This post contains spoilers!
Gears Of War is a series I'm constantly on the fence about. As much as I love the series for it's cover-based gameplay, giant setpieces, and huge suite of modes and options giving the player great value for their money, it's not a series without some deep flaws. The characters are all cartoons, right down to their thick-necked, impossibly proportioned character models and ridiculous "ooh rah" mentality. Unless you're willing to read the novelizations and comic books, there's not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on from a story perspective. It's a bunch of war movie cliches and melodramatic nonsense that telegraphs every character moment and plot twist by signal flare.
The first Gears game is, to my mind, the only one that had the right tone: it was a romp. There were serious moments, or moments we were meant to take seriously, but it was all in service of blowing shit up. It seems that, once the first game set the world on fire, the writers never quite found their footing. They had to make the narrative more and more grandiose to match the level of attention heaped upon the game and it's never really been to the series' benefit. It certainly made for some excellent setpieces but the stubborn refusal of characters to act human rubbed against ham-handed moments so incongruous to what came before that my reaction was to sputter with laughter, not get choked up.
As a sidenote: there's plenty of people who like to act as though the narrative of the Gears games are bulletproof. Why question something so resolutely stupid? Well, for the same reason I was one of the guys criticizing the storytelling issues in Mass Effect 3: if the writers want us to take their story seriously, we have to oblige them and judge it as such. If this were Bulletstorm or Vanquish, I'd let a lot of things pass because they never wanted to be anything more than a ridiculous shooter. While Gears may have started as a ridiculous shooter, it discovered ambitions along the way they could never pull off. If you just want to shoot stuff, you can pretty much stop wasting your time with this article now. It's still really good at that.
This was all supposed to change with Gears Of War: Judgement. Developers People Can Fly, those responsible for the aforementioned Bulletstorm, are solid developers picking up a very tried-and-true series. There's no pressure to reinvent it, merely give it a twist while Epic proper works on the first next-gen Gears game. It's role as a placeholder actually works in it's favor because it means they can take more chances than Gears Of War 4 can. They picked game journalist and respected author Tom Bissell to write the game, lending a little credibility to the series and hopefully moving it beyond the Random Quip Generator it had been up to that point. Based on the hushed tones other game journalists spoke of Bissell in, I figured good things were in store.
Sadly, the campaign is only a marginal success... mostly due to the unimpeachable gory action the series is known for.
The first thing I noticed when they previewed the game was the slightly tweaked character models. While still exaggerated, they seemed a little less beefy and more realistic. As a prequel, this could either be because the characters are younger or because of a commitment to a slightly less bro-ified attitude towards the series going forward. Choosing Baird and Cole as the leads was a smart choice as they were the characters who had the most personality in the original trilogy. A game where we see Baird become the increasingly bitter and sarcastic man he is in the first Gears is very much a game I'd like to play. Turns out, I'm still waiting.
People Can Fly know their way around arcade-y score-based action games and Judgement sort of smashes together the vanilla story mode and the arcade mode from the previous games into one. The idea is to collect stars through your performance. Each area has three stars to collect depending on how well your team does. Die or go DBNO (Down But Not Out) and you lose stars. Kill your enemies in various creative ways to earn Ribbons which increase your stars. Collect enough stars and you unlock bonuses including an extra couple of campaign chapters called Aftermath which are a side story to Gears 3 and the only part of the campaign that has no Declassified modifiers. It's also the best chunk of the story in the game, partly for that exact reason.
Every significant firefight in the game has an option to be "Declassified," which imposes any of a number of different battle conditions on you from limited arsenals to increased difficulty to visual impairment which will allow you to earn stars faster at increased risk. It'd be an excellent system if it didn't hamstring narrative momentum and pull you out of the game.
By interrupting you every ten or fifteen minutes by asking you to click on a big COG logo to see what the Declassified factors are for the next fight, Judgement is constantly reminding you that it's a game. I'm a little shocked that Declassified wasn't offered as an optional mode or unlocked after beating the game. The single player wouldn't have been particularly compelling anyway but at least you'd have been able to focus on the story and the flow of action unhindered. Every Declassified logo was an opportunity for me to stop for a bathroom break or a bite to eat or a "Oh, hey, I should go back and continue my Persona 3 game... I'll come back to this later."
The fragmented nature of the narrative gives added scrutiny to the story that it doesn't particularly need. In addition to much quieter, more sober iterations of Baird and Cole (not once are the words "Cole Train" uttered over the course of the campaign), your other squadmates are by-the-book cadet Sofia Hendricks and scarred, grizzled Russian-analogue Garron Paduk, who sort of becomes the game's Baird despite the presence of the actual Baird.
Paduk is far and away the best character in the game. He has a history, a point of view, motivation, a disrespect for authority, and a sharp tongue. And then there's poor Sofia. If you were thinking that a respected writer might mean a well-drawn female character in a video game... not so much. At the military tribunal, Sofia is the only one to try and pass the blame to her squadmates. Later on, it's revealed that she was schtupping an ancillary character they've been searching for, a married man and father. And at the end of the Aftermath chapter it's revealed that she moved on to sleeping with Garron and was brutally murdered off screen to attempt to add a bit of dramatic weight to the story. The Feminazis Coming To Destroy Gaming will not be amused.
The game is ostensibly about Baird's Kilo Squad trying to stop a rampaging Locust leader named Karn by dropping a missile on his head. However, Karn is a just a walking boss fight waiting to start. The real antagonist of the story is Loomis, a moustachioed avatar of myopic military arrogance. After disobeying orders and dropping a Lightmass missile on Karn's head, Loomis has Kilo Squad arrested for treason. The game itself happens in flashback. (I was hoping there'd be some element of Baird and crew as unreliable narrators but that's a bit too ambitious, I suppose.) When you Declassify a section, there's normally a bit of text about how Kilo is alleging something that runs counter to Loomis or the COG brass' intel, illustrating pretty clearly how badly the Locust were underestimated. It's an additional shade to the series I actually quite liked given how black and white the conflict has been portrayed.
By insisting on court martialing Kilo Squad in the middle of a city that's at war, with Locust literally breaking down their doors, there's no interpretation of Loomis' actions that doesn't fit the definition of cartoon villain. Regardless of Kilo's testimony, it's clear he intends to kill them for their disobedience. Between the Declassified text and putting soldiers in harm's way needlessly out of ego and single-mindedness, they spend the entire game building and building up to a reckoning for Loomis and... it all ends with Baird essentially shaking his hand and going their separate ways. No harm done.
Yeah, really, that's it. It's a moment every bit as stupid as the finale of Gears Of War 3 where they tease the idea that there's something more to the Locusts before... well, committing genocide. There's no case to be made that Loomis is just a hard man making hard choices. He's willfully doing wrong because he cannot admit that the Locust are any smarter than "animals" and because he can't see beyond hardline military doctrine. There's a moment in Aftermath where Kilo Squad comes across a statue dedicated to Loomis and I would have been fine with that as a "the real heroes never get recognition" moment if it was clear that he got the ignominious death his actions warranted.
There are action genre rules, the same as in horror. If a character is a dick in the first act, usually an officer or bureaucrat, he gets his just desserts in
the third. Hopefully in a fun, ironic way that will make us cheer. Because that's what we're here for. Maybe he dies due to his own arrogance. Maybe he dies despite Kilo's best efforts to intercede, thus making them seem more heroic. Maybe he survives despite all odds and Kilo helplessly watches him leave to continue to lose the war for them, but you don't have your hero characters absolve the villain without the villain changing their ways. If you're going to buck action genre conventions, you need to make your intentions very clear as to why or else it seems as though you're wildly out of sync with the genre you're working in. Because what we got was a very unfulfilling, sour ending.
If only this were the game's only story-related problems.
The game is woefully in need or memorable setpiece fights. The only one that stands out to me is a Normandy-like beach invasion followed later by a defense of the same area, which only stands out due to how tired of a concept it still is and how it will be nakedly reproduced for multiplayer. Judgement seems to have fallen in love with wave-based hold out sequences too. There's several dotted over the course of the game which only make the absence of a proper Horde mode more curious. It also becomes a crutch they lean on by the end of the game. By keeping you penned up in one area, they don't have to generate new areas or sequences. The combat mechanics are as solid as ever but nothing stands out after you're done as being memorable as far as settings or enemy types.
Loomis isn't the only character in the game who has no arc. Character development on the whole just doesn't happen. The opportunity to see Baird and Cole start as rookies and move towards the characters we know from the main series was tantalizing yet is absent in the game itself. Baird has a couple of quips but it otherwise bland as can be. We're left to understand that any serious adjustments to his character were made between the end of Judgement and the first Gears, which is an utterly wasted opportunity.
The handling of Cole is even worse. He has none of the boisterous personality he's known for and doesn't show any by the end of the game. At one point Loomis tells him that he's been "uncharacteristically quiet" and I had to chuckle. Where's this loud Cole he's talking about? The only lines of Cole's I remember are him off-handedly reminding us of how rich he was as a thrashball star. Using his inside voice, no less. There's a case to be made that Cole needed to be a bit more grounded in reality but, at the same time, it wastes Lester Speight as a voice actor. Dude does not do "demure" well. There's a middle ground to hit with the character that the game has no interest in.
These are all things that could have been handled in a few lines of dialogue or a short cutscene. I'm not asking for the game to be based around it's characters, merely that it give us something, anything, to chew on while we play. The Gears series has always struggled in this respect. While Judgement represents an attempt to grow the series up, it's still a long way from meeting it's potential. It still has the smooth, gratifying gameplay we expect from the series but there's only so long you can coast on that. Mechanics get repetitive over time and familiarity will eventually cause people to move onto the next thing. However, if your characters and your world are compelling, that will go a long way towards extending the life of your franchise. Given how sober and ponderous and mishandled Judgement's story turned out to be, it's a lesson Epic is still learning.
