more classical side. Distortion is largely dropped, but the solos and melodies often dart about as swiftly and lightly as fireflies in a way that hybridizes jazz with arena rock. Åkerfeldt’s voice does an even better job of carrying the song here than in most, demonstrating that he works equally well in either element. Perhaps the coolest part of it all, and probably the most unique moment on the album, is saved for the end; Åkerfeldt starts playing an acoustic riff repeatedly that at first sounds beautiful, but as time passes someone begins to gradually detune his guitar while he’s still playing. No, stop. Do not attempt to set up an eye appointment. You likely read that correctly, and it likely caused your head to explode. This segment actually gave me chills the first time I heard it, but don’t take my word for it; listen to it yourself.

Now compared to moments like that, the next song, Porcelain Heart, may seem a tad pedestrian. It takes my vote for the weakest track on the album, but even then the exchange between hard and soft moments makes this one special – not to mention it features a couple of quick tricks, including a sudden and massive drum tempo shift that will undoubtedly catch you off guard the first time you hear it. If anything, Porcelain Heart does well to set up for Watershed’s eleven-minute epic, Hessian Peel (bizarrely, I could only find a link for the second half of the song). This is where the proggiest influences the band can muster are set loose, and it’s also the most jarringly divided song, split between gorgeous tranquility and unstoppable brutality. It even features a rarely used musical tactic: backmasking. Early on, you’ll hear a vocal segment recorded backwards, which when rewinded reads, “Out on the courtyard, Come back tonight. My sweet Satan, I see you”; a subtle nod to the infamous Stairway to Heaven backmasking myth. Rest assured, only The Lotus Eater beats out this track in its sheer song-writing prowess. Finally, Hex Omega exists to wrap up the album’s poetic tale, and does the job nicely. The uplifting riffs in conjunction with the smooth verses make an appropriately grandiose ending for an equally grandiose album.

These seven masterpieces probably would’ve been enough, but nope; the band had to go ahead and spoil us. Along with the special editions of the album come three bonus tracks, two of which are covers. The original track, entitled Derelict Herds (no link for this one, sorry), is a great song in its own right, and was probably left off the album due to its irrelevance to the plot, which is a shame given how well in contrasts both the light and dark sides of the band. The covers, however, reveal a completely new side to them entirely. Bridge of Sighs, originally by English rock guitarist Robin Trower, seems more or less the perfect fit for the new classic-rock influenced style of the band, and Åkerfeldt’s vocals do its sound great justice. The cover of Marie Fredriksson's Den Ständiga Resan, meanwhile, expresses their folk side well, but is more than anything an excellent showcase for Åkerfeldt’s voice, and in his home country’s native tongue, no less. If you aren’t a believer in him by the end of the album proper, this little bonus will change that, guaranteed. Finally, as an added treat, the recently released Burden single comes with even more goodies. The first is Mellotron Heart (no link here either, I tried), a recreation of Porcelain Heart with only the mellotron and mini-Moog synthesizers as instruments. It’s no replacement for the original, but it’s still a fun little bonus. The final B-side is yet another cover, and an unexpected one at that: Would?, by Alice in Chains, the famous grunge group. It’s hard to judge a song of this format to Opeth's core work, as grunge is far less technical and far more linear by nature, but its certainly good for what it is, and a faithful recreation of the original. Consider it a cherry atop what was already a great topping-soaked sundae.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking by this point: where’s all the hate? Where’s the cynicism and the nit-picking that so dominates the lives of reviewers? And the truth, in all honestly, is that I couldn’t think of a single reason to waste any of my precious critical bile on this album. My sole problem with it – which will mean little to newcomers – is that in streamlining the song dynamics and diversifying the sound, the band may have had to sacrifice some its overwhelming power, the kind that made previous albums like Blackwater Park almost absurdly gripping. But if this album truly is representative of permanent change for the group, and if a future album can combine the past and future Opeth together, then…well, I think I could rest easy declaring it to be the greatest album I would ever hear.

At this point it may simply be an understatement, but Watershed deserves accolades from here to eternity, as well as your undivided attention. Listen to it. Love it. Cherish it. And if you can think of a single greater album that came out in 2008, please tell me…but think hard about it first, or else I may have break out that aluminum bat of mine.

Recommended First Listens: Coil, Burden, Porcelain Heart, Hex Omega
Stavers’ Top Picks: Heir Apparent, The Lotus Eater, Hessian Peel
Bonus Achievements: What, Album of the Year wasn’t good enough for you?

The 1st Annual Stavers Awards Presents: The Top 12 Albums of 2008

2009-01-11T19:42:00.001-08:00

Well, it's taken nearly a month to construct, write, neatly package, and deliver it, but here it finally is: The 1st Annual Stavers Awards, and the Top 12 Albums of 2008! Each entry has earned its place through the exceptional demonstration of songwriting, muscianship, and generally being fun to listen to, but keep in mind that these elements have been judged solely by me, the writer. If the list seems biased in any way, that's because it technically is. So if you disagree with the placement (just know that the race was pretty tight, especially towards the top of the list) or if you think I missed an important contender, then...well, that's what the comments section is for!

So here's how this works: each album will be accompanied by a miniature review containing the reasons for why it was selected, along with three informational subcategories. The first, Reccomended First Listens, lists the songs I believe serve the best for being introduced to the sound of the album (important to getting used to the more extreme stuff on the list). Stavers' Top Picks, meanwhile, are the songs that I have chosen to be the best of the lineup, the elite ones that demonstrate the best that the album has to offer. Finally, there are the Bonus Achievements, tiny awards given for special provisos the album gives us (please, don't take them too seriously). Oh, and you may be wondering, "why twelve, of all numbers?". And I have a perfectly good answer to that....
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....so with that all explained, we can start this countdown of awesome! The envelope, please...

12. Jeff Loomis – Zero Order Phase

Why the public has yet to embrace instrumental music has always puzzled me; given the general abhorrence of respectable lyrics in mainstream culture one would think it would make a perfect fit. For those of us who can appreciate a break from the human voice for a little bit, the guitarist from Nevermore made a nice little solo project entitled Zero Order Phase. There’s no real meaning behind the titles of either the songs or the album itself; all the emotion is spurred from the music itself, which is obviously done quite well. One could argue that the entire experience cycles around Loomis’ mastery of sick guitar licks, and that’s essentially an apt ideology. Still, the guitar-work alone is some of the best 2008 had to offer, which makes Zero Order Phase more than eligible for a spot on the list in my book.

Recommended First Listens: Azure Haze, Sacristy, Departure
Stavers’ Top Picks: Jato Unit, Devil Theory, Miles of Machines
Bonus Achievements: Devin Townsend Award for Solo Project Achievement, Yngwie Malmsteen Award for Exceptional Shredding

11. Meshuggah – obZen

Imagine that a rogue supercomputer from the future broke some circuits, engineered unfeasible weapons of mass destruction, and started eliminating human life with all the precision and speed mankind’s technology could muster. That, in a way, is like listening to Meshuggah’s obZen, an album which overwhelms you with its dense, mechanical orchestration of dark energy. It lands low on the list mainly for being just that, not much more than an outright metal attack, yet it remains notable for having done it so well. The drumming on songs like Bleed, for instance, will have your mouth gaping, likely due to the coma induced by the guitarist’s and bassist’s desire to numb your senses with wicked experimental lines. Repetitive, sure, and largely inaccessible, certainly, but never say it’s not without benefit.

Recommended First Listens: Combustion, Electric Red, Lethargica
Stavers’ Top Picks: Bleed, obZen, Pineal Gland Optics
Bonus Achievements: Worst Cover Art for an Actually Good Album Award, David Lombardo Award for Drumming Prowess

10. Jedi Mind Tricks – A History of Violence

Family reunions are generally awkward processes, ones where you stand in the corner hoping to your deity of choice that no one approaches you to inform you that they are a long-lost aunt or uncle with a lifetime of boring stories to make you suffer through. That’s why JMT’s seemingly natural reunion with former hip-hopper Jus Allah on A Histroy of Violence deserves such praise; it manages to reincorporate the old elements that he used to bring into the path JMT has followed in the years since his absence. Those expecting the reunion to have resulted in an older-school release like Violent By Design will scuff their feet in the dirt, but the rest of us will know we’re getting a quality product. Yeah, the vocal patterns are getting a little rusty with repeated used, and the lyrics still border on the nonsensical at times, but the production and beats are as perfect as ever, Vinnie Paz is still on of the most pissed-off rappers in music, and Jus Allah’s return provides some greater variety to the whole mix. Resident hip-hoppers will surely want to check this out.

