Saturday, April 17, 2010

Coachella 2010

LCD Soundsystem and Flame Vortex





Photos by Sam Julius

The Windmills

Photo by Phil Julius

Here we are at Coachella 2010, current center of the musical universe. Indio is ablaze with awesome music and scorching sunlight, and some great acts graced the stages last night. Arriving at the event was troublesome, however. Once on Jefferson, a mainline street into Indio coming off the interstate 5, traffic was so jammed we waited in snail pace traffic for 3 hours. We eventually found another route in and got a parking space. The lines to get a wristband were out of control and security was inefficient and scatterbrained to say the least. We had left at 12pm, and we were inside the grounds at 6:30. Time is scarce, so here is a brief rundown of some cool stuff:

Them Crooked Vultures
Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones are all amazing artists and were definitely a successful recipe for a great live show. The main draw for me was Grohl, as this is what is becoming a rare chance to see him abuse a drum kit. He did not disappoint, with the machine of god fills and kick punching you in the face. Jones was locked in tight, filling out the low end, and Homme brought his blues and garage infested pop sensibilities to the mix (I'm a big fan of Queens of the Stone Age).

LCD Soundsystem
I've seen them before, and it seems they are consistently and awesome live band. I didn't see the whole show, but what I did see was great, them opening with Us v. Them, going into Drunk Girls, and closing with New York, I Love You. A giant disco ball hung above the stage. The energy of coming electronic dance with live instruments is great.

Jay-Z
I saw just a couple songs, including Brush ya shoulders off, a short part of Diamonds are forever, and Forever Young, that 80s song from Napoleon Dynamite which was sung by Beyonce. He had a great band behind him, and a really good visual set up.

Public Image Limited
This was a weird show. PiL is abrasive, atonal music to begin with, with little more and funky vamping bass and drums to hold it together. Johnny Rotten is still a psycho, singing with strange vibrato and snarl. This music seems to run from deep trenches of British disgust and impotency, so its not exactly good vibes music. Most people seemed to be locked in an apathetic stare while watching.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Record Stores and Perdedores

Making Records
Record stores are a funny thing. Major chains like Tower and Virgin are now gone, toppled by iTunes and illegal downloading, while indie stores stay alive by offering vinyl and weird stuff that the major stores never could. In the Pasadena area there are a couple indie record stores, but one of the most interesting is Poo-Bah, near the Guitar Center on Colorado Blvd. Usually I go to Penny Lane, also on Colorado across the street from Pasadena City College, but they are, in their own indie way, predictable. They have a pretty well stocked selection of vinyl, and lots of CDs, yet its that very abundance that leads browsing to quickly become monotonous. PooBah, on the other hand, has their vinyl mostly divided by first letter, so their aren't artist sections, so you have to look through everything to find something you might want. And when they do have what you want, its usually something you've never seen before on vinyl, and you probably won't again, making it more likely you will purchase it then and there. Even in their CD sections, the albums by artist tend to be weird, off-center selections that you aren't gonna find at Best Buy. In the age where you can buy anything at anytime from iTunes, this seems like the only way to shop for physical recordings of music.

The whole vibe of PooBah lends itself to adventuristic perusing of the shelves. I went in there today to purchase a record for my brother's birthday, not knowing what I wanted, just knowing that if I found something, it would probably be awesome. There's some old, kinda bookish guy behind the cash machine, with the rows of records and CDs at a little above hip level, and an overlook mezzanine as well as a side walkway that is like where a department stores would put up stuff for sale that bypassers could see but instead you can walk into it and it has two CD listening stations and music, tattoo and weed magazines. Sprinkled throughout the store are super-indie like pressed in your basement type records, with WordPerfect typed info inserts and stuff. When I was in there I saw this bizarre couple looking for weird old records, like the woman had a used copy of the Paul Stanley solo KISS record in her hand. I found a new copy of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, which I definitely had never seen before. The first time I went there I found a new vinyl copy of PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, and yeah I've never seen that anywhere else. One time there was a guy up on the mezzanine make weird noise with pedals. And it was like noon on a weekday! So if you are in the Pasadena area this is definitely a place worth checking out.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Top 5 Videogames of all time

"Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots" Game Lauch
Watching Bytejacker, this online show about indie games, has compelled me to finally put out my top 5 video games of all time list. Of course this list only applies to my favorite games like, right now, so this could change tomorrow, but I'll try to make the list as sturdy as possible. So here it is:

My Top 5 Video Games of All Time (in alphabetical order):

Bioshock (PS3)
Final Fantasy VII (PS1)
Metal Gear Solid (PS1)
Resident Evil (Gamecube Remake)
Super Mario RPG (SNES)

Other really strong contenders for this list would be Super Mario All-Stars, Metal Gear Solid 2 and maybe even Final Fantasy VIII (well, not really but that is an awesome game). Bioshock is definitely the best next-gen game I've played, and really needs no explanation. FFVII is a super-classic, of course, and I love the gritty and story of MGS1. The Gamecube RE1 is way underplayed, and it seems like nobody knows about it but I am a huge RE fan and this is definitely the best RE game ever (I'm not into the new ones like 4, and I don't really condsider that a true RE game). Super Mario RPG is such a great game, but I'm super into for All-Stars and Super Mario World as well.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Mixtape Monday #2: Baroque & British

2009 All Points West Music & Arts Festival - Day 2 - Show
Okay, so its Tuesday, but I've been busy so here's this week's mixtape. This is the Baroque and British tape, which is like lush British stuff, basically stuff that I see has a connection or is influenced by Scott Walker. And he's not even British!

Baroque and British Mixtape
1. It's Raining Today- Scott Walker
2. The Universal- Blur
3. Dissolved Girl- Massive Attack
4. Lose My Breath- My Bloody Valentine
5. Stay With Me- Spiritualized
6. Quicksand- David Bowie
7. Radian- Air
8. Fake Plastic Trees- Radiohead
9. Paper Tiger- Beck

So obviously these are not all British groups, both Walker and Beck being American, MBV being Irish and Air being French. Fake plastic trees is kind of a shoo in for something like this, but I guess I didn't have a choice. Radian is a great lesser know Air song, kind of a Mike Mills-esque center piece for 10,000 hz Legend. These songs have a great kind of thematic blend. Enjoy!

Friday, March 26, 2010

Concert Review: Brains of an Alien


I just got back from a recording gig in Tujunga, a strange methed-out corner of California 20 minutes outside Los Angeles. Me and my cohort arrived at the bombed-out town, a Barstow-esque setting of old muscle cars and rotting storefronts. The venue the concert was to happen at didn't even have a sign, instead the empty metal shell of a an neon billboard. Most of the shops on the street looked like they housed medical marijuana clinics, but without the class one would have on, say, Santa Monica Blvd. Inside was a black-and-white tiled waiting room with blue couches and a cheesy wooden sign that read "FAMILY". The actual venue was a large square room with ugly brown carpet, bass traps nailed to the back wall (which means they don't work) and the main stage flanked by two wide screen TVs. As we entered, the obvious I-run-this-thing-and-I'm-a-jerk type guy walks up: "Hi, who are we?" We tell him that we're there to record Brains of an Alien, and then he goes back to talking with these rock n' roll types who look about as authentic as a piece of tattoo parlor flash. "Yeah, we didn't play places like the Whiskey or the Roxy 'cause they didn't want the punk and hardcore bands back in the day" he muses. Immediately following the rockers departure, he turns to the sound guy and says, "Man, I am full of shit. I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but I don't know shit. I don't know the hell's going on. Do I sound indignant?" "No man, you sound fine". I couldn't believe this, it was something out of a Judd Apatow movie.