Gears Of War is not a series that needs to be taken seriously. It just needs to be a well-written action game. Well-written action, contrary to being "dumb" as people assume, actually means being clever rather than high-minded. There's no Terrence Malick film hiding somewhere in the Gears Of War universe. There are series that can get away with Big Thoughts but Gears isn't one of them. All we need is solid action and to not have our intelligence insulted. They've long since mastered the former, now we just need them to start on the latter.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
iOS Review: DDR Dance Wars
Dance Dance Revolution: Dance Wars
Developer: Bemani
Publisher: Konami
Price: Free (with microtransactions)
Rhythm game institution Dance Dance Revolution has seen better days. The genre has seen a huge contraction due to an over-crowded market. Those of us who played it when it hit American shores have gotten older and more fearful of having our future political ambitions derailed by photos showing up on Facebook, so we're not as likely to pull out the dance mats as we once were. On the upside, just about anyone has time for a quick two minutes of tapping our smartphones to cheesy dance music while pretending to work.
There's already a proper mobile Dance Dance Revolution game, DDR S+, already available which offers the classic DDR experience, so seeing a more social media based, competitive, freemium game show up in this market was a little surprising. Making an impression in a crowded field is no easy task even with name recognition, especially if that name is well past it's prime. So... does DDR Dance Wars [dance metaphor] or does it simply [dance metaphor]?
The first thing I was struck by when I started the game up was just how chintzy and low budget it looked. While DDR S+ feels like an actual app, Dance Wars seems like a glorified browser game. There's plenty of free-to-play games with a solid presentation so having Bemani fumble on even that was not a hopeful sign.
It took me a little while to find my footing in the game because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be clicking on. Some of the buttons just look like generic headers or graphics. I found myself futzing my way through the screens until I figured out what was where. Not nearly enough thought went into a clear, easy-to-use layout.
Once you figure that out, the game opens up a bit. You have a your standard Free Play mode where you can practice what is initially a very small batch of songs. Mission mode allows you to unlock more tracks by completing various songs under various conditions as well as stickers, the currency of Battle mode. At the end of a song, either in Free Play or the Mission mode, you have the option of setting it as your Battle Track. The idea is to set your highest score as a Battle Track which others will play against in Battle mode.
Battle mode is not a direct competition but simply pits your high score against the score of whichever opponent you choose. You're competing for stickers which, in turn, unlock even more songs. Each song is divided up into five stickers and if you can collect and hold each sticker for the song, you unlock it. You're given up to eight different opponents to choose from which actually results in a bit of strategic thinking. Is the guy with "Max 300" on Expert some kind of savant or is he bluffing with a D rating to keep the scrubs away? On the other hand, is the low level player with the generic batch of numbers and "Kind Lady" on Basic just some random dude who played the game once and quit or did he AA or AAA the song to lure in the suckers?
Either way, the game attempts to keep you on your toes by speeding up the song a couple of times during the course of the battle but since these always happen at exactly the same point of a song, you can pretty easily train yourself. The people who set up a "war cry" to accompany the sped up sections, which is just a random line of text to taunt your opponent, actually succeed more because you eye is automatically drawn to reading the text which can then throw off your timing. You can also buy traps to put on your tracks for an additional level of difficulty to whomever challenges you.
If you're looking to stack the odds in your favor, there's always buffs available in the Store for the cost of either the Respect Points you gain from completing Battles or Missions or DDR Points which cost actual money. You can also use your Respect Points on any of four different power ups which can be leveled up for increased effects.
Your biggest boon in Battle mode is your Crew, friends who also play the game. The game allows you ten initially but the size of your crew can be increased through items bought in the store. In order to join a crew, however, you need to sign up for Japan's mobile gaming social network site GREE. Sign up can apparently only be done via the game, so you can't start an account from your desktop and log in later which is a pain. If you don't have any friends of your own on GREE, the game will auto-populate a number of people you can randomly invite. These crewmembers will go with you into Battle and buff you. There's a cooldown period afterwards but having a couple crewmembers along for the ride and a score boosting power up means even inexperienced players can essentially buy a victory.
Even in the mildly diverting Battle mode, the general sense of a game that's been tossed off in a fortnight follows you everywhere. The game will not notify you if you've leveled up. You need to go back to your profile screen to check. There seems to be some sync issues occasionally where I'll fail out of a mission because of a long string of Great and Good ratings but if I immediately replay the song in Free Mode on the same difficulty, I'll be scoring Perfect or Marvelous.
This is a free-to-play game, though, so your biggest obstacle to play is managing your Stamina meter. It defaults at 500, which essentially means you can play five Battles or Missions before exhausting it. There is a power up that reduces the amount of stamina each match costs as well as an item in the store that can permanently raise your stamina and consumables items for a one time boost, so the amount you play will be decided on how invested you're willing to be in a very mediocre game.
Old school DDR fans will appreciate the returning characters or the songs which have become old favorites. New players will likely be put off by how low budget and cheap the game feels, even at the low, low price of free. The game will be supported by community events that will allow you to unlock accessories for your characters, bonus items or even new tracks. They already have a cross-promotion with another Konami beat-matching game, the vastly superior jukebeat, which will unlock three remixed game tracks for Contra, Lethal Enforcers and Frogger. Being optional tracks, though, they're only available for Free Play mode.
Nothing in DDR Dance Wars is overly offensive but when there are so many classier rhythm games for iOS, including it's sister game, DDR S+, the game really doesn't make a case for itself. While there's a bit of fun to be had and the freemium model is not used in a particularly odious manner, you can easily forget the game in on your phone. Ultimately, it's a solid idea with a poor presentation.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
On CliffyB, Micro-Transactions, and EA vs. Valve
You've probably already read this. Just about anyone who follows gaming news sites has read and developed an opinion about ex-Epic design director and video game gadfly Cliff Bleszinski's Tumblr post about micro-transactions. Some sites, like Kotaku, printed the article without comment, which reads like a public co-sign. Other places, like Destructoid, wrote a polite but assertive counter-argument. Comment threads have grown bloated with rage. Fingers have been waggled at people on both sides of the argument. It's a thing.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with Bleszinski (I don't), I do respect the man's candor. Developers and publishers are notoriously squirrely about doing anything openly. The fact that Cliff is willing to let us look behind the curtain at what a AAA game developer really thinks is undoubtedly a good thing. He has a top down perspective of the industry most of us never get to hear about. However, as informative as it can be, it also illustrates how disconnected he and his peers are from your average rank and file gamer.
It's very eye-opening how little sympathy he seems to have for his audience, shrugging off valid complaints as the simple mechanics of doing business and laying blame on the shoulders of the people buying his games for the state of the industry, ignoring that we're only working with the tool they are giving us. At any rate, given that he's stepped down from his position at Epic in his prime, he's also rich enough to not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him.
One of the major points of his argument, about the encroachment of micro-transactions in AAA titles, is not something that's going away. For better or for worse. Nonetheless, where Cliff (and many of his colleagues, I'm sure) see this as some kind of inevitability, guys like me see the kind of myopic, single-minded, fear-based corporate thinking that's hobbling the industry. It's greed, rationalized.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with micro-transactions in games, just in how they're being implemented. Micro-transactions are a tool. Multiplayer is a tool. Basic common sense dictates that you use your tools efficiently depending on the project you're tackling. If you try to install a window using only a hammer, you'll likely end up with a lot of blood and swearing. And no window. Cliff has a history of missing the point on this issue, like insisting that games like Shadows Of The Damned would have been improved by multiplayer despite Grasshopper Manufacture not having a large enough team, funding or any kind of logical in to justify it.
For years now we've been in a vicious circle, watching publishers chase after Activision's omnipresent Call Of Duty franchise in hopes of mimicking their success. EA threw more money than I'd care to count, including a PR blitz that seemed to last for months, at Battlefield 3 in hopes of unseating the champ and still fell short. Yet they keep trying the same tricks over and over again on every franchise under their umbrella expecting a different result. You don't need me to tell you what that's the definition of.
So when Cliff gets exasperated at the terribly low opinion people have about EA, I get exasperated right back because I cannot understand how any intelligent person doesn't get it. This isn't a question of people picking on poor, poor multi-billion dollar corporations like EA over something as ridiculous as marketing... this is people catching on to a company that insists on making the exact same mistakes over and over and over again. No one is blaming EA for wanting to make money, they're blaming EA for being bad at it in the long term. They're blaming EA for introducing cynicism into something they love. For reminding us that the industry is owned and managed largely by giant corporations who look at us as walking billfolds rather than people with brains and the ability to walk away from something we don't like. Respect must be earned and maintained.
The argument against EA is multifacited. EA wants uniformity. They want the same rules to apply to everything, because to approach each property or franchise differently would require thought and long-term planning. Simply sayings "add micro-transactions and multiplayer" is something a bunch of shareholders who know nothing about games can understand. It may mitigate risk but it also results in burning their bridges as they're building them. It gets much harder to build a head of steam when everyone is waiting for the day where someone makes a big tentpole, franchise game that can't be beaten without micro-transactions. Because, based on their history, that is the exact kind of thing EA would do.
The Call Of Duty bubble is going to burst. Every year there are contenders and every year they're knocked out but people will eventually tire of the feedback loop. And right now, the video game industry doesn't have anything else to pick up the slack other than the seemingly evergreen sports franchises. Millions and millions of dollars have been thrown at MMO's that have under-performed and been shuttered. The handheld market has given way to smartphones and tablets that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo don't own. We have a new generation of consoles coming and rumors of Microsoft releasing an online-only, EA-partnered system swirling that will likely hand the console crown back to Sony. A good PR team can dazzle but it only takes one well-informed friend to kill the buzz.
And when the dust settles, Valve will still be there. Not because they are inherently good and righteous people but because, as others have mentioned, they're smart and they're privately-owned. They make bucketloads of money because they treat their audience like people who will leave if they feel they aren't getting a fair deal. Other people have broken down the differences between EA's approach to DLC and Valve's, but it boils down to respect. Valve's Team Fortress 2 micro-transactions do not hinder the game, they personalize it.
While EA is confused at why they're being voted the worst company in America, Valve seems to understand the power of not underestimating your audience. (I quoted Valve head Gabe Newell in a Tumblr post not too long ago that illustrates the kind of thinking EA has yet to grok.) Being a Capitalist doesn't mean you have license to treat your audience as disposable and there's no rule that you can't be richer than God and also well-liked. So long as Valve remains a private company, you can expect their hot streak to continue.