Recommended First Listens: Deathbed Doctrine, Heavy Artillery, Godflesh
Stavers’ Top Picks: Monolith, Trail of Lies, Butcher Knife Bloodbath, Death Messiah
Bonus Achievements: Angriest Hip-Hop Award, “Family Reunion” Achievement Award, Best Beatz Prize

9. Radiohead – In Rainbows

Paradox, thy name is Radiohead. They have a vast army of loyal followers to put China to shame, yet they still exercise the freedom to expand their music into continuously different territories without losing them. That freedom took us to a strange world on the very first day of 2008 when In Rainbows was released to critical acclaim. However, I cannot in good spirits place this new experimental opus above something along the lines of OK Computer or Kid A. There’s a level of consistency on those albums, an unbreakable thread that sews songs together that made them work flawlessly, and it just seems missing on this release. Not to mention, there’s a certain wide disconnection between how the band’s members described the album and how it personally effected me; “terrifying”, for instance, is a strong word, and I would not have used it to describe the rhythmic hand-clapping and children’s cheering that accompanies the album opener 15 Step. But hey, it’s still Radiohead, and the strangeness and openness they always carry with them from album to album still remain. It’s disappointing in some ways, but In Rainbows deserves a place on the list nonetheless.

Recommended First Listens: Bodysnatchers, Nude, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, House of Cards
Stavers’ Top Picks: All I Need, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Videotape
Bonus Achievements: Highest Indie Band Survival Rate, “Black Sheep of This List” Award

8. Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

Alright, I’ll admit it: this one surprised me. Heretic Pride’s simplicity and seemingly infallible joy belies some pretty interesting folk-rock techniques, even if the linearity of most tracks makes them a little more predictable than usual. The poetic lyrics – and subsequently the strange voice of a one John Darnielle – are really the star here, mixing surreal visual treats with some very affirming life lessons (How to Embrace a Swamp Creature being a good example of both). I’ve heard some critics say that the album covers little ground that the Mountain Goats hadn’t covered before, but for the amateur such as myself, the album is instantly accessible while still being phenomenally well-balanced and varied. It couldn’t bring itself to compete with the more boisterous candidates on the list, but it is easily worth a glance.

Recommended First Listens: So Desperate, How to Embrace a Swamp Creature, Tianchi Lake
Stavers’ Top Picks: Sax Rohmer #1, San Bernardino, Heretic Pride, Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Bonus Achievements: Most Joyous, Creepiest Lyrics

7. Arsis – We Are the Nightmare

Combining melody and technicality has been a task that few in the music biz seem to undertake…or care about. Arsis (from Virginia, who knew?) have instead taken it upon themselves to accomplish that goal thrice in succession, with the latest victory being entitled We Are the Nightmare. In doing so, the formula does prove to be somewhat repetitive as you move from start to finish, but the mighty riffs and excellent drumwork reciprocate your patience with some truly commendable songwriting. If perhaps the lyrics seem overwrought by comparison, then it takes little to ignore them while you bask in the glory of the album’s melo-tech hybridization. It’s essentially the musical equivalent of having a perfectly-engineered power drill accurately flossed through your ear canals…although that does make it sound bad, so try to imagine that statement through the perspective of a masochist, yes?

Recommended First Listens: We Are the Nightmare, Sightless Wisdom…and if you don’t like those, then there’s no hope for the rest of the album.
Stavers’ Top Picks: Overthrown, Progressive Entrapment, A Feast for the Liar’s Tongue, Failure’s Conquest
Bonus Achievements: Most Technical, Best Attack Tool for Metal Elitists

6. Equilibrium – Sagas

Oh gee, I’ve never seen this before. A symphonic folk metal band with blackened elements that fuses guitar with violin and pan flutes melodies, singing lyrics about old Nordic stories exclusively in German? How utterly predictable.

Ok, so in all seriousness, it's really the sheer uniqueness that makes this one stand out. Everything about the musicianship is really spot-on (except for maybe the screechy black-metal vocals), but all of the folkandish touches make the songs complete. Most of them sound European in nature, fittingly enough, but traces of Latin and even Australian aboriginal culture make an appearance along the way as well. The result is an album that is truly epic; the word may get thrown around a lot these days, but it really does seem designed for the sheer girth of this album’s sound. If you can handle some extreme vocals and don’t have a problem flipping through a Germanic dictionary to understand lyrics, then this record was made for you.

Recommended First Listens: Prolog Auf Erden, Blut im Auge, Heimwärts
Stavers’ Top Picks: Unbesiegt, Snüffel, Mana
Bonus Achievements: Most Likely to Be Used in a World of Warcraft Montage Video, Most German

5. Scar Symmetry – Holographic Universe

There are some people out in this world (I like to call them “elitists”) who have already gone ahead and declared the entire genre of melodic death metal “dead”. The frequency with which Holographic Universe has appeared on many end-of-the-year lists such as this one seems to have shut them up pretty well, I daresay. This is because Scar Symmetry has put out nothing but high-quality of the melodeath genre up to now, and Holographic Universe is simply their most polished effort yet. The entire guitar-keyboard partnership that drives the album works tremendously well, but its really the vocals of Christian Älvestam tha push it over the top. It’s a shame that his unwillingness to cooperate with the rest of the band resulted in his eviction from the group shortly after the album was made, because his powerful death grunts and soaring singing voice are so well done here. Plus, the album takes its sci-fi theme very seriously, as the song titles and great lyrics reflect. Some of the riffs are occasionally quite samey, but that hardly derides the entire experience. Get this, if only to prove those Gothenburg-hating heathens wrong.

Recommended First Listens: Morphogenesis, Timewave Zero, Ghost Prototype I – Measurement of Thought
Stavers’ Top Picks: Artificial Sun Projection, Trapezoid, Holographic Universe, Ghost Prototype II – Deus Ex Machina
Bonus Achievements: Best Use of a Theme/Concept, Creed Award For Having a Band-Threatening Vocalist

4. In Flames – A Sense of Purpose

I could probably write entire analytical tomes about these legendary Swedes if possible, but I’ll have to cut to the chase (relatively) in the name of brevity. A Sense of Purpose brewed up quite a storm as far back as late 2007, under the watchful eye of fanboys and musical cynics alike. More than likely it was because it followed Come Clarity from 2006, an album that returned the band to its metal roots after half a decade of questionable experimentation that tore their fanbase in two more violently than perhaps any other band in metal history. So, we all wondered, would the next release take the band even further back towards their humble beginnings? Was the guitar-driven sound of Come Clarity a one-time deal? Could In Flames surprise us with a masterpiece that made their classic The Jester Race sound like Miley Cyrus? The answer, as it turned out, was “no” on all counts.

Instead, A Sense of Purpose was an apt blend of everything In Flames had done thus far, freshened up and injected with cautious but successful experiments up the wazoo. In losing the rushed pace and outright aggression of Come Clarity, it regained the warmth, addicting melodies that defined the band. Yet it didn’t all make itself apparent immediately and instead unraveled with multiple listens. The strange new approach has led some to call it the worst album in the entire In Flames catalogue, while others consider it the best. The most reasoned of In Flames fans such as myself reside somewhere in the middle, for there are certainly flaws to pick at; the lyrics, namely, have taken a rather unprecedented dive in quality in some songs, demonstrating that band vocalist Anders Friden may have finally plumbed the wells of “social cruelty lyrics” completely dry after a decade or so. Apart from that, the band sounds better than it has since Clayman, with Jesper Stromblad’s guitar riffs flowing like wine once again, not to mention the best drumming the band has ever seen.