We started setting up the mic stands, and chatted a bit with the sound guy: "Yeah, Pastor Bob got the idea that we should have this place for shows, you know, to keeps kids off the street and smoking pot and stuff... Not that that's a bad thing." Oh, ok. To be fair, this guy really did help us out. When the jerk guy would tell us to get out of the way for one reason or another, the sound guy would lead us back in and watch our back. People started milling around outside, and the tweaker vibe was soundly established. Like, the Jesus-freak-meth-head-trailer-trash vibe. One guy was wearing a shirt that was like the Reese's Cups logo, but with "Jesus Cups" or something. One guy was wearing a homemade "Be Kind Rewind" T-shirt like the movie! (Super awesome or lame, I can't decide). So half our stuff is set up, and I'm really hunger. We saw a deli across the turn, so I run over there. Turns out its a Persian Kabob place, and as I'm looking at the menu a guy walks in and starts yelling at the guy behind the counter in Persian, and they're both yelling at each other for 10 seconds, and then the first guy walks out and the guy behind the counter mutters in English, "Fucking (mutter mutter)" then turns to me and says: "I bought $300 worth of spices, I do not need any more spice!" but in a pleasant and enthusiastic manner, and of course I had to agree with him. Seriously, a situation requiring more than $300 worth of spice in an unimaginable one. So I order two cheeseburgers, and as he's making them he painstakingly list for me the ingredients that will be included on the burgers, because he says: "That the way I make them so I need to know if that's what you will like". Once I assure him the listed ingredients will be fine, he asks if I want spice on them, because "that is what I like so I need to know that you will like it!" This guy had to be one of the most enthusiastic people I've ever met, super invested in the food he was preparing for me. He gave me back a full $8 in change even though its was supposed to be $7.95, while saying how much he cares.

Now nourished by the best prepared cheeseburgers in the world, we finally set up all our gear. We were running a Pro Tools rig off of a laptop and an MBox, making a stereo recording with two condenser mics setup at the back of the room. Now for the music. Brains of an Alien was a sort of punk/metal band, with a lot of screaming and not a lot of melody. The first two songs were scream fests, but some songs came off like sloppy Ramones covers, and they covered a Megadeth song. It was a standard 4-piece of drums/guitar/guitar/bass, with the drummer and guitar holding down vocal/screaming duty. Pretty much all the songs consisted of minor-third metaly stuff or poppy 3-chord punk progressions with fast Metallica riffs thrown in. When the drummer said: "This song is about Tujunga and all the tweaker that live here" it cemented any previous notions I had been nursing about the place. The Persian guy from the kabob place even show up and handed someone what looked like a piece of bread, spoke enthusiastically to them, and then left. We successful laid the entire set to disk, the only snafu being someone kicking one of the condenser mic stands during the first song.

The song about Tujunga was like "Welcome to the Jungle" with a location change and basterdized with a Nightmare before Christmas song and the warm, acidy desert vibe of Queens of the Stone Age replaced with the bad-coming-down-off-meth vibe of Tujunga. The "special guest" of the night was a piece of cantaloupe the band had turned into an alien brain, which got its own mic. They also had a banner with their name done up to look like the title of Back to the Future. It seemed like a good time was had by all. Tujunga wants you to pay a visit!

Guitars for Weirdos


I spotted this today in a music catalogue and it just killed me. This is an awesome looking instrument! With the sleek white finish and two yin and yang-esque dots, this is a seriously badass guitar. Then I saw it was Buckethead's signature Les Paul. Now, I don't have anything against Buckethead, but he is this kind of weird fringe artist that only super-guitar-nerds are into. I know he played on Chinese Democracy, and that Axl Rose had to take him to Disneyland and build a chicken coop in the studio for Bucket to lay down his tracks, but other than that I don't know anything about him (although just that info tickles me to no end). But objectively this guitar does look awesome, and Buckethead should be pleased. For him, it is fitting.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

My Metal Machine Music

The Persol "Incognito Design Exhibition" Opens At The Whitney Museum
Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music set the precedent for unformed, harrowing distortion. At the time of its release in the mid-70s, the album was considered an act of career suicide, yet its philosophy has been sung by many successful acts since. The two most apparent of these acts are My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. By draping their songs in mind-bending distortion, it elevated the sonic ambiance to that of something akin to a natural force, like a tornado. Yet even Machine Music's screech is strongly felt in the Beach Boyish pop tunes of the Jesus and Mary Chain, stabbing out amongst the hummable melodies. How MBV and SY are different are that they made the noise an integral and cohesive part of their sound, so that if you stripped away the chords and melody you would have Metal Machine Music, the raw genetic material of such noisy records.