People use the term "vocal minority" like it's derogative. They tend to forget the operative word there, which is "vocal." Your average casual gamer who buys only Madden and Halo and Call Of Duty may not have an opinion about Day One DLC or micro-transactions but you can be sure he has a friend who does. If that friend tells him not to buy the next Xbox because you have to be online at all times to use it, he'll listen. These aren't numbers you can plug into a spreadsheet. It's a human factor and it's an area corporations like EA have a damnably hard time understanding. Get enough people crowing about something and others will listen.
So, while I respect Bleszinski for providing gamers with an insight into how high level suits in this industry think and I admire him for the foresight to take a step back to see how the chips fall before making his next move, his insistence on blaming his audience for his own short-sightedness means that, even after the future of the industry has been written, there will people waiting in the wings to bring that bad old cynicism back. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with Bleszinski (I don't), I do respect the man's candor. Developers and publishers are notoriously squirrely about doing anything openly. The fact that Cliff is willing to let us look behind the curtain at what a AAA game developer really thinks is undoubtedly a good thing. He has a top down perspective of the industry most of us never get to hear about. However, as informative as it can be, it also illustrates how disconnected he and his peers are from your average rank and file gamer.
It's very eye-opening how little sympathy he seems to have for his audience, shrugging off valid complaints as the simple mechanics of doing business and laying blame on the shoulders of the people buying his games for the state of the industry, ignoring that we're only working with the tool they are giving us. At any rate, given that he's stepped down from his position at Epic in his prime, he's also rich enough to not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him.
One of the major points of his argument, about the encroachment of micro-transactions in AAA titles, is not something that's going away. For better or for worse. Nonetheless, where Cliff (and many of his colleagues, I'm sure) see this as some kind of inevitability, guys like me see the kind of myopic, single-minded, fear-based corporate thinking that's hobbling the industry. It's greed, rationalized.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with micro-transactions in games, just in how they're being implemented. Micro-transactions are a tool. Multiplayer is a tool. Basic common sense dictates that you use your tools efficiently depending on the project you're tackling. If you try to install a window using only a hammer, you'll likely end up with a lot of blood and swearing. And no window. Cliff has a history of missing the point on this issue, like insisting that games like Shadows Of The Damned would have been improved by multiplayer despite Grasshopper Manufacture not having a large enough team, funding or any kind of logical in to justify it.
For years now we've been in a vicious circle, watching publishers chase after Activision's omnipresent Call Of Duty franchise in hopes of mimicking their success. EA threw more money than I'd care to count, including a PR blitz that seemed to last for months, at Battlefield 3 in hopes of unseating the champ and still fell short. Yet they keep trying the same tricks over and over again on every franchise under their umbrella expecting a different result. You don't need me to tell you what that's the definition of.
So when Cliff gets exasperated at the terribly low opinion people have about EA, I get exasperated right back because I cannot understand how any intelligent person doesn't get it. This isn't a question of people picking on poor, poor multi-billion dollar corporations like EA over something as ridiculous as marketing... this is people catching on to a company that insists on making the exact same mistakes over and over and over again. No one is blaming EA for wanting to make money, they're blaming EA for being bad at it in the long term. They're blaming EA for introducing cynicism into something they love. For reminding us that the industry is owned and managed largely by giant corporations who look at us as walking billfolds rather than people with brains and the ability to walk away from something we don't like. Respect must be earned and maintained.
The argument against EA is multifacited. EA wants uniformity. They want the same rules to apply to everything, because to approach each property or franchise differently would require thought and long-term planning. Simply sayings "add micro-transactions and multiplayer" is something a bunch of shareholders who know nothing about games can understand. It may mitigate risk but it also results in burning their bridges as they're building them. It gets much harder to build a head of steam when everyone is waiting for the day where someone makes a big tentpole, franchise game that can't be beaten without micro-transactions. Because, based on their history, that is the exact kind of thing EA would do.
The Call Of Duty bubble is going to burst. Every year there are contenders and every year they're knocked out but people will eventually tire of the feedback loop. And right now, the video game industry doesn't have anything else to pick up the slack other than the seemingly evergreen sports franchises. Millions and millions of dollars have been thrown at MMO's that have under-performed and been shuttered. The handheld market has given way to smartphones and tablets that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo don't own. We have a new generation of consoles coming and rumors of Microsoft releasing an online-only, EA-partnered system swirling that will likely hand the console crown back to Sony. A good PR team can dazzle but it only takes one well-informed friend to kill the buzz.
And when the dust settles, Valve will still be there. Not because they are inherently good and righteous people but because, as others have mentioned, they're smart and they're privately-owned. They make bucketloads of money because they treat their audience like people who will leave if they feel they aren't getting a fair deal. Other people have broken down the differences between EA's approach to DLC and Valve's, but it boils down to respect. Valve's Team Fortress 2 micro-transactions do not hinder the game, they personalize it.
While EA is confused at why they're being voted the worst company in America, Valve seems to understand the power of not underestimating your audience. (I quoted Valve head Gabe Newell in a Tumblr post not too long ago that illustrates the kind of thinking EA has yet to grok.) Being a Capitalist doesn't mean you have license to treat your audience as disposable and there's no rule that you can't be richer than God and also well-liked. So long as Valve remains a private company, you can expect their hot streak to continue.
People use the term "vocal minority" like it's derogative. They tend to forget the operative word there, which is "vocal." Your average casual gamer who buys only Madden and Halo and Call Of Duty may not have an opinion about Day One DLC or micro-transactions but you can be sure he has a friend who does. If that friend tells him not to buy the next Xbox because you have to be online at all times to use it, he'll listen. These aren't numbers you can plug into a spreadsheet. It's a human factor and it's an area corporations like EA have a damnably hard time understanding. Get enough people crowing about something and others will listen.
So, while I respect Bleszinski for providing gamers with an insight into how high level suits in this industry think and I admire him for the foresight to take a step back to see how the chips fall before making his next move, his insistence on blaming his audience for his own short-sightedness means that, even after the future of the industry has been written, there will people waiting in the wings to bring that bad old cynicism back. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Publisher: Sega
Developer(s): Gearbox... and TimeGate, and Demiurge, and Nerve...
Platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, & WiiU (eventually)
Spoiler Alert! You shouldn't play this game anyway so I'm going to spoil it in full...
Walking in on your grandfather watching the chestburster scene in Alien when you're nine years old is every bit as scarring as you'd think. A few days later, after I stopped hyperventilating, I convinced him to let me watch the entire movie and the crusty old bastard actually agreed. It's very likely the source of my arachnophobia and my fear of being raped in my face. No matter how many facehuggers, chestbursters and xenomorphs I've gibbed in various video game incarnations since then, it's always remained a primal fear of mine.
When I found out that Gearbox was developing a first person shooter and supposedly canonical sequel to the second movie, I was immediately on board. When I saw the demo footage they showed at conventions, I got excited. Rumors of a troubled six year (!) development and a lack of any real gameplay footage prior to release tempered that excitement but I still picked up the game on day one figuring, well, even if it's crap it'll give me something to write about.
And... I am definitely writing about it.
Watching the explosion of pointed fingers around this game happen (which has been well-documented by Destructoid) seems like it could threaten to overshadow the actual content of the game. The game has been roundly (and rightly) panned by critics but reading those reviews you could pick out a lot of criticisms there were simply nitpick-y. The game failed so utterly at getting you to suspend your disbelief that suddenly everything became suspect. So, is it really as bad as all that? Is it possible to salvage some sense of fun from it?
Thus far, the only people I've talked to who defend the game are avowed fans of the series. This confuses me, for reasons that I'll get into later, but their argument seems to boil down to the fact that you can successfully play it from beginning to end... and they managed to get a lot of the fan service right. Ripley's pulse rifle/flamethrower combo was a pre-order bonus. Scattered through the game are things like Hicks' shotgun, Vasquez's smart gun, Hudson's pulse rifle that you are free to use which, I guess, evoke some nostalgic feelings for a movie that's become a cultural touchstone. You can also find dog tags for the now-deceased Aliens marines, recreations of certain areas from the movie, and other callbacks. Clearly, the developers (whoever they ultimately were) are familiar with the lore. Honestly, though, unless you're the kind of person who is enchanted by the idea of "oh, that's a thing I recognize from another thing" there really is nothing to recommend the game. It is, at best, a mostly functional FPS that ties into a beloved series.
I should note that the least worst experience you can have with this game is on the PC where it looks marginally better. Plus, savvy PC gamers have already come up with mods to improve the graphics of the game. If you absolutely, positively must play the game, go for the PC version. I played the game on the 360 which is clearly the worst available option.
It's hard to know where to start when talking about a game that fails at absolutely everything it tries to do. As shooter, it looks and plays like a last gen title. As an Aliens game, it insults established canon, hand waves away giant plot holes, and misses all of the subtext inherent in the series.
Slogging through the single player campaign, I witnessed so many bugs and glitches that the whole thing become a comedy to me. Kill a xeno on a wall and it'll stick partway into the wall and twitch endlessly. Gib a xeno and little bits and pieces will hover in the air, spinning in circles because they can't touch the ground. The stealth sequence, already widely mocked for the hilarious stick-up-the-butt walk of the Boiler xenos (which neuters any tension of crawling in a dark sewer without a gun), had the additional hilarity of one of the xenos just walking on top of the water like Suicide Bomber Jesus Alien. During a co-op run, one of my teammates fell halfway into the ground and we had to execute him in cold blood in order get him to respawn. Those are just the ones that come to me off the top of my head. You can find gifs and YouTube clips of other people's experiences with the glitch-y, damn-near-broken game for additional laughs. I couldn't even do a quick 100% of the game because it glitched a pair of dog tags, robbing me of the achievement for collecting all of them.