Undoubtedly the best aspects of ASoP lie in the increased variety it brings to the table after Come Clarity’s blurred line-up. The setlist ranges from short-and-sweet metal anthems (The Mirror’s Truth), spastic thrashers (Sober and Irrelevant, March to the Shore), and even largely keyboard-driven moments (Alias). Some parts even indulge in the Swedish-folk acoustic guitar interludes that sound plucked straight from the band’s debut Lunar Strain. But no one could prepare for In Flames’ most risky experiments, and indeed one of their most beautiful songs ever; The Chosen Pessimist, an eight-minute-long epic of the progressive rock mold that demonstrates just how far Friden’s clean vocals have come, evoking sounds and emotions more like those of Radiohead than At the Gates. Plus, those of you willing to search for the Japanese edition or shell out extra for the accompanying EP will find three absolutely awesome bonus tracks as well, and the luckiest will obtain one of the rare box sets that comes will a frickin’ pinball labyrinth game. Awesome.

Granted, In Flames will always have their detractors, but that’s to be expected from a group brave enough to flip their established sound upside-down over the course of just a few albums. Besides, you have to love a band that pokes fun at itself; one of the banners that advertised the album prior to its release stated “In Flames don’t follow trends…they create them!” And you know what? That’s absolutely right. They may have a long way to go to win back the hearts of those they scorned, but this new album proves that even after 14 years of twists and turns, In Flames are still not obsolete, and instead march forward with “a sense of purpose” of their very own.

Recommended First Listens: The Mirror’s Truth, Disconnected, Condemned, Drenched in Fear
Stavers’ Top Picks: Sleepless Again, Alias, I’m the Highway, The Chosen Pessimist, March to the Shore
Bonus Achievements: Most Undeserved Hatred, Best Cover Art, Most Addicting, Jesper Stromblad Award for Having Jesper Stromblad

3. Gojira – The Way of All Flesh

There isn’t much to say about The Way of All Flesh that wasn’t covered in my previously written review, but I must reinforce the notion I made earlier about this album being a “grower”. On further examination over the past few months, the differences between this and 2005’s From Mars to Sirius expand ever further; the newer release is less organic (the production has been kicked up quite a dozen notches), yet eliminates the monotony and adds innumerable new angles to the songwriting. The vocals are fuller and more powerful, the drum-work god-like, and the innovations clever. When you get right down to it, TWoAF may be the apex of the path these Frenchies have strode since their first album, which makes it all the more interesting to see where future years will take them.

There’s another reason I have had yet to touch upon that takes TWoAF to the near-peak of the list, too: it once again proves that Gojira produces music for a discernable reason. That doesn’t sound impressive when phrased so bluntly, but think of all the tired, bloated rock stars or corporate-controlled prissy pop princesses who cough up new records for sheer profit or to imitate a semblance of activity. In short, Gojira aren’t in the music business for the money, but for the music, for the power that the musical medium provides in spreading the word of noble causes and spiritual beliefs. And that’s especially notable when their enviro-friendly nature contrasts so heavily against the back-drop of their hellraising sound in a way that is both ironic and distinctive. For these reasons and more, you will never find another band like Gojira, nor another album like The Way of All Flesh. Brilliant, in all possible respects.

Recommended First Listens: Oroborus, A Sight to Behold, The Silver Cord, Vacuity
Stavers’ Top Picks: Toxic Garbage Island, Adoration for None, The Art of Dying, The Way of All Flesh
Bonus Achievements: Best Lyrics, Most Likely to Rupture An Organ Through Sheer Ferocity, Best Death Metal Album to Be Made in Fran…on second thought, gimme that last one back. It’s practically a freebie.

2. Cynic – Traced in Air

Some of you may have wondered, perhaps in the black depths of a subconscious dream, what genius sounds like. Or perhaps that was just me. In any case, Cynic would be a perfectly acceptable answer to that. Their 1993 debut Focus was the first, and for a while only, proof of that, combining technical death metal with jazz fusion and progressive elements to form an instant underground classic many still regard as one of the greatest releases of all time (myself among them). In just one year thereafter the band split, however, and all of their work on the follow-up was seemingly lost. Then the impossible happened; the band reformed in 2007, and all the material that was once thought lost to time has resurfaced 15 years later. There are few albums I could consider to be worth waiting more than a decade for (you hear that, Chinese Democracy?), but I can assure you that Traced in Air is one of them.

The most important thing to know going into Traced in Air if you are familiar with Focus is that it has little resemblance to its forbearer. Undoubtedly that has left some feeling scorned, but there is no reason to fret. TiA is a nearly perfect album in its own regard, because it explores territory left unexplored not just by themselves, but by the musical community at large. Vocalist Paul Masvidal’s robotic vocoder-backed vocals return much improved, forming glorious melodies that layer perfectly on top of one another, and amongst the technical beating of Sean Reinert’s drums and the guitar’s cyclical, melodic loops. Largely less aggressive and fast-paced than Focus, it instead ensnares you in a steady, flowing river of sound, one that’s willing to burst in rapids or gently caress the shores as it deems appropriate. And if that sounds more than a little trippy, its probably because the space-age sound of Traced in Air is one of the most difficult albums I’ve ever had to explain in words. My sole complaint, and it is a minor one at best, is that at a meager 35 minutes or so, TiA ends far too soon. Nonetheless, the once-in-a-lifetime experience of closer song Nunc Stans helps ease that wound, and the general quality of the album already has me in peak anticipation of what Cynic will possibly create next to continue their legacy.

If you need any more endorsement of Traced in Air than I can provide, of course, I think Paul Masvidal does a better job than I ever could:

“We've been on an amazing journey discovering this new music and soon it will be yours. Expect the unexpected. The album is an intensely concentrated mosaic of internal and external energies, from the deepest peace to the purest aggression. There's an acquired taste that comes with a record of this density, but once your ears wrap themselves around the language at work, everything falls into place and suddenly you'll feel a sudden urge to sing, scream or maybe even cry. The album has a beginning, middle and end. The story will reveal itself after numerous listens and then you may not want to let go…”

So very true. Buy this album right away.

Recommended First Listens: Nunc Fluens, The Space For This, The Unknown Guest
Stavers’ Top Picks: Evolutionary Sleeper, Integral Birth, King of Those Who Know, Nunc Stans
Bonus Achievements: Longest Delay, Highest Payoff, Best Use of Vocoder a.k.a. Only Good Use of Vocoder, Midget Award for Being Too Short

Surprise! The #1 album gets a full review next time!

The Cold Places of the Universe: "The Moon and Antarctica" Review

2008-12-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

Album: The Moon and Antarctica
Artist: Modest Mouse
Genre: Alternative / “Indie” Rock
Length: 59:43 (72:02 reissue)
Release Date: June 13, 2000 (March 9, 2004 reissue) (2008-09-12)
Label: Epic
Producer: Brain Deck (Simon Askew reissue)

Somewhere in the life of every successful and long-lived group of musicians comes a time when they must make a crucial choice; to vegetate in the same style they have developed and loved from the beginning, or to take the deep risk of mending and experimenting with it. By the former path, bands may stagnate to the point of irrelevancy; by the latter, they risk alienating the fans of all that had come before and thus put their reputations on the line. And by the excessive degree to which fans can take hold of a particular band, seeing them either change or rot away is often an unbearable transition. Such results in a polarized following, one side composed of former disciples who swear by the old works battling against another of those who jumped on the bandwagon with the new. And in the process, it’s the band themselves who end up in the crossfire.

Enter Modest Mouse, the indie darling sextet that has earned accolades and praise amongst underground critics since 1993. In recent years, the band has begun to stir up fury within the more experienced loyalists as they have made the transition into mainstream attention (if somewhat limited in scope). Suddenly the band who had once recorded an EP in a garage had hit #1 on the Billboard 200 with 2007’s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, and those who felt the band had sold its soul were out for blood. Its such massive transitions that make one question the nature of past albums, as its sometimes possible to trace the gradual evolution of the band into the states they finally arrive in. Such was the purpose when I – a veteran of perhaps the most heated fan-war stalemate of all time, the on-going In Flames debate (though that it is a story for another time) – was parachuted deep into the strife to review Modest Mouse’s supposed magnum opus, The Moon and Antarctica, to see how it held up outside of a fan perspective.

Now as far as I can understand, The Moon and Antarctica was the band’s attempt to expand off the broad base cemented by their previous breakthrough release, The Lonesome Crowded West. Blame the experimentation on either a desire for greater variety or Isaac Brock’s broken jaw if you will, but ultimately for every critic who showered the album in gold stars there was another who thought Modest Mouse was edging into commercial territory; quite frankly, when a band starts licensing songs to Nissan Quest minivan commercials it can be difficult to think otherwise. Yet I can’t help but feel like the commercialization argument has gone the way of a horse that has been beaten one too many times; the glossier production values and major label status aren’t necessarily strikes against TMaA, merely differences. In fact, they often help amplify the more spacious, spacey sound the album develops, which in the land of the Indie City resides on the corner of Mature Street and Engaging Avenue, only occasionally striding into Pretentious Lane to pick up its groceries. To put it in a much less metaphor-laden way, it’s as good a representation of the indie scene as your going to find this side of the decade.

Indeed, the band’s attempts to tinker with their formula resulted in making it much more distinct. The blend of classic folk, alternative song structure and delightful synthesizing in a powerful one indeed that will usually leave the listener immersed up to his or her eyeballs. Though it doesn’t offer too much room for technical chops, that’s hardly what the record is about. Instead, it’s quite keen to manipulate this mellow, laid-back foundation into a variety of different moods throughout the setlist, from sullen and plodding (Perfect Disguise) to bouncy and joyful (Life Like Weeds), and even moments where these moods are exchanged frequently (3rd Planet). The twangy guitar-sound does, however, remain roughly the same throughout, which makes most songs blend together. It also makes the longer tracks like The Stars Are Projectors outlast their welcome, even if the addition of some moderate tempo changes does manage to shake things up. Fortunately, plenty of other moments, like the swooping keyboard dips and dives in Dark Center of the Universe and the surprisingly aggressive opening to A Different City, stand out.

Strangely, the member of the group whose contributions I am least enthusiastic for is the one who practically drives the band, Isaac Brock. His singing style is very unique, for sure, but it sometimes stands in stark contrast to everything else in a song, and eventually becomes rather grating as the album wears on. He’s more of an acquired taste than anything, and due to the aforementioned broken jaw his appearances are actually somewhat limited by alternative standards, so for most it won’t even be a factor. Yet I also have a bone to pick with the lyrics; a lot of people cite them as being exceptionally clever and insightful, and I would agree to an extent, but simply can’t muster the same enthusiasm. Most are open to interpretation – hardly an issue on its own – but without some kind of binding context, many of them could be about…well, anything. Not to mention that many tracks take it into themselves to repeat the same redundant lines several times over; if you don’t know what it means the first time, the next few times will only be bound to reinforce that notion. With enough studying, however, some personal meaning for each song should fall right into place (*winkwink*) for you. Oh, and a special shout-out has to be made to Wild Packs of Family Dogs, which put the dainty little images of dogs eating people and “crying dust blood” into my mind’s eye. A happy album, this is not.

By this token, TMaA personally falls into the little niche of strong, yet sometimes flawed, curiosities. While there are plenty of nitpicks to be made, the overall sound of the album is powerful enough to warrant praise without trespassing previously tread territory – the very definition of a successful experiment. This was certainly not a diversion to be forgotten, either, as traces of the more airy, calmer sound still exist in the songs of newer fare from the band. And for those out there hooked on the atmosphere but not the presence of Mr. Brock, this album will likely provide your best escape. Respectable lyrics and a moody environment combine to make TMaA worthy of attention, both back in 2000 and now.

So what have I now to say to the fanboys of each faction of the Modest Mouse debate? Well to be honest, I probably didn’t even need to hear the album to tell all of them to stop their futile actions before they all give themselves brain hemorrhages. To the newer recruits, I sayeth now that TMaA is a fine album that needs no disrespect, even if you prefer the more widely known, two most recent releases. I have even less comforting things to say to the other group, who will simply have to deal with whatever changes the band has felt are best for them, be it for reasons of nobility or greed. In either case, the past is irreparable, and in this case for the better.

P.S. : Apologies about the delay. My computer seems to have attained some kind of nasty Adware virus that’s slowing down my entire computer, and even preventing me from using some programs whatsoever. I’ve been trying to work my way around it, and hopefully my computer will be clean and running at full speed again by next week.

A Totally Serious Review, I Swear: "Appeal to Reason" Album Review

2008-11-22T16:52:00.000-08:00

Album: Appeal to Reason
Artist: Rise Against
Genre: Melodic Hardcore / Punk Rock
Length: 48:23
Release Date: October 7, 2008 (2008-09-12)
Label: Geffen
Producer: Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore

When I got asked to review a Rise Against album, I ran back home and grabbed my iron helmet and wooden shield, because I was about to run the gauntlet. Rise Against hails from the same line of punk-rooted protest bands that have been running rampant across corporate America ever since the Bush administration started shooting itself in the foot (that’s 2,345,670 bullets fired into the big toe and counting!) and there’s hardly a demographic I hate more; the smug half-baked philosophy, the restless complaining, the same four or five chords and drum beats recycled over and over and over until you want to run for Congress, work your way up the ranks, and finally submit and authorize a bill that forbids the little pricks from coming within 500 miles of freedom. So Rise Against had the tall order of trying to change my cold, steel-plated cynical beast-mind into thinking they could possibly be any different. The result…

…is that they totally did. Wow. I couldn’t have believed it until this album had arrived before me, but I was wrong about the entire pseudo-punk movement from day one. In fact, Rise Against is the most valuable of music bands because it taught me an amazing lesson: that you can sell five figures within the first week of a release and even have your own line of shoes purportedly manufactured by slave labor and still pretend to be a pot-smoking, Molotov-tossing anarchist rebel. How inspiring!

The magic begins with Collapse (Post-Amerika), which in no way resembles anything ever done before, not even American Idiot...hell, not even themselves on past albums. The single-tempo, emotionless riffing, and generic hardcore shouts would sound utterly monotonous and repetitive from any other band, but Rise Against makes them work. How? Alas, their genius is far too much for me to describe in simple man-words. And behold, for when the next track begins, so does the exact same pattern and song structure! Such is their brilliance that they repeat the exact same formulaic compositions a grand total of 13 times…and with 13 being an unlucky number, the act serves as flawless testament to their bravery. Only rarely do actually interesting leads or notable bass lines ever appear to fuck things up, but the producers were so brilliant as to edit them out to their last breath as not to spoil the perfection. The lone exception to this ever-so original formula is an acoustic song entitled Hero of War, so originally titled and so not made up from the remnants of discarded Bob Dylan B-sides that it would make the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Wolfgang Mozart cry. Why, so great is this beautiful track that it could very well rise those fallen geniuses from the dead, officially making Tim McIlrath the second-coming of Jesus Christ. No wonder so many people rabidly worship these awe-inspiring musical heroes!

But if there is any reason to bow down before the likes of this ground-breaking band, it is their lyrics, whose majesty and truth ring like the bells of Heaven’s highest, most ornamented towers. They speak of a terrifying fascist government that will in no way disappear a mere three months after this album’s release date, and one that has in no way been spoken of by any other musical act. Nope, not even Green Day. And how, you may be wondering, can such beaten-to-death lyrical clichés such as “fall[ing] from grace”, “desperate eyes”, and “the strength to go on” possibly combine to make these inspiring call-to-arms messages? Again, I could not possibly explain it, but totally not because they couldn’t. Because they could. In fact, they do it so well that they don’t even need to create solutions to the political problems they so desperately claw at like merciless, blood-thirsty kittens. Thus, these songs will ring throughout the back alleys of all the greatest organizations of protest and resistance, such as Hot Topic and McDonalds, from now until the end of mankind. Only the greatest musicians could create music as such that it will never become dated, certainly not in, as aforementioned, three months from now. You know, when the man they are trying so hard to condemn is replaced by a liberal reformist who the country so strongly supported in a fairly recent election. Oh no, certainly not then.

And so I sayeth to you, in the spirit of the mightiest revolutionaries of our time – from Lindsay Lohan to Justin Timberlake – let your voices of pre-pubescent confusion and conformism be heard by purchasing this downright irreplaceable masterpiece. And as you half-heartedly pound your fist in the air, pretending to fight an evil that has already been fought by people whose actions actually matter and whose criticism is not just limited to needless whining, remember that you support a band whose music is definitely not just a clone of a million other bands who came before, whose imagery is completely and totally unique, and who honestly, undeniably, unsarcastically, doesn’t suck balls.