Co-op was the most fun I had playing the game because it allowed myself and three other people to Mystery Science Theater our way through the game but even that presented a whole host of other problems. If you imagine what a focused Gearbox Aliens game could have been, four player drop-in-drop-out class-based co-op (like a more linear Borderlands), it only highlights how much of a mess the game really is. You load up a map and you are simply dropped into the shoes of one of four random character models. There's nothing exciting or different about them. The game only plays differently in the sense that it's infinitely more crowded and hard to manage, especially when you factor in having additional brain dead, computer-controlled AI characters. The game shudders nearly to a halt the minute you get into a big firefight. Misery loves company and there's laughs to be had but it's not enough of a justification to play the game.
Plenty has been said about how ugly the game is, especially in light of the infamous "vertical slice" demo and the promises made by Gearbox, and what you heard is true, and it's especially true on the 360. The game looks not unlike a launch title. Dynamic lighting was promised and not delivered. The screen tearing, lazy textures, the flat animations. It looks genuinely, shockingly bad. Enemies crawl out of black squares that are supposed to pass for vents. A broken light fixture hanging from the ceiling will completely block you from moving. These aren't nitpicks, these are things that any B-grade shooter has evolved past years ago. Where Alien made the chestbursters a drawn out, horrifyingly painful experience, Colonial Marines has them popping out immediately (through body armor) like a game of Whack-A-Mole.
The actual story of the game is astonishingly amateurish. As one-note as the characters in Aliens were, their one note was usually interesting and had a logical arc. The protagonist, Winter, starts and ends the game a hyper-competent bad ass. Your AI partner, O'Neal, on the other hand, looks like a biker and acts like child. The dialogue between him and Winter is terrible, most of the quips landing flat because they sound weirdly self-conscious, not like self-possessed bad ass marines. It's clearly nerds trying to write tough guys and falling well short. (It doesn't help that the voice acting is wildly uneven, vacillating between "okay" and "fucking terrible.") O'Neal doesn't even have a character arc so much as a bunch of stuff happens to him and he reacts to it. Other characters drift in an out of the narrative like the pilot, Reid. Voiced by Ashly "Tina Tina" Burch, she gets a couple of the only good lines in the game but, again, she has no arc. The plot randomly demands that she act like a bitch for a couple of minutes and then it's dropped.
This leads into a larger problem the game has: in a series that gave us characters like Ripley and Vasquez, where the xenomorphs are essentially rapists, there are no strong female characters to be found. Reid goes from smart-ass pilot to pulling rank out of cowardice for no reason. The other female character, Bella, who looks like she's on her way to the Bikini Bowl, is introduced as having already been face raped by a xeno (with the hilariously dead line reading of "It's dead now") and spends the entire game needing to be saved, first from her hidey hole and then on a Quixotic mission to have her chestburster removed. She doesn't even get to die with dignity as the chestburster pops out (through her body armor, 'natch) before anyone has the decency to put a bullet in her head like she asks. What should have been a tragic moment earns nothing but an eye roll.
Oh, and the whole fuss about adding female character models to the multiplayer last year? Well, the guys all look and dress like standard grunts but the women don't wear helmets and show more skin because... well, of course they do. I can hear the closet misogynists grumbling about being able to differentiate between the two but that's the whole fucking point. Vasquez only got to dress the way she did because she was lugging around a giant smart gun and it played into her badass character. Other women in Aliens like Ferro and Deitrich wore standard military uniforms. For crying out loud, they're called "uniforms" for a reason. Misinterpreting a call for equality by giving special treatment (and a bit of sex appeal) is such a standard dudebro move that you can't help but facepalm.
The bad decisions don't end there, though. Remember how bummed you were when you found out that Hicks and Newt died in the crash at the beginning of Alien 3? Well, never fear, because the game brings Hicks back from the dead, complete with Michael Biehn sleepwalking through his dialogue like he knows what bullshit he's reading. They don't even have the basic decency to give it a proper explanation. Nor do they explain how the Solaco went from crash landing on the planet's surface to back in space again. They could have brought fan favorite Hudson back, as he never died on screen, but instead you find his dead chestbursted body in the sewers. They can't even capitalize on such an obvious loose end.
The writers take such astonishing liberties with established cannon that it boggles my mind how even fans of the series can defend it. Generally, when writers play fast and loose with series canon, the fans are the first to get up in arms but it seems to be the one thing people defending the game fall back on. Considering fans still loudly disagree on which movies in the series are good, I suppose it should be expected to some degree. Is Aliens 3 crap or an underrated film with a troubled development? Is Prometheus utter shite or an ambitious failure?
The game ends with a resounding "thunk" as you eject a Alien Queen from an airlock by running around and hitting buttons. No need to fight her or even fire a bullet. Just hit a few buttons. To top it all off, they have the utter temerity to end this amazing crapfest with a cliffhanger. As if the game would ever get a sequel in the state it's in. For the sad, sad people who actually were invested in the story, you'd better hope that your $30 Season Pass nets you some single player DLC because that's the only resolution you're ever going to get. This is a game that will be quietly swept under the rug and ignored as quickly as possible.
If you were thinking you could justify your purchase by playing the multiplayer... not really, no. It's a serviceable but completely uninspiring suite of modes you've seen many times in the past. There's the requisite Aliens vs. Marines Team Deatchmatch and a couple more modes cribbed from Left 4 Dead. Controlling Xenomorphs is more of a chore than a good time with wall and ceiling crawling poorly implemented so that only there are only certain walls and ceilings you can crawl on. There's only a couple maps to choose from so the replay value is nearly non-existent. The persistent leveling system is fine, allowing you to level up in single player as well as multiplayer but the amount of customization you can do is fairly limited. One of the four pieces of DLC with the Season Pass is a Horde Mode that absolutely should have shipped with the game. Add a couple of much needed Map Packs and you'll be lucky if you get one piece of Single Player DLC to try and wrap the story up.
I haven't been reviewing games that long and I generally know enough not to waste my money on stinkers but I thought I'd buy this strictly for review purposes and the hope that it would be so-bad-it's-good. But it's not. It really, really isn't. It's a cynical, greedy mess only on the market to try and make SEGA back the money they spent in the six years it's been developed. If you paid $60 for it, you've been played. Allegations are already flowing from anonymous sources about who took advantage of who. Between this game and Duke Nukem Forever, Gearbox has crippled any goodwill they gained from the Borderlands games. You will hear this game mentioned the next time Gearbox puts a title out.
Ultimately, Aliens: Colonial Marines will be more famous for the questionable practices surrounding it than the game itself... but don't let that fool you into thinking you should give it a try, even just to see what the fuss is about. This game should be retired the bargain bin as quickly as possible and forgotten as a thick, black stain on a beloved series.
Publisher: Sega
Developer(s): Gearbox... and TimeGate, and Demiurge, and Nerve...
Platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, & WiiU (eventually)
Spoiler Alert! You shouldn't play this game anyway so I'm going to spoil it in full...
Walking in on your grandfather watching the chestburster scene in Alien when you're nine years old is every bit as scarring as you'd think. A few days later, after I stopped hyperventilating, I convinced him to let me watch the entire movie and the crusty old bastard actually agreed. It's very likely the source of my arachnophobia and my fear of being raped in my face. No matter how many facehuggers, chestbursters and xenomorphs I've gibbed in various video game incarnations since then, it's always remained a primal fear of mine.
When I found out that Gearbox was developing a first person shooter and supposedly canonical sequel to the second movie, I was immediately on board. When I saw the demo footage they showed at conventions, I got excited. Rumors of a troubled six year (!) development and a lack of any real gameplay footage prior to release tempered that excitement but I still picked up the game on day one figuring, well, even if it's crap it'll give me something to write about.
And... I am definitely writing about it.
Watching the explosion of pointed fingers around this game happen (which has been well-documented by Destructoid) seems like it could threaten to overshadow the actual content of the game. The game has been roundly (and rightly) panned by critics but reading those reviews you could pick out a lot of criticisms there were simply nitpick-y. The game failed so utterly at getting you to suspend your disbelief that suddenly everything became suspect. So, is it really as bad as all that? Is it possible to salvage some sense of fun from it?
Thus far, the only people I've talked to who defend the game are avowed fans of the series. This confuses me, for reasons that I'll get into later, but their argument seems to boil down to the fact that you can successfully play it from beginning to end... and they managed to get a lot of the fan service right. Ripley's pulse rifle/flamethrower combo was a pre-order bonus. Scattered through the game are things like Hicks' shotgun, Vasquez's smart gun, Hudson's pulse rifle that you are free to use which, I guess, evoke some nostalgic feelings for a movie that's become a cultural touchstone. You can also find dog tags for the now-deceased Aliens marines, recreations of certain areas from the movie, and other callbacks. Clearly, the developers (whoever they ultimately were) are familiar with the lore. Honestly, though, unless you're the kind of person who is enchanted by the idea of "oh, that's a thing I recognize from another thing" there really is nothing to recommend the game. It is, at best, a mostly functional FPS that ties into a beloved series.
I should note that the least worst experience you can have with this game is on the PC where it looks marginally better. Plus, savvy PC gamers have already come up with mods to improve the graphics of the game. If you absolutely, positively must play the game, go for the PC version. I played the game on the 360 which is clearly the worst available option.
It's hard to know where to start when talking about a game that fails at absolutely everything it tries to do. As shooter, it looks and plays like a last gen title. As an Aliens game, it insults established canon, hand waves away giant plot holes, and misses all of the subtext inherent in the series.
Slogging through the single player campaign, I witnessed so many bugs and glitches that the whole thing become a comedy to me. Kill a xeno on a wall and it'll stick partway into the wall and twitch endlessly. Gib a xeno and little bits and pieces will hover in the air, spinning in circles because they can't touch the ground. The stealth sequence, already widely mocked for the hilarious stick-up-the-butt walk of the Boiler xenos (which neuters any tension of crawling in a dark sewer without a gun), had the additional hilarity of one of the xenos just walking on top of the water like Suicide Bomber Jesus Alien. During a co-op run, one of my teammates fell halfway into the ground and we had to execute him in cold blood in order get him to respawn. Those are just the ones that come to me off the top of my head. You can find gifs and YouTube clips of other people's experiences with the glitch-y, damn-near-broken game for additional laughs. I couldn't even do a quick 100% of the game because it glitched a pair of dog tags, robbing me of the achievement for collecting all of them.