Mediocrity Magnetic: "Death Magentic" (Delayed) Album Review

2008-11-16T11:24:00.000-08:00

Album: Death Magnetic
Artist: Metallica
Genre: Thrash / Heavy Metal
Length: 74:46
Release Date: September 12, 2008 (2008-09-12)
Label: Warner Bros., Vertigo, Mercury, Universal Music Japan
Producer: Rick Rubin

Forget the Year of the Rat…2008 has so far been the year of metal. Aside from the innumerable releases from many of the genre’s top acts, we’ve seen long dormant metal bands choosing this year as the time to make their big comeback. Cynic has returned to the studio after a 15 year hiatus; AC/DC has stepped back into the limelight with a new album; and other bands that have been long out of commission like Atheist and Wintersun are working on new material early into 2009. Hell, if all goes to plan then Chinese Democracy might actually be released this year! But I have no doubt that it is the recent return of Metallica that will have earned the most attention and sales by next year. Granted, they may have been gone for only a five-year gap, but since the last record they released was St. Anger, considered by many to be a utter travesty of chaos, muddled confusion, and making absolutely no sense whatsoever, the world definitely wanted to know whether or not the band could possibly make the saving throw and restore their former glory. So now that Death Magnetic has been out for a couple of months now, we can finally ask the ultimate question: has Metallica made a comeback?

Unfortunately, that still isn’t a very easy question to answer, as the definition of comeback isn’t very clear for a band such as Metallica. Keep in mind, this is a group of individuals whose in-fighting and apparent hatred for each other caused wave after wave of horrible decisions, both inside and outside the recording booth; undoubtedly that was part of the cause of St. Anger’s wretchedness and the infamous Napster incident. Now, they seem to have overcome the hurdle of growing older, come to grips with their themselves, and generally kept a level-headedness that is expected of good musicians. So when looked at in the terms of whether or not Metallica has salvaged the semblance of a successful career, then yes, Death Magnetic is a glorious revolution. When looked at musically, it is considerably less so. Granted, it fixes all the mistakes of the past release…but seemingly does so by retreating deep into the rusty catacombs of their old works, with little in the way of innovation. So if it’s not a failure and not a complete success, then we are left with a single word left to describe Death Magnetic, one that still serves as a painful blow to such a famous band: average.

Yes, for all the hyped shouts of glee that Metallica had finally become themselves again, they are still just average. And the key factor in that mediocrity is that the album is just plain dull. Dull, dull, dull, so very dull. Most riffs resemble watered-down versions of those we heard on Master of Puppets 22 years ago, the bass is practically inaudible (bringing flashbacks of …And Justice for All’s insipid production to out ears), and, as always, Lars Ulrich is an utter joke. In their attempts to reclaim the thrash metal throne, the basic and uninteresting drum beats just can’t help back drag down their efforts. If there’s anyone worse than Lars, though, it’s Hetfield; while he’s finally made the excellent decision to actually sing in tune again, the country-tinged yelps he makes just don’t fit here as well as they would on something like Load, and become annoying extremely quick. Oh, and forget about the lyrics; they’re useless. To cap off this ensemble of pain, we have a banal production that seems wafer-thin and tries to make up for it by compressing and distorting everything up to eleven. If you can believe this, the re-mastering of the tracks for Guitar Hero III actually doesn’t have this issue. And when the man behind the original mix is Rick Rubin, who once defined the sound of fellow thrash-legend Slayer on Reign in Blood…well, that’s just pathetic.

The real icing on the cake – with the cake being made of concrete and the icing made of sewage water, of course – is that Metallica has gone ahead and made all of their songs way too long. Again. The song structures sound like they would feel more at home on something like “The Black Album”, something succinct and catchy but never overly extensive. This isn’t Dream Theatre, you guys, and it certainly isn’t the best way to pretend like your living in the 80’s again. As a matter of fact, a lot of the worst aspects of this album feel like clip-ons designed to fool old, jaded fans into coming to their concerts again, the solos being a good example. They almost make me believe that the lack of solos on St. Anger was a good thing, now that their newest efforts of extended soloage feel incredibly sloppy and needless. In metal, they are usually there to form a climax to the song, to provide a reward for sitting through a long, tense build-up. Here, they plop them down before us, with no satisfaction to gained, as if they were only there because, well, they have to be.

The one exception to that rule is The Day That Never Comes, a song that brings back fond memories of Fade to Black and One…but only because it’s practically the same damn song. The quiet intro that segues into the heavy chorus, a machine-gun riff that pops up after two verses, and a long solo-heavy segment to wrap things up...sounds awfully familiar to me. Granted, it’s a formula that still works, but it’s also a good representation of how little Metallica desired to re-invent themselves on this release. There’s a fleeting glimpse of advancement on the The Unforgiven III, which opens with some mournful piano-playing; unfortunately the interlude is quickly forgotten, and the song becomes a basic ballad (which, thankfully, doesn’t really try at all to sound like Unforgiven I or II…why on Earth either song would need another sequel is anyone’s guess).

Then there’s an instrumental towards the end, because, well, you need one of those for a comeback album too. Now it is certainly the longest song on the album, clocking in at almost exactly 10 minutes, but it’s also the only song that varies enough to warrant such a time frame. It’s not quite The Call of Ktulu, but it will do. The rest of the songs are mostly full-speed-ahead, riff-tastic monsters, with mixed results. The opening track is notable, kicking things off with a heart-beat and an acoustic segment that slowly builds up into a trademark Metallica guitar explosion; there’s no denying that they worked hard to make the first impression memorable. By contrast, you have songs like The End of the Line and The Judas Kiss that really don’t do anything memorable, and fall flat on their faces. All Nightmare Long stands tall among these because it cops a few phrases straight from Slayer’s playbook; but hey, if they needed to copy someone for some maniac thrash moments, at least their stealing from the right pages. Finally, My Apocalypse (bearing no similarity to the Arch Enemy single of the same name…oddly enough) is perhaps the most bearable track on here because it is by far the shortest, at a mere 5 minutes. It also packs the most intensity and speed, making it a great way to close this highly anticipated effort.

But despite all the good moments Death Magnetic can muster, none of them are anything we haven’t heard before and better…and none are good enough to save this album. If the hype is pushed aside – and even as we acknowledge just how much an improvement the album is from the past decade of Metallica bloopers – we still see a work whose only worthy footnote is that it comes from Hetfield and crew, who once ruled the world and conquered the stars. Of course, if you haven’t picked this up already, I myself was never too interested in the band’s music itself, but more so the social stigma that followed them like a pestilence since the 90’s. It was truly enthralling to see their members devolve into whiny rock-pop babies, to hear their fans whimpering and futile cries while they softly cuddled their old copies of Ride the Lightning in the corner of their parent’s basements…now those days are largely gone, and the music can just hardly hold itself up better for the effort.

Funnily enough, I can’t help but feel like this is the album that should’ve generated the dreaded “sell-out” label that they’ve been such good poster-boys for up until now. St. Anger may have been poor, but it was also different, and while the music sucked, the passion was there. Now there is no life left in the poor souls down at Metallica headquarters, just aimless attempts to regain a triumphant feeling of world domination they once had. And if that’s exactly what you wanted or expected, then Death Magnetic will have you squealing with delight. If you wanted an epic on par with their early works, then you’re left out in the cold. If you wanted a continuation of the style defined on St. Anger…well then nothing quite compares to the miserable, hollow shell of a life you live. My point is that the album satisfies many, but can't please the more hardened or caring of music connoisseurs, meaning that it is safe but ultimately nothing of significance. Give your attention to the better metal releases that have been so harshly ignored these past few months instead.

Sunshine, Lollipops, and Backstabbing: "Rumours" Album Review

2008-11-02T14:42:00.000-08:00

Album: Rumours
Artist: Fleetwood Mac
Genre: Classic Rock
Length: 40:03
Release Date: February 4, 1977
Label: Warner Bros.
Producer: Fleetwood Mac, Ken Caillat & Richard Dashut

Perhaps you haven’t yet heard the little fable that goes along with Rumours, an album that ranks among one of the best-selling and most critically-acclaimed of all time. As the story goes, every one of the band’s five members was going through a romantic issue of some kind during the song writing process, prominently involving break-ups between the band members themselves (Lord only knows why any of them thought that an inter-career love interest would be a good idea). Subsequently, as each one started independently crafting lyrics for the next album it became apparent that they were all writing about each other, hence the album’s name. In the end, the realization that their deep, burning hatred for one another had resulted in what they considered a good piece of music somehow alleviated the tension, and everybody was happy. Rainbows were painted into the sky by magic purple unicorns while Stevie Nicks and the gang soared into the glorious sunset on their fantastical enchanted sailboat to buy delicious ice cream. THE END.

Now, all of that makes for a decent marketing blurb or at least a notable Wikipedia factoid, but it doesn’t confirm or deny the presence of actually decent song-writing on here. As it turns out, one of the features of this album that seems to stem from that little feud is neither a strength nor a weakness, and that’s in how divisive the songs are from one another. With all but a scant few tracks being almost entirely associated to a single individual, most of them tend to exert a slightly different feel from the rest, usually by highlighting certain elements while removing others. Compare the bouncy acoustic-driven tune Second-Hand News to the slow piano-laden ballad Songbird, for instance, and you’d hardly think there was any relation. The since-beaten-to-death prospect of having two vocalists of varying Y-chromosome levels furthers the idea by rarely having the two work in tandem, either by awkwardly switching between them or by omitting one or the other from a track altogether. Granted, you can interpret the frantic switches of style as either a lack of balance or an abundance of variety, so for the most part it won’t detract from the experience if you listen to the album on a song-by-song basis.

What does detract from the experience are some rather boneheaded and suitably predictable song-structures that prevent it from being elevated to the highest levels of the art form. Most tracks have respectable core ideas but attract clichés like bears to honey-covered babies, namely in the basic verse-chorus architecture that occupies the majority of the album. And if the aforementioned back-story implied to you that the lyrics, fueled by friction and hostility, would be very intricate or unique, then you may want to get your head re-examined. The mainstream music industry’s attempts to flirt with truly deep reflections on love-once-lost are almost always utterly horrific, and a quick flip to your local radio station is usually enough to prove it. And while the Fleetwood gang’s assortment of poems are hardly as bad as the modern dribble that passes for music, it’s hardly art, which is something you might expect from the sort of Shakespearian-tragedy the band members went through. There are exceptions, but perhaps not enough to list “lyrical and structural ineptitiude” as some of the album’s flaws.

So yes, Rumours does suffer a bit for being the product of a band under duress and, more importantly, for being draped in the clothing of commercialism despite the cries of its subject matter to represent quite the contrary. Yet despite all the hateful things I’ve managed to point out so far about it, there is a certain aura around Rumours that is – dare I say it? – oddly compelling.

For all the angst and bitterness you might expect to come from such a strained group of individuals, Rumours has to be one of the most overtly optimistic albums I’ve ever heard. Songs like Dreams and Gold Dust Woman provide a bright outlook for dreary events through their lyrics, which are just as linear as aforementioned, but the music itself is what makes the album such a shining beacon of hope. Whether it’s the jazzy bass-lines of You Make Loving Fun (just ignore the cheese-flavored title, please) or the deliciously folksy Never Going Back Again, the actual music is genuinely good at generating happiness, which is something I thought I’d never say about any piece of music, ever. If you can ignore the majority of what comes out of their mouths, the two singers reflect this good-spirit just as well, and ignoring what I said about the awkward transitions between them, both Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have phenomenal voices. It’s when things start to get a bit more layered, when the talents of all the band members are proficiently and simultaneously shown such as in The Chain, that the album’s coherent weaknesses can be overshadowed by these strengths…which is kind of ironic, if you think about it.

All in all though, my reaction is mixed. It’s no doubt an album that treads the fine line between accessibility and complexity, and while it leans into both categories at some point or another there’s a lot about the album that feels rather indecisive and conflicting, fittingly enough. Altogether the songs sound a lot better when less focus is put into analyzing them as a musical depiction of themes and worse when framed into the context of being technical and elaborate, as I have the rather obsessive habit of doing. That being the case, you get out of Rumours what you put into it. Walk in expecting a casual, colorful romp into floaty and loose song-writing and you’ll walk out believing that this really was worthy of all its fame; listen to it expecting brilliance and you get a kick in the face. If the former is what you expect, or in fact need, from your music, then you could certainly do a lot worse than Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

Full Circle: "The Way of All Flesh" Album Review

2008-10-26T17:48:00.001-07:00

Album: The Way of All Flesh
Artist: Gojira
Genre: Progressive Death Metal
Length: 75:07
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Label: Listenable (Europe), Prosthetic (America)
Producer: Joe Duplantier

I’m not going to lie and say I have the most “believable” taste of music in the world. For all I complain about band X or praise artist Y, I usually find myself at the losing end of most debates because of the giant schism between me and the average (read: sane) consumer. However, I’m not going to blame anyone for not liking Gojira; they are the kind of artist with a learning curve as steep and impenetrable as a canyon wall, even for genre fans. But just as the most accessible tunes often possess the depth of a tablespoon, so does Gojira present an ocean of opportunities by being so dense and original.

Gojira (whose name is the rōmaji spelling of “Godzilla”, fittingly enough), first truly made a name for themselves on 2005’s astounding From Mars to Sirius. It was a brilliant concept piece that established everything that makes the band unique, talented, and, well…difficult to accept. Their goal is not as much to satisfy their listener as it is to punish them, not quite unlike the progressive death-jazz idols Atheist. But while Atheist overwhelmed listeners with a mixture of blinding speed and bizarre time signatures, Gojira simply bashes their heads in with the kind of raw power you wouldn’t think four guys could create alone. The riffs are thick, the drums precise with blast-beats galore, and the vocalist produces a strange new sound somewhere between a hardcore shout and death-metaller’s growl. They provide the occasional breathing room in the form of instrumentals and experimental noodling, but rest assured the majority of the Gojira experience is claustrophobic, melancholic, and perhaps even frightening, so much so that you would never believe these guys were French.

Yes, it’s a progressive death metal band from France. I wouldn’t lie to you here.

Understandably, when one goes about creating a new style, it comes with a great burden. Thus, the immediate question to ask is whether or not the band’s most recent release, The Way of All Flesh, can possibly compare to the album that defined their careers just three years ago. And if you had asked me a mere few days ago, I would have answered “no”. But with enough time and patience I have come to understand all the subtleties and experiments that make this album every bit as excellent as From Mars to Sirius, if not more so. Not only does it provide a more versatile thrill-ride, it’s the perfect entry point for anyone who wishes to subject themselves to their impeccable brutality.

It immediately succeeds to a certain degree merely by sticking to the principles outlined above; it’s powerful, extreme, and technical the way we expect. But it’s the subtle points that make The Way of All Flesh a transcendent experience: the peculiar mix of synths and vocoder vocals on A Sight to Behold; the surprise guest vocals on Adoration for None; the atmospheric and haunting, atmospheric, four-minute ending to the title track (try listening to it at night, trust me); and most importantly, The Art of Dying. This amazing song opens with a mix of tribal instruments that perfect matches the album’s Aboriginal-esque cover art and ends with a riff that resembles a section of the next track in the set, Esoteric Surgery…played backwards. In between are some of most suffocating moments in Gojira’s history (and remember, that’s a good thing here). And while a few moments on the album feel a tad samey after the big jump in quality that was From Mars to Sirius, the album’s general innovation makes it stand out. Even were that not the case, certain songs on TWoAF represent both the fastest (Esoteric Surgery) and slowest (Vacuity) extremes in music, saving it from feeling anything less than truly special.

If any of this attempts to imply that Gojira only works on the technical and instrumental front, that would be quite the lie. Yes, Joe Duplantier’s growling is easily the biggest obstacle to enjoying the album, but there’s no denying it matches the rest of the ensemble perfectly. And while TWoAF lacks the conceptual storyline that tied all of the songs on the previous album together, it also possesses a much stronger theme: the band’s personal beliefs in life and death. The previous album cemented the band's skill in evaluating tough global issues, namely those relating to mankind's atrocious treatment of the environment; thus, Gojira does not dissapoint in tackling this prickly and bold topic. The subject permeates everything on the album, even the song titles: Oroborus refers to the cyclical, never-ending property of existence associated with Buddhist beliefs, and Yama’s Messengers refers to the Japanese lord of death. Likewise, each song's lyrics are all remarkable pieces of poetry, thanks mostly to their phenomenal imagery. In addition, the album’s biggest musical innovations, as mentioned above, seem to have an other-worldly mannerism themselves, which makes the brutality of the music much more emotive.