Co-op was the most fun I had playing the game because it allowed myself and three other people to Mystery Science Theater our way through the game but even that presented a whole host of other problems. If you imagine what a focused Gearbox Aliens game could have been, four player drop-in-drop-out class-based co-op (like a more linear Borderlands), it only highlights how much of a mess the game really is. You load up a map and you are simply dropped into the shoes of one of four random character models. There's nothing exciting or different about them. The game only plays differently in the sense that it's infinitely more crowded and hard to manage, especially when you factor in having additional brain dead, computer-controlled AI characters. The game shudders nearly to a halt the minute you get into a big firefight. Misery loves company and there's laughs to be had but it's not enough of a justification to play the game.
Plenty has been said about how ugly the game is, especially in light of the infamous "vertical slice" demo and the promises made by Gearbox, and what you heard is true, and it's especially true on the 360. The game looks not unlike a launch title. Dynamic lighting was promised and not delivered. The screen tearing, lazy textures, the flat animations. It looks genuinely, shockingly bad. Enemies crawl out of black squares that are supposed to pass for vents. A broken light fixture hanging from the ceiling will completely block you from moving. These aren't nitpicks, these are things that any B-grade shooter has evolved past years ago. Where Alien made the chestbursters a drawn out, horrifyingly painful experience, Colonial Marines has them popping out immediately (through body armor) like a game of Whack-A-Mole.
The actual story of the game is astonishingly amateurish. As one-note as the characters in Aliens were, their one note was usually interesting and had a logical arc. The protagonist, Winter, starts and ends the game a hyper-competent bad ass. Your AI partner, O'Neal, on the other hand, looks like a biker and acts like child. The dialogue between him and Winter is terrible, most of the quips landing flat because they sound weirdly self-conscious, not like self-possessed bad ass marines. It's clearly nerds trying to write tough guys and falling well short. (It doesn't help that the voice acting is wildly uneven, vacillating between "okay" and "fucking terrible.") O'Neal doesn't even have a character arc so much as a bunch of stuff happens to him and he reacts to it. Other characters drift in an out of the narrative like the pilot, Reid. Voiced by Ashly "Tina Tina" Burch, she gets a couple of the only good lines in the game but, again, she has no arc. The plot randomly demands that she act like a bitch for a couple of minutes and then it's dropped.
This leads into a larger problem the game has: in a series that gave us characters like Ripley and Vasquez, where the xenomorphs are essentially rapists, there are no strong female characters to be found. Reid goes from smart-ass pilot to pulling rank out of cowardice for no reason. The other female character, Bella, who looks like she's on her way to the Bikini Bowl, is introduced as having already been face raped by a xeno (with the hilariously dead line reading of "It's dead now") and spends the entire game needing to be saved, first from her hidey hole and then on a Quixotic mission to have her chestburster removed. She doesn't even get to die with dignity as the chestburster pops out (through her body armor, 'natch) before anyone has the decency to put a bullet in her head like she asks. What should have been a tragic moment earns nothing but an eye roll.
Oh, and the whole fuss about adding female character models to the multiplayer last year? Well, the guys all look and dress like standard grunts but the women don't wear helmets and show more skin because... well, of course they do. I can hear the closet misogynists grumbling about being able to differentiate between the two but that's the whole fucking point. Vasquez only got to dress the way she did because she was lugging around a giant smart gun and it played into her badass character. Other women in Aliens like Ferro and Deitrich wore standard military uniforms. For crying out loud, they're called "uniforms" for a reason. Misinterpreting a call for equality by giving special treatment (and a bit of sex appeal) is such a standard dudebro move that you can't help but facepalm.
The bad decisions don't end there, though. Remember how bummed you were when you found out that Hicks and Newt died in the crash at the beginning of Alien 3? Well, never fear, because the game brings Hicks back from the dead, complete with Michael Biehn sleepwalking through his dialogue like he knows what bullshit he's reading. They don't even have the basic decency to give it a proper explanation. Nor do they explain how the Solaco went from crash landing on the planet's surface to back in space again. They could have brought fan favorite Hudson back, as he never died on screen, but instead you find his dead chestbursted body in the sewers. They can't even capitalize on such an obvious loose end.
The writers take such astonishing liberties with established cannon that it boggles my mind how even fans of the series can defend it. Generally, when writers play fast and loose with series canon, the fans are the first to get up in arms but it seems to be the one thing people defending the game fall back on. Considering fans still loudly disagree on which movies in the series are good, I suppose it should be expected to some degree. Is Aliens 3 crap or an underrated film with a troubled development? Is Prometheus utter shite or an ambitious failure?
The game ends with a resounding "thunk" as you eject a Alien Queen from an airlock by running around and hitting buttons. No need to fight her or even fire a bullet. Just hit a few buttons. To top it all off, they have the utter temerity to end this amazing crapfest with a cliffhanger. As if the game would ever get a sequel in the state it's in. For the sad, sad people who actually were invested in the story, you'd better hope that your $30 Season Pass nets you some single player DLC because that's the only resolution you're ever going to get. This is a game that will be quietly swept under the rug and ignored as quickly as possible.
If you were thinking you could justify your purchase by playing the multiplayer... not really, no. It's a serviceable but completely uninspiring suite of modes you've seen many times in the past. There's the requisite Aliens vs. Marines Team Deatchmatch and a couple more modes cribbed from Left 4 Dead. Controlling Xenomorphs is more of a chore than a good time with wall and ceiling crawling poorly implemented so that only there are only certain walls and ceilings you can crawl on. There's only a couple maps to choose from so the replay value is nearly non-existent. The persistent leveling system is fine, allowing you to level up in single player as well as multiplayer but the amount of customization you can do is fairly limited. One of the four pieces of DLC with the Season Pass is a Horde Mode that absolutely should have shipped with the game. Add a couple of much needed Map Packs and you'll be lucky if you get one piece of Single Player DLC to try and wrap the story up.
I haven't been reviewing games that long and I generally know enough not to waste my money on stinkers but I thought I'd buy this strictly for review purposes and the hope that it would be so-bad-it's-good. But it's not. It really, really isn't. It's a cynical, greedy mess only on the market to try and make SEGA back the money they spent in the six years it's been developed. If you paid $60 for it, you've been played. Allegations are already flowing from anonymous sources about who took advantage of who. Between this game and Duke Nukem Forever, Gearbox has crippled any goodwill they gained from the Borderlands games. You will hear this game mentioned the next time Gearbox puts a title out.
Ultimately, Aliens: Colonial Marines will be more famous for the questionable practices surrounding it than the game itself... but don't let that fool you into thinking you should give it a try, even just to see what the fuss is about. This game should be retired the bargain bin as quickly as possible and forgotten as a thick, black stain on a beloved series.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Favorite Albums Of The 2012
Again, real life seems to interrupt my attempts at writing. Things are back on track now, so I hope to be back to weekly updates. In the meantime, I've started a Tumblr page and have been doing some micro-blogging with reviews and assorted weirdness. Be sure to check that out: http://thdefenestrator.tumblr.com/
Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind: My love for Converge can be summed up in an anecdote: I got to see them live for the third time last year headlining a show the day before Halloween that awesomely had Torche and Kvelertak opening. I was waiting to use the one bathroom stall in the men's room when lead singer Jacob Bannon came literally bouncing out of the stall and out of the bathroom like he was lit on fire. He didn't look like he was late for anything. In fact, he seemed to be smiling. Dude doesn't even slow down to take a dump.
(Also, my butt touched the same place his butt just touched so I think that means we're now lovers. I'm pretty sure that's how it works, right?)
To me, that's Converge in a nutshell: bursting with restless energy. They've been doing this with a consistency and a pace that left most of their peers wheezing in their wake. They all seem to have creative endeavors and side project outside of Converge that keep them busy. (Dear Nate, more Doomriders, plz?) Rather than run out of ideas on their first couple records, they actually seem to be getting better as musicians and taking more chances with their sound as time passes.
After what might be a career highlight with 2009's guest-heavy Axe To Fall, they've responded with a tighter, more focused album. They can still batter you with sound but time has also taught them where best to hit for maximum impact.
Baroness - Yellow & Green: According to my Last.fm stats, I listened to 674 Baroness tracks in the last 12 months. "March To The Sea" 89 times and "Take My Bones Away" 86. That sends a pretty clear message: I am deeply disturbed. Or I have a desk job and I listen to a lot of music. Y'know. Whatevs. Honestly, the worst thing about Baroness' switch up from dynamic sludge metal to a more palatable hard rock was watching music journalists contort themselves into uncomfortable shapes trying to describe it. The vocabulary for talking about hard rock music has completely atrophied from disuse so seeing comparisons ranging from Nickelback to Thrice to Foo Fighters were kind of inevitable.
Baroness, of course, sounds nothing like any of those bands. They're similar only in the sense that no one in them are legally considered dead. The imagery of the lyrics alone should separate Baroness from the pack. Bones and water are recurring themes. Textural interstitial pieces help the album flow and keep a sense of atmosphere. Lyrics about bones and bodies of water give everything a sense of immensity or expansiveness. This is not a pop record.
Downshifting from the exhilarating Blue Record still leaves the band cruising at a healthy speed. "March To The Sea," "Take My Bones Away" and "Psalms Alive" all sound fantastic blasting out of a car chugging well over the speed limit. "Eula" is gorgeously dark, one of their very best songs. "Cocanium" and "Stretchmarker" allow them to experiment more with the listeners expectations while remaining very much a Baroness song. In the end, I guess it's okay that music journalists couldn't find the right words for this band. No one else is doing it like this.
Golden Void - Golden Void: Based in the Bay Area, named after a Hawkwind song, and with a sickly yellow cover of dead tree limbs, you can get a good idea of what you're going to get from Golden Void's first album before you drop the needle on the platter: gauzy production, hazy psychedelic atmosphere, and some champion level guitar playing. This is no empty throwback, though. Isaiah Mitchell's limber guitar playing cuts through the smoke with ease. I could listen to the guitar solo on "Atlantis" for days on end.