As stated earlier, almost none of these magical attributes may be noticed on the first spin of the disc. Perhaps more so than any other album I’ve listened to, TWoAF requires time and patience, almost like watering a dried-up plant with the promise of delicious fruit. Guaranteed, most people will just give and walk away…actually, most people will probably run away and cower in the corner for a few minutes trying to recovery from the pure intensity of it all, but that’s hardly the point. All in all, those of you out there with a taste for pure power and a tolerance for some initial whip-lashing will walk away with something truly memorable, full of substance, and one of the best metal releases of the year.

Youtube Links:

Oroborous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v50wkoofl-4&feature=related

Toxic Garbage Island: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAw5nWJBNrM&feature=related

A Sight to Behold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXfdRLPA9is

The Art of Dying: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xEYz74bMHA&feature=related

Vacuity Music Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gv7fo6mefo (WARNING: this is probably one of the most disturbing music videos ever made. Don't say I didn't warn you)

Daysed and Kunfoozed: "Midnite Vultures" Review

2008-10-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

Album: Midnite Vultures
Artist: Beck
Genre: Alternative / “Indie”
Length: 58:24
Release Date: November 23, 1999
Label: DGC
Producer: Beck Hansen, Tony Hoffer, Mickey Petralia, The Dust Brothers

A stage name. Intentional misspellings. More oversaturated neon colors than a 80’s nightclub. And worst of all, the prominent depiction of tight leather pants…pink ones, I might add. Yep, I think it’s safe to say this album’s cover art couldn’t make me want to listen to the music less if it were covered in thorns and had a shrieking, carnivorous maw. But by no means was that going to prevent me from giving it a decent and equitable shake to the best of my ability. Turns out, however, the cover’s aesthetic actually does point to an attribute of the music that I so greatly fear: overt pretentiousness.

Now, before you decide to force-feed me my own words, I should note that this is my first exploration into the musical enigma known as Beck. From what I could initially gather, the man is some sort of alt-rock idol, and he clearly possesses the eccentricity to receive such a nomination. Alas, idiosyncrasy does not a great musician make, at least not by itself. So I walked into Midnite Vultures, purportedly one the most upbeat Beck releases, expecting bizarre genre transfusions, liberal sampling, and lots of electronica influences. What I didn’t expect was for all of this to be true, but not at all more engaging for the efforts. In fact, for all this man does to keep the wool over my eyes from start to finish, Midnite Vultures is unbelievably shallow.

Many would claim Beck’s style isn’t too readily defined, but I’ve got one word to do just that: schizophrenic. Indeed, so insistent is he to mix so many different genres and instruments under a single album that whatever magical recipe he could have created is quickly soured. Ironically, the core traits of each track – tempo, tone, and even length – don’t vary much at all, so we are forced to rely on his cheap tricks and gimmicks just to keep pace. Take the starting track Sexx Laws for instance; it kicks off in a much more engaging manner than most of the other songs by mixing together repeating keyboards with a soul-flavored jazz ensemble, but repetition already starts to sink in by the bridge and my attention starts to wane off accordingly. That’s when, from seemingly no logical location in space or time, a full-blown banjo riff kicks in. Raised eyebrows not-withstanding, the cocktail of soul and bluegrass just doesn’t flow or make sense…but it’s here anyway, because Beck said so. And it’s only one of many “WTF?” moments that randomly pepper the album, from the laugh-worthy beat-boxing in Pressure Zone to the sudden appearance of below-average hip-hop in Hollywood Freaks. Yeah, it’s great to be diverse, but such a trait must be managed and controlled, not splattered all about like the paint on a monkey’s self-portrait.

And on the subject of inconsistency and incompetence, we come to Beck’s lyrical capabilities, which is indeed where the aforementioned pretentiousness is showcased to a spit-shine polish. I truly went into this album perceiving Beck as a potentially intelligent individual, but from his music I would guess that he’s either very confused about the way the English language works or he advertently has his face crammed right up where-the-sun-don’t-shine. To put it bluntly, they defy reason and intellect in favor of a working rhyme scheme, something that is usually associated with much more mainstream acts than this guy. The result is that any chance of comprehending them from a listener’s point of view is locked up, caged away, and sealed within a cube of building bricks bathed in cement. The first verse from Nicotine and Gravy, for example, sounds like it could be the arrangement of lines from other random songs that in no way relate: “I'll be your chauffeur on a midnight drive / It takes a miracle just to survive / Buried animals call your name / You keep on sleeping through the poignant rain”. What?! Please, someone inform me if you can find any lucid meaning to that jargon. Then, by contrast, you have a song like Mixed Bizness (what did I say about intentional misspellings, huh?), that has “linear” and “dull” written all over it. In other words, it’s a single, and you’ve actually probably heard it before; I know I did. Sadly, it’s also a syrupy, mindless rant about dancing and sex, which is hardly new. Between these two extremes, it’s hard to walk away from this album feeling any sort of emotion, almost like an hour-long elevator ride.

Suffice it to say – and this really should go without saying at all – there will always be an audience for that sort of thing, who will find what I see as superficial to be brilliance instead. And indeed, if you’re looking for an album that carries such a multitude of styles under one roof, you might just have the key that unlocks this album’s potential. Sadly, I couldn’t even lockpick the frickin’ door to said potential because I was too distracted by generic song structures dotted with conceptual and lyrical inconsistencies. I’m sure that in between his song-writing sessions that involve a combination of liberal drug-use and smashing his head against a brick wall, he’d like to refute some of these harsh and perhaps rashly made lashes against his work, but rest assured that if he speaks anything like he writes poetry then he’d probably be better off communicating to me by drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch with his toes.

Great Gig in the Sky, Indeed: "Dark Side of the Moon" Review

2008-10-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

Album: The Dark Side of the Moon
Artist: Pink Floyd
Genre: Progressive Rock / Psychadelic Rock
Length: 42:59
Release Date: March 17, 1973
Label: Harvest (1973), Capitol (20th Anniversary), EMI (30th Anniversary)
Producer: Pink Floyd

It’s a sad fact of life – at least in the world of music, anyway – that the greatest and most important creations and developments are often sadly overlooked. I can expect anyone to know who Britney Spears is, but I still get raised eyebrows when I ask someone about Iron Maiden, and I guarantee most people have no idea what a “Grandmaster Flash” is. In such a world, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to take anything that’s remotely popular or mainstream seriously, which has in part lead to my more “alternative” taste.

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is, in all respects, a glorious exception to this rule. Once my initial skepticism was pushed aside, I was overjoyed to find it to be one of the elite few truly deserving of its success and praise. And that goes beyond its purely financial achievements; at the time of its conception, DSotM was (and I am not exaggerating in the slightest here) an album destined by its inherent brilliance, creativity, and originality to define its era and deeply influence those to come from here to eternity. Whether that’s a statement that everyone wearing the Pink Floyd T-shirts they bought at The Gap can agree with is beyond me, but against impossible odds the fans and the critics – myself included – seem to agree, and so should you.

What’s truly magnificent about Pink Floyd is that the fame they acquired was due solely to the music they created, as it should be. DSotM is probably the best of their works to represent their ability because it is simultaneously their most experimental, so much so that it went on to define a genre that revolves around experimentation: progressive rock. Unlike their later rock opera classic The Wall, the album wallows in a sort of ethereal state, passing fluidly from one phase to the next, hard to grasp yet impossible not to be sucked into, like a musical vacuum. For this reason it’s hard to definitively break down DSotM into parts and infinitely easier to look at it as a whole, where the division of the album into songs only exists to divvy up the conceptual lyrics.