In true record fetishist fashion, the album is a brief seven track, thirty-seven minute and change affair, perfect for two sides of a thick slab of vinyl. (You get a bonus live track on the iTunes version.) While the atmosphere is thick throughout, they still try on a fair share of styles. Mitchell's vocals may recall Hendrix one moment or Ozzy the next. They may go at a more languid pace on "Jetsun Dolma" only to charge straight through on a song like "The Curve." It's all foreplay to get to "Atlantis," as far as I'm concerned. It's rare for a song to so clearly hit me where I live. All the promise of the earlier tracks comes together for a nearly eight minute ride that begs for big headphones and a volume dial broken at 11.
My only hope is that this isn't a one off project.
Pig Destroyer - Book Burner: Read my review here. Easily the best grind band working today.
High On Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis: Read my review here. I follow guys named Matt Pike on Twitter who aren't the actual Matt Pike in hopes that one day they'll miraculously transform into him and play a gnarly riff that will make you HEAR WRITTEN WORDS. Because that's how awesome Matt Pike is.
Unsane - Wreck: Read my review here. The last and best of a dying breed.
Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music: Sometimes all a rapper needs is a distinctive voice. Not "voice" in the sense of his overall approach to music, just the way words come out of their face hole. There's plenty of rappers who don't have much in the way of technical skill but can convince you solely through the power of their voice. Others have technical skill to spare but no personality or charisma. Atlanta's Killer Mike is the total package.
Buoyed by El-P's most accessible production to date, Killer Mike tears through twelve tracks without stopping for penny ante skits or instrumentals. This is a lean, mean, no bullshit rap album. The album opens strong with monster track "Big Beast" that has a sly turn from T.I. and a confident Bun B but most of the album's guest stars are only there for the hooks. This is Killer Mike's show and rightly so.
The album's centerpiece, the incendiary "Reagan," is soaked in well-earned paranoia as he tears down sacred cows in his own culture as well as the government that enables them. It's strong stuff and an album full of similar political rap would have blunted (pun intended) it's impact. While the tone of the album certainly isn't light, it's not oppressive either.
I don't often buy instrumental albums but after hearing his beats on this record, I picked up El-P's instrumentals just to admire them in their original form. I love El-P's records but seeing him try his hand at a more mainstream friendly style only highlights the range of his productions. When you put Killer Mike over top the beats, you end up with a really killer collaboration that I hope continues on more records in the future.
Easily my favorite rap record of the year.
Swans - The Seer: While my 2012 wasn't exactly rose-scented, two high points of the year were standing front and center on Halloween night to witness the mighty Earth play Phoenix for the first time in fifteen years. It was fucking transcendent. The other was watching with awe as Michael Gira and company (including a Nordic-looking guy named Thor who naturally played shirtless) absolutely wreck the audience at Crescent Ballroom. Lucky for us, what makes them so captivating live is very evident on record.
Their latest album, a double CD titled The Seer, is not casual listening. Swans records never are. Each disc is weighted down by dark epics like the 32 minute "The Seer" on disc one and the one/two punch of "A Piece Of The Sky" (19 minutes) and "Apostate" (23 minutes) on disc two.
If you're willing to put in the time, Swans can open up a whole new world of oppression and darkness. Wielding a different kind of heaviness since their reformation, the band is continuing down a path of apocalyptic folk and psychedelia. In other bands, that would be hyperbole but with Swans it's just facts. It's absolutely pummeling in it's bleakness to the point that comparisons to other bands would be doing Swans a disservice.
It's an exhausting, emotionally draining listen but it's well worth the trip.
Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind: My love for Converge can be summed up in an anecdote: I got to see them live for the third time last year headlining a show the day before Halloween that awesomely had Torche and Kvelertak opening. I was waiting to use the one bathroom stall in the men's room when lead singer Jacob Bannon came literally bouncing out of the stall and out of the bathroom like he was lit on fire. He didn't look like he was late for anything. In fact, he seemed to be smiling. Dude doesn't even slow down to take a dump.
(Also, my butt touched the same place his butt just touched so I think that means we're now lovers. I'm pretty sure that's how it works, right?)
To me, that's Converge in a nutshell: bursting with restless energy. They've been doing this with a consistency and a pace that left most of their peers wheezing in their wake. They all seem to have creative endeavors and side project outside of Converge that keep them busy. (Dear Nate, more Doomriders, plz?) Rather than run out of ideas on their first couple records, they actually seem to be getting better as musicians and taking more chances with their sound as time passes.
After what might be a career highlight with 2009's guest-heavy Axe To Fall, they've responded with a tighter, more focused album. They can still batter you with sound but time has also taught them where best to hit for maximum impact.
Baroness - Yellow & Green: According to my Last.fm stats, I listened to 674 Baroness tracks in the last 12 months. "March To The Sea" 89 times and "Take My Bones Away" 86. That sends a pretty clear message: I am deeply disturbed. Or I have a desk job and I listen to a lot of music. Y'know. Whatevs. Honestly, the worst thing about Baroness' switch up from dynamic sludge metal to a more palatable hard rock was watching music journalists contort themselves into uncomfortable shapes trying to describe it. The vocabulary for talking about hard rock music has completely atrophied from disuse so seeing comparisons ranging from Nickelback to Thrice to Foo Fighters were kind of inevitable.
Baroness, of course, sounds nothing like any of those bands. They're similar only in the sense that no one in them are legally considered dead. The imagery of the lyrics alone should separate Baroness from the pack. Bones and water are recurring themes. Textural interstitial pieces help the album flow and keep a sense of atmosphere. Lyrics about bones and bodies of water give everything a sense of immensity or expansiveness. This is not a pop record.
Downshifting from the exhilarating Blue Record still leaves the band cruising at a healthy speed. "March To The Sea," "Take My Bones Away" and "Psalms Alive" all sound fantastic blasting out of a car chugging well over the speed limit. "Eula" is gorgeously dark, one of their very best songs. "Cocanium" and "Stretchmarker" allow them to experiment more with the listeners expectations while remaining very much a Baroness song. In the end, I guess it's okay that music journalists couldn't find the right words for this band. No one else is doing it like this.
Golden Void - Golden Void: Based in the Bay Area, named after a Hawkwind song, and with a sickly yellow cover of dead tree limbs, you can get a good idea of what you're going to get from Golden Void's first album before you drop the needle on the platter: gauzy production, hazy psychedelic atmosphere, and some champion level guitar playing. This is no empty throwback, though. Isaiah Mitchell's limber guitar playing cuts through the smoke with ease. I could listen to the guitar solo on "Atlantis" for days on end.
In true record fetishist fashion, the album is a brief seven track, thirty-seven minute and change affair, perfect for two sides of a thick slab of vinyl. (You get a bonus live track on the iTunes version.) While the atmosphere is thick throughout, they still try on a fair share of styles. Mitchell's vocals may recall Hendrix one moment or Ozzy the next. They may go at a more languid pace on "Jetsun Dolma" only to charge straight through on a song like "The Curve." It's all foreplay to get to "Atlantis," as far as I'm concerned. It's rare for a song to so clearly hit me where I live. All the promise of the earlier tracks comes together for a nearly eight minute ride that begs for big headphones and a volume dial broken at 11.
My only hope is that this isn't a one off project.
Pig Destroyer - Book Burner: Read my review here. Easily the best grind band working today.
High On Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis: Read my review here. I follow guys named Matt Pike on Twitter who aren't the actual Matt Pike in hopes that one day they'll miraculously transform into him and play a gnarly riff that will make you HEAR WRITTEN WORDS. Because that's how awesome Matt Pike is.
Unsane - Wreck: Read my review here. The last and best of a dying breed.
Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music: Sometimes all a rapper needs is a distinctive voice. Not "voice" in the sense of his overall approach to music, just the way words come out of their face hole. There's plenty of rappers who don't have much in the way of technical skill but can convince you solely through the power of their voice. Others have technical skill to spare but no personality or charisma. Atlanta's Killer Mike is the total package.
Buoyed by El-P's most accessible production to date, Killer Mike tears through twelve tracks without stopping for penny ante skits or instrumentals. This is a lean, mean, no bullshit rap album. The album opens strong with monster track "Big Beast" that has a sly turn from T.I. and a confident Bun B but most of the album's guest stars are only there for the hooks. This is Killer Mike's show and rightly so.
The album's centerpiece, the incendiary "Reagan," is soaked in well-earned paranoia as he tears down sacred cows in his own culture as well as the government that enables them. It's strong stuff and an album full of similar political rap would have blunted (pun intended) it's impact. While the tone of the album certainly isn't light, it's not oppressive either.
I don't often buy instrumental albums but after hearing his beats on this record, I picked up El-P's instrumentals just to admire them in their original form. I love El-P's records but seeing him try his hand at a more mainstream friendly style only highlights the range of his productions. When you put Killer Mike over top the beats, you end up with a really killer collaboration that I hope continues on more records in the future.
Easily my favorite rap record of the year.
Swans - The Seer: While my 2012 wasn't exactly rose-scented, two high points of the year were standing front and center on Halloween night to witness the mighty Earth play Phoenix for the first time in fifteen years. It was fucking transcendent. The other was watching with awe as Michael Gira and company (including a Nordic-looking guy named Thor who naturally played shirtless) absolutely wreck the audience at Crescent Ballroom. Lucky for us, what makes them so captivating live is very evident on record.
Their latest album, a double CD titled The Seer, is not casual listening. Swans records never are. Each disc is weighted down by dark epics like the 32 minute "The Seer" on disc one and the one/two punch of "A Piece Of The Sky" (19 minutes) and "Apostate" (23 minutes) on disc two.
If you're willing to put in the time, Swans can open up a whole new world of oppression and darkness. Wielding a different kind of heaviness since their reformation, the band is continuing down a path of apocalyptic folk and psychedelia. In other bands, that would be hyperbole but with Swans it's just facts. It's absolutely pummeling in it's bleakness to the point that comparisons to other bands would be doing Swans a disservice.