And conceptual the album is, dealing with some of the broadest and most complex issues: life, death, and that which takes place in between. Speak to Me / Breathe is the embodiment of life, represented by the throbbing heartbeat that ushers in the album, and the brief Eclipse ends it with a bold statement about free will. The remaining songs cover all kinds of territory ranging from religion (The Great Gig in the Sky) to greed (Money) to ethics and moral conflict (Us and Them), and are all delivered beautifully through David Gilmore’s spectacular vocals.

The guitarists and drummers do their task marvelously throughout, never overly technical and always in sync with the rest of the sound, but the real star here is the keyboard, courtesy of (recently deceased) Richard Wright. They are, indisputably, the key that unlocks the album’s almost ghost-like and oftentimes eerie sound, and this is clearly the album to which Wright contributed the most. Apart from that, the album’s atmosphere is accentuated by masterful mixing in of various sound effects and other oddities. The exact reasoning escapes me, but when a metronome syncs perfectly with the starting riff in Time, or when a melody of ringing cash registers and jingling coins kick in Money, it seems to make the song more meaningful.

Of course, the album does have its flaws. If you haven’t inferred this by now, know that it takes a patient and open mind to fully enjoy what DSotM has to offer. For something that has garnered so much attention, it’s surprisingly slow and lacks the focus and immediacy of most other music; many of its greatest second-long moments have buildups that can take minutes, as is the nature of progressivism. On the Run symbolizes this well; its long and repetitive keyboard noodling, accented only by odd sounds that pass in and out, may be as exciting to some as it is coma-inducing to others. Ironically, another potential fault can be found in its ending, which is sudden and lacks the explosive punch you would expect such an epic album to end at. In most other regards, though, DSotM is excellently paced and mastered.

Of course, maybe I’m being overly analytical (not like that’s a surprise to anyone). Bluntly put, The Dark Side of the Moon perfectly captures the time and place of 1973, perfectly summarizes a handful of life’s most vital aspects, and is a blast to listen to, all in one handy package. Beyond being the most important proof that music that impresses the public and leaves a massive mainstream mark is almost always made without the intention to do so (see also: Nirvana), its an album that actually received what it deserved. It’s a pity more albums don’t.

And R.I.P. Richard. We think you and your band may have written your own best eulogy for you: "And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime."

Failed to Stir Well: "Hybrid Theory" Review

2008-09-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

Album: Hybrid Theory
Artist: Linkin Park
Genre: Nu Metal / Rapcore
Length: 37:50
Release Date: October 24, 2000
Label: Warner Bros.
Producer: Don Gilmore

As much as the past is haunting, it made sense for my first review to be about the first album I ever really liked. It makes further sense in that almost everyone in North America was touched by this album once upon a time, either by the continuous radio airplay or through the early 2000s nu metal trend. Alas, it’s been a long time since the days where I once adored this band, much like everyone else and their dog at the time, so it goes without saying that this album will be written through the perspective of crap-colored lenses rather than rose-tinted ones.

Hybrid Theory, the first of the “bad albums with awesome names” Linkin Park trilogy, was also a rather large slice of the infamous nu-metal pie that was all the rage back in the day. The fusion of hip-hop and metal quickly proved to be a quick ticket to fame and success amongst troubled adolescents and was hailed as metal’s antidote to grunge, even if it probably exacerbated the disease in the long run. But while most simply dabbled into the hip-hop cultural stew, Linkin Park’s debut practically fell into the damn pot. The trappings of a distortion-fueled metal band are draped in turntable tomfoolery from beginning to end, but the key aspect to the band’s musical schizophrenia comes in the form of two separate vocalists: one to carry the melodies and another to fill in the gaps with full-blown rapping segments. Mike Shinoda, the latter member, was not at his best in Hybrid Theory, as indicated by his more recent solo project Fort Minor, but the big trouble is that none of the other contributors were quite up to snuff either. For all its gimmicks and musical blends, HT is really just one big mediocrity salad.

Unfortunately, it’s apparent right from when you hit “play” exactly what ails Linkin Park. On Papercut, the guitar, drums, and bass all key in fairly quickly, but none of them seem to really take the song in any direction until the verses hit. That’s when all of the distortion and aggression comes to a screeching halt so that the promised rapping can commence. It continues to flip-flop between the two styles in the basic “verse-chorus-bridge” format as predictably as can possibly be, and then immediately ceases, leaving you to wonder what the point of all of it was. And really, that’s an apt description of almost every song here; the album does provide snippets of both metal and hip-hop (which is where the titular “hybrid” aspect comes in) but fails to capture the magic of either. The riffs of the metal half suffer from a minor case of what I like to call “Fallout-Boy syndrome”, in which they only serve to provide a wall of distorted sound but hardly do anything creative, unique, or notable. Meanwhile, the drums and bass serve very little purpose, seemingly only there because they need to be.

As for the vocals, you’re getting a mixed bag. The aforementioned Shinoda handles his designated segments well enough, with an aggressive but likable voice and a respectable degree of flow, but his partner in crime Chester Bennington is a disaster. His wails and screams are absolutely cringe-worthy, especially when paired with the lyrics he's penned. Summing them up is much like skimming through the pages of a pre-pubescent goth child’s diary; disjointed and banal metaphors, combined with linear and cliché subject matter, make for depressingly standard and inexcusably bad lyrics. Chester points the inspiration for his words on drug abuse and familial problems, but it's just as possible that he threw a chimp in a cage and tasered it through the bars until it started screeching things he could use as writing material.

So can the album even hope to have some high points? Sure, though most of them are simply relative to the rest of the album’s blandness. Its most famous single, In The End, succeeds by focusing on the rap end of the spectrum, largely restricting Chester to the sideline where he belongs while a surprisingly component piano melody and some tolerable electronic experimenting aid Shinoda in his lyrical delivery. Even when Chester does show up for the choruses and to add a couple of harmonies to the verses, he actually manages to carry a tune, at least until the song’s bridge (one of which he should probably consider jumping off of, if you catch my meaning). The following track, Place For My Head, opens with some interesting semi-distorted guitar playing that opens up all kinds of doors for a crescendo, only to have all the energy fall into a pit somewhere when Shinoda takes the mic and the song falls into Linkin Park’s standard tricks. Finally, Cure For the Itch is worth noting because it deviates from basic song writing; it’s a shockingly clever instrumental that makes good enough use of the band’s skills behind a studio mixer. But that’s really all she wrote. Every other track is a mix between the same bland riffs, despicable lyrics, and the desperate cries for Bennington to receive voice training…and some therapy.

If any positive criticism could be given Hybrid Theory to this point, its that it managed to mix together the two polar opposite genres better than most other attempts did, that its best moments would be built upon and polished on the follow-up album Meteora, and that it still beats the stuffing out of the ghastly Minutes to Midnight. But it’s a forgettable and dismissible effort through and through, one that makes me somewhat depressed to think I had wasted so much time with it in my youth. I must send it my thanks for ultimately putting me on the path to much greater forms of music, but suffice to say that this hypothetical thank-you-note also comes with a letter-bomb.

"In The End" YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK73dup3IaY

Greetings to Newcomers, and the Rules 'Round Here

2008-09-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

Come one, come to all, to see the opinions that normally stay locked inside my crazy little head! In case you didn't know, this is a place of music evaluation, and all posts created by me will be devoted to reviews of music albums or editorials on the state of the music industry. Sounds fun enough, yes? And you can help!

How, you ask? By giving me things to talk about, of course! If you have a particular nagging desire to see me ridicule (or, on the off chance, praise) one of your favorite albums, or if you have a real stinker you want me to verbally thrash, then let me know! Just post a comment on one of my latest reviews or on this very post, and I'll be sure to find it and take your recommendation to heart. It helps me, it helps you, it helps stop global warming (sorta), everyone wins!

So here's how said reviews will work: I will post an evaluation of an album I listened to on a roughly weekly basis, unless otherwise noted in a post. These reviews will contain specific information regarding each album, and then a in-depth discussion of them. You may notice my reviews don't carry scores; this is because a score-keeping system inevitably leads to numerous conflicts between both my own record-keeping and my viewers, and because opinions are far too complex to represent through simple numbers. Needless to say, if you want to know whether or not to give the album a listen, you may have to read the actual review (or, ya know, the last paragraph).

And that's about it. Let the exploration into unrestricted musical pessimism begin!