It's an exhausting, emotionally draining listen but it's well worth the trip.
iOS Game Review: Pixel People
Pixel People
Devoloper: Chillingo
Price: Free With Micro-Transactions
Tip toeing through the minefield of free-to-play apps can be a grind. Due to poor planning or outright greed, you can find yourself with an app that gives you as little as fifteen minutes of game time before you herding you into their store to buy a fifty pack of Star Dollars for a bigger gun or a stat boost. So when a game hits the sweet spot where it's compelling enough to make you volunteer your hard earned rather than hold you hostage, you almost audibly unclench.
Pixel People is a city building app not unlike a smaller scale Sim City with a cute 8-bit design. You start the game with only a clone factory and create new jobs by splicing together two different people. New jobs generally create new buildings to populate your world which generate money to continue your nascent career as an urban planner.
Depending on whether or not you are splicing a character with a new job or a new kind of building, there's a timer that always ticks down. These can go from ten seconds to twenty-four hours depending on the size or complexity of the task. However, rather than make you wait around, the timer continues even when you back out of the app. This allows you to essentially check in on your city a few times a day for maybe ten minutes at a time rather than grinding your way through an endless series of in app purchases to speed things along. Tap your buildings to keep the money flowing, assign clones to their new jobs and go back about your business.
While Pixel People doesn't punish you for taking their app and never giving them a dime, it's certainly not removing the option. In addition to standard gold coins, there's a secondary currency called Utopium that can be used to speed up creation, to build higher end buildings or to trade for more coins. You may occasionally be gifted some Utopium for creating parks or trees or completing a brief series of "secondary experiments" that regularly pop up but otherwise it's only available via the in game store. Even in the game's more advanced stages, you aren't required to buy anything. It's just a matter of dutifully maintaining your city until you raise the money.
With a maximum of 150 jobs, you could potentially play Pixel People for days and not fully unlock everything in the game. If you don't purchase more Utopium, it could take more than a month. I've had the app for about a week now and the urge to check in on my miniature city is still strong. Not even Temple Run 2 hooked me that long.
So far, my only niggling complaint about the game is that creating roadways is entire optional. It doesn't give you any bonuses or speed anything up. It's purely aesthetic. Given how every other decision in the game has a tangible bonus, making roads merely a design choice seems out of place.
Ultimately, I think the best compliment you can give a free-to-play game is whether or not you want to give the game your money. Not "I was frustrated at my lack of progress" or even "I must level up because: feedback loop." I bought four dollars worth of in app purchases because I was enjoying myself and I wanted to reward the developers for making an addictive yet fair game that didn't treat me like a spigot full of money. Well made games that respect their audience are few and far between. It's worth it to support them.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Favorite Songs Of The Year
Mandatory overtime, 120 hours (and counting) of Resonance Of Fate and a house full of puppies haven't left me with a lot of spare time for writing. I'm going to try and knock out a couple more Favorite ______ Of The Year posts before the end of the year, so keep an eye out for them, Imaginary Person I Think Is Reading This. Up first, my favorite songs of the year. Favorite, not Best Of, because... well, I'm uncomfortable with the semantic difference between "Favorite" and "Best." This is the stuff that most interested me and, as most people aren't into throwback 70's style rock and gay bounce music, I'll make a lame play for being humble by not trumpeting them as The Best Of The Year.
Burning Love - "Hateful Comforts": My issue with punk rock, even going back to my teenage years, was that most of it was exasperatingly vague about what, exactly, we should be rebelling against. Mostly it was just an excuse for mohawks and facial piercings and I'm sorry, The Offspring, but I don't need your permission for a tattoo to bum out my parents. This is where Burning Love frontman Chris Colohan comes in. "Hateful Comforts," off of their sophomore album Rotten Thing To Say, is the most exhilarating four and a half minutes of punk rock I've heard in years. The lyrics and vocal performance are mostly what sells the song for me. It is painfully specific about post-9/11 paranoia, witch hunts, and the easily led cable news junkies. This is everything punk rock should be aiming for. And, goddamn, that guitar solo...
Future Of The Left - "Beneath The Waves An Ocean": Most people who have heard Future Of The Left's most recent album, The Plot Against Common Sense, would probably argue that "Robocop 4 - Fuck Off Robocop" should be the song you mention first. (Actually, they probably wouldn't argue, they'd just mock me, but... shut up.) While I think it is some of Andy Falkous' best work, the lyrics overpower everything else in the song. "Beneath The Waves An Ocean" feels like a more even balance. Catchy as hell with the entire band firing on all cylinders. Falco's arch delivery and the fuzzed out bassline from Julia Ruzicka really sell it.
Local H - "Sad History": Saying that Local H is the most underrated and under appreciated band in rock music would probably be cold comfort to singer/songwriter Scott Lucas. Every Local H record feels like it could be the last one, it's been that way since the 90's, but "Sad History" could very well be the swan song for a couple of puckish Midwesterners who never quit. While most of his peers have been reuniting for club shows to help pay off their mortgages and drug addictions, Lucas has never stopped writing and touring. He's never released an album that was anything short of rock solid. As a songwriter, there's no one in America who wields bitterness and cynicism the way he does. As a live act, they're still a freight train... thanks in no small part to Brian St. Clair's monster drumming. That said, Lucas has never seemed more tired than he has on this song and this album. Even if the lyrics could easily be about the band themselves, he still ends on a note of hope. Because if Scott and Brian have proven anything, it's that writing them off is a bad idea.
The Afghan Whigs - "Lovecrimes": The idea of Greg Dulli and the recently reunited Afghan Whigs covering a Frank Ocean song only sounds like a strange idea for about the first ten seconds. Dulli has covered everyone from Bjork to Billie Holliday to Kanye West in his other band, The Twilight Singers. His rough, working class soul croon never sounds better than when it's paired with Rick McCollum's instantly recognizable bluesy guitar. They may have broken up more than a decade ago but no moss has grown on them in that time. If the real criteria of a cover song is whether or not a band can make the song their own, this is a success. It sounds like the exact kind of dark psychodrama Dulli was always fond of. I'd never have known this was a cover if they didn't advertise it. It's also a free download on their website, so there's no excuse not to pick it up.
Diplo feat. Nicky Da B - "Express Yourself": New Orleans Sissy Bounce is a subgenre of a subgenre but it's also been some of the most irrepressible dance music I've heard since Baltimore club music was in vogue several years back. Built around lo-fi, homemade beats and repetitive chants, and anchored by openly gay or transsexual emcees like Big Freedia, the gravelly voiced Sissy Nobby and Katey Red, it somehow manages to be dirty as hell and unselfconsciously fun at the same time. Probably because it doesn't have the macho douchebag energy straight men seem to take with them wherever they go. Diplo wisely maintains the basic aesthetic of sissy bounce but gives it a budget and clean production while Nicky Da B jump onto the track with confidence and control. Straight up the best dance music I've heard all year.
Psy - "Gangnam Style": Nope, still not sick of it yet. Usually, when there's a foreign language dance craze, like the Macarena, we can all agree that it was always ridiculous and it's charming or enduring for exactly that reason. Not only is Psy the only real Asian pop star who broke through in America despite several tries (sorry Utada), he was legitimately funny AND in on the joke. Nothing he does will ever be remotely this big again, but damned if it wasn't entertaining while it lasted. And without Psy, I wouldn't have had the single most panic attack inducing four minutes of my life.
Baroness - "Take My Bones Away" / "March To The Sea": Most people I know seemed leery when Baroness went on record about going in a more hard rock direction for fear of permanently scarring the vocal cords of singer/guitarist/lead songwriter/artist John Dyer Baizley. I was not. I got turned onto the band when they released their first EP (yeah, yeah... music nerd bragging rights) and while the heavier-than-thou sludge metal was part of the appeal, you could never deny their songwriting chops. Take out the sludge and you're still left with some very solid, catchy rock music of a sort that doesn't get made anymore. Hesher music of the highest order.
Unsane - "No Chance": It's always gratifying to see a band perfect their artform, whatever it is. Unsane have honed in on a very specific brand of angry, working class noise rock. The stark lyrics, the awesomely distorted bass guitar... no one else could pull it off with this kind of velocity or single-mindedness. A good Unsane song barrels right through you and "No Chance" is one of their best.
Pigs - "Give It": There's no part of the Unsane trio that's less integral than the other but Dave Curran's singular bass tone tweaks the pleasure centers of my brain the way nothing else does. When I found out he had a side project (this time on guitar and vocals) I jumped at it immediately. The album is still very much in the noise rock template but it opens up a bit more than his other project. It's less suffocatingly bleak, but only just. "Give It" could stand alongside the best Unsane track without question. An excellent song on an under-appreciated album.
Golden Void - "Atlantis": All you had to do was mention guitarist Isaiah Mitchell and my ears perked up. A guitar hero in the purest sense of the word, his other project, Earthless, is the essential modern psychedelic rock band. Songs stretch out for twenty minutes or longer, enough to break the patience of any casual listeners. However, the hypnotic repetition and guitar solos that seem alternately endless and far too short help it go down easy. They hinted at what they could do in a more conventional song length on a three way split with Danava and Lecherous Gaze last year and now we have Golden Void. It's an excellent album that I'll write more about later but it culminates in this epic track, incorporating my favorite of Mitchell's guitar work yet.
Aesop Rock - "ZZZ Top" / "Zero Dark Thirty": The thing that jumped out at me first about Aesop Rock's new album, Skelethon, were those killer live-sounding drum samples. They knock hard. I wasn't expecting a huge change in his sound jumping from the "B-boy brainiacs" at the much missed Def Jux to the Minnesota-based Rhymesayers crew, and the star here is still Ace Rock's flow, but Skelethons is definitely funky in a different way than his previous album, None Shall Pass. "ZZZ Top" (incidentally my favorite video of the year... go Patti Li go!) and "Zero Dark Thirty" are probably the best examples of this. Ace is every bit as dense and dizzying as always but this new vibe gives him an extra kick I haven't heard from him before.
Killer Mike - "Reagan": I'd heard of Killer Mike before this year's awesome El-P produced R.A.P. Music but this album was a revelation. Not many emcees would be able to jump from axe murdering with Bun B & T.I. to taking down his own culture and the government that enables it and oppresses it at the same time, but Killer Mike managed it with aplomb. In addition, it contained El-P's most accessible production work, marrying boom bap with the sort of layered darkness he uses on his solo work to outstanding effect. The best track on an excellent album.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - "Death's Door": Adding this song is a bit of cheat. It came out in Europe last year but was only released in the States in November, giving me a chance to talk more about it. Willfully mysterious, this Cambridge trio are gaining a lot of momentum. The entire album is a strain of doom metal of a type that's been out of fashion for awhile. They've been lumped in with bands like the Merciful Fate devotees Ghost, but Uncle Acid prefer to wallow gleefully in the B-movie themes and grimy lo-fi production. The rickety vibe and the hazy claustrophobia gives the entire album a unique 70's vibe I never get tired of. Essential listening.
Graveyard - "Goliath": There's something about Sweden. No other place can reproduce discarded and marginalized genres of music with so much faithfulness and soul that it doesn't come off like some kind of rote mimicry. There's desert rock Kyuss worshippers like Truckfighters, Astroqueen, Dozer, etc. (Are there even deserts in Sweden? I don't think there are any deserts in Sweden...) Then there are the 70's rock revivalists like Spiders, Horisont, Witchcraft, and Graveyard. Their previous album, Hisingen Blues, was flat out brilliant. It was everything I love about what is usually dismissed as dinosaur rock in an updated form without coming off like some lunkheaded, lowest common denominator-baiting Jet single. Lights Out aims for a tighter, more streamlined version and mostly knocks it out of the park. In a mainstream where The Black Keys are seemingly the only remaining rock band people take seriously, the world needs more bands like this.
Burning Love - "Hateful Comforts": My issue with punk rock, even going back to my teenage years, was that most of it was exasperatingly vague about what, exactly, we should be rebelling against. Mostly it was just an excuse for mohawks and facial piercings and I'm sorry, The Offspring, but I don't need your permission for a tattoo to bum out my parents. This is where Burning Love frontman Chris Colohan comes in. "Hateful Comforts," off of their sophomore album Rotten Thing To Say, is the most exhilarating four and a half minutes of punk rock I've heard in years. The lyrics and vocal performance are mostly what sells the song for me. It is painfully specific about post-9/11 paranoia, witch hunts, and the easily led cable news junkies. This is everything punk rock should be aiming for. And, goddamn, that guitar solo...
Future Of The Left - "Beneath The Waves An Ocean": Most people who have heard Future Of The Left's most recent album, The Plot Against Common Sense, would probably argue that "Robocop 4 - Fuck Off Robocop" should be the song you mention first. (Actually, they probably wouldn't argue, they'd just mock me, but... shut up.) While I think it is some of Andy Falkous' best work, the lyrics overpower everything else in the song. "Beneath The Waves An Ocean" feels like a more even balance. Catchy as hell with the entire band firing on all cylinders. Falco's arch delivery and the fuzzed out bassline from Julia Ruzicka really sell it.
Local H - "Sad History": Saying that Local H is the most underrated and under appreciated band in rock music would probably be cold comfort to singer/songwriter Scott Lucas. Every Local H record feels like it could be the last one, it's been that way since the 90's, but "Sad History" could very well be the swan song for a couple of puckish Midwesterners who never quit. While most of his peers have been reuniting for club shows to help pay off their mortgages and drug addictions, Lucas has never stopped writing and touring. He's never released an album that was anything short of rock solid. As a songwriter, there's no one in America who wields bitterness and cynicism the way he does. As a live act, they're still a freight train... thanks in no small part to Brian St. Clair's monster drumming. That said, Lucas has never seemed more tired than he has on this song and this album. Even if the lyrics could easily be about the band themselves, he still ends on a note of hope. Because if Scott and Brian have proven anything, it's that writing them off is a bad idea.
The Afghan Whigs - "Lovecrimes": The idea of Greg Dulli and the recently reunited Afghan Whigs covering a Frank Ocean song only sounds like a strange idea for about the first ten seconds. Dulli has covered everyone from Bjork to Billie Holliday to Kanye West in his other band, The Twilight Singers. His rough, working class soul croon never sounds better than when it's paired with Rick McCollum's instantly recognizable bluesy guitar. They may have broken up more than a decade ago but no moss has grown on them in that time. If the real criteria of a cover song is whether or not a band can make the song their own, this is a success. It sounds like the exact kind of dark psychodrama Dulli was always fond of. I'd never have known this was a cover if they didn't advertise it. It's also a free download on their website, so there's no excuse not to pick it up.
Diplo feat. Nicky Da B - "Express Yourself": New Orleans Sissy Bounce is a subgenre of a subgenre but it's also been some of the most irrepressible dance music I've heard since Baltimore club music was in vogue several years back. Built around lo-fi, homemade beats and repetitive chants, and anchored by openly gay or transsexual emcees like Big Freedia, the gravelly voiced Sissy Nobby and Katey Red, it somehow manages to be dirty as hell and unselfconsciously fun at the same time. Probably because it doesn't have the macho douchebag energy straight men seem to take with them wherever they go. Diplo wisely maintains the basic aesthetic of sissy bounce but gives it a budget and clean production while Nicky Da B jump onto the track with confidence and control. Straight up the best dance music I've heard all year.
Psy - "Gangnam Style": Nope, still not sick of it yet. Usually, when there's a foreign language dance craze, like the Macarena, we can all agree that it was always ridiculous and it's charming or enduring for exactly that reason. Not only is Psy the only real Asian pop star who broke through in America despite several tries (sorry Utada), he was legitimately funny AND in on the joke. Nothing he does will ever be remotely this big again, but damned if it wasn't entertaining while it lasted. And without Psy, I wouldn't have had the single most panic attack inducing four minutes of my life.
Baroness - "Take My Bones Away" / "March To The Sea": Most people I know seemed leery when Baroness went on record about going in a more hard rock direction for fear of permanently scarring the vocal cords of singer/guitarist/lead songwriter/artist John Dyer Baizley. I was not. I got turned onto the band when they released their first EP (yeah, yeah... music nerd bragging rights) and while the heavier-than-thou sludge metal was part of the appeal, you could never deny their songwriting chops. Take out the sludge and you're still left with some very solid, catchy rock music of a sort that doesn't get made anymore. Hesher music of the highest order.
Unsane - "No Chance": It's always gratifying to see a band perfect their artform, whatever it is. Unsane have honed in on a very specific brand of angry, working class noise rock. The stark lyrics, the awesomely distorted bass guitar... no one else could pull it off with this kind of velocity or single-mindedness. A good Unsane song barrels right through you and "No Chance" is one of their best.
Pigs - "Give It": There's no part of the Unsane trio that's less integral than the other but Dave Curran's singular bass tone tweaks the pleasure centers of my brain the way nothing else does. When I found out he had a side project (this time on guitar and vocals) I jumped at it immediately. The album is still very much in the noise rock template but it opens up a bit more than his other project. It's less suffocatingly bleak, but only just. "Give It" could stand alongside the best Unsane track without question. An excellent song on an under-appreciated album.
Golden Void - "Atlantis": All you had to do was mention guitarist Isaiah Mitchell and my ears perked up. A guitar hero in the purest sense of the word, his other project, Earthless, is the essential modern psychedelic rock band. Songs stretch out for twenty minutes or longer, enough to break the patience of any casual listeners. However, the hypnotic repetition and guitar solos that seem alternately endless and far too short help it go down easy. They hinted at what they could do in a more conventional song length on a three way split with Danava and Lecherous Gaze last year and now we have Golden Void. It's an excellent album that I'll write more about later but it culminates in this epic track, incorporating my favorite of Mitchell's guitar work yet.
Aesop Rock - "ZZZ Top" / "Zero Dark Thirty": The thing that jumped out at me first about Aesop Rock's new album, Skelethon, were those killer live-sounding drum samples. They knock hard. I wasn't expecting a huge change in his sound jumping from the "B-boy brainiacs" at the much missed Def Jux to the Minnesota-based Rhymesayers crew, and the star here is still Ace Rock's flow, but Skelethons is definitely funky in a different way than his previous album, None Shall Pass. "ZZZ Top" (incidentally my favorite video of the year... go Patti Li go!) and "Zero Dark Thirty" are probably the best examples of this. Ace is every bit as dense and dizzying as always but this new vibe gives him an extra kick I haven't heard from him before.
Killer Mike - "Reagan": I'd heard of Killer Mike before this year's awesome El-P produced R.A.P. Music but this album was a revelation. Not many emcees would be able to jump from axe murdering with Bun B & T.I. to taking down his own culture and the government that enables it and oppresses it at the same time, but Killer Mike managed it with aplomb. In addition, it contained El-P's most accessible production work, marrying boom bap with the sort of layered darkness he uses on his solo work to outstanding effect. The best track on an excellent album.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - "Death's Door": Adding this song is a bit of cheat. It came out in Europe last year but was only released in the States in November, giving me a chance to talk more about it. Willfully mysterious, this Cambridge trio are gaining a lot of momentum. The entire album is a strain of doom metal of a type that's been out of fashion for awhile. They've been lumped in with bands like the Merciful Fate devotees Ghost, but Uncle Acid prefer to wallow gleefully in the B-movie themes and grimy lo-fi production. The rickety vibe and the hazy claustrophobia gives the entire album a unique 70's vibe I never get tired of. Essential listening.
Graveyard - "Goliath": There's something about Sweden. No other place can reproduce discarded and marginalized genres of music with so much faithfulness and soul that it doesn't come off like some kind of rote mimicry. There's desert rock Kyuss worshippers like Truckfighters, Astroqueen, Dozer, etc. (Are there even deserts in Sweden? I don't think there are any deserts in Sweden...) Then there are the 70's rock revivalists like Spiders, Horisont, Witchcraft, and Graveyard. Their previous album, Hisingen Blues, was flat out brilliant. It was everything I love about what is usually dismissed as dinosaur rock in an updated form without coming off like some lunkheaded, lowest common denominator-baiting Jet single. Lights Out aims for a tighter, more streamlined version and mostly knocks it out of the park. In a mainstream where The Black Keys are seemingly the only remaining rock band people take seriously, the world needs more bands like this.
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