This is not to in any way undermine to fantastic songwriting chops of both MBV and Sonic Youth. Its just so ironic that MMM was deemed such a failure, or at possibly some sort of stunt. Lou Reed recently talked about the earnestness in which this record was produced, how he could only have made such a piece of art only if it really moved him. This seemed to come as a shock to some, yet it never seemed like people were questioning whether or not MBV or Sonic Youth were pulling any stunts. Yet MBV plays shows that end in 20 minutes of shattering noise, and on Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, considered by many to be their most popular and accessible album, a majority of the tunes devolve into pure noise at some point or another. At that point MMM is being reiterated straight up.

That's not to suggest that having song structures doesn't help the noise go down easier. It's just that while MMM isn't the most listenable album, its "difficulties" have been reused in different contexts much to the gain of those who reused them. Pure noise isn't really something to be judged, anyway. Its ever present, like adding gain to the buzz of your fridge. And it can make for some great music.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Album synopsis: Ash's Free All Angels


So I think every once in a while I'm gonna pick an album apart, and not even albums that are my favorite but one's that just sort of intrigue me for some reason or another. Ash is an Irish band, I think, and in the early 00's came out with power-pop LP Free All Angels. I got into this album while heavily into Weezer and other such bands, so when the sped up "Today"-ish guitar riff of "Burn Baby Burn" started playing on MTV when I was in 8th grade, I was instantly hooked. And while that is straight forward Ramones style chord ramming, the rest of the album proved weirder and interesting.

I can't say I've ever seen more of an obviously Frankensteined album, with huge chunks torn from other bands and songs, only to be reassmbled into what on paper looks like a hit record in America. The "Tired of Sex" bass slamming on "Cherry Bomb", the Beach Boys "wooos" mixed with the Black Francis/Kim Deal vocal blend on "Pacific Palisades". The band keeps things extra commercial with medium tempo ballads sprinkled throughout. And yet there are fascinating anomolies, like the hip-hop/big-band stomp of "Candy". This is not an appealing sound for an 8th grade Weezer fan. That and "There's a Star" provide strange breaks from the otherwise chaste power riffs and ballady pop. Where those influences came from I can't really guess, but what was the 8th grade me's loss is the present me's gain. The bizarro content only adds to the intrigue, letting the listener in on the fact that while this is definitely an American sounding album, its was not made by Americans.

I just can't see Ash's contemporaries, bands like Weezer, Third Eye Blind and Blink-182 putting such strange musical stuff on their albums, but Free All Angels is definitely a more adventurous album because of it. I once saw a picture of Ash while touring behind this album, and as openers they were playing to empty stadiums. Tim Wheeler said the wanted the audience to be "dancing like crack smokin' hippies", but it didn't appear to be so. The closer, "World Domination", serves as the thesis and purpose for the rest of album. Why they didn't achieve it is anybody's guess.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Mixtape Mondays #1: Nirvana

Kurt Cobain Performs At MTV Awards
Fantasy situation: You wanna get the 14 year old in your life into Nirvana, but really wanna steer past the whole Teen Spirit/Nevermind overplayed zone. Well, there's a mixtape for that! From now on, every Monday I'm gonna post a mixtape, either just from a specific band or a mix that has some sort of theme. I'll also put some comments on some of the songs from the mix. So here's #1:

Nirvana Mix
1.Drain You
2.Aneurysm
3.Pennyroyal Tea
4.School
5.Here She Comes Now (Velvet Underground cover)
6.Scentless Apprentice
7.Love Buzz (Shocking Blue cover)
8.Sliver
9.About a Girl
10.Heart Shaped Box

I know I said trying to avoid Nevermind, but Drain You makes a good opener without being the most overplayed song from the record. Poppy substitutes come in the form of Sliver and About a Girl. Here She Comes Now, a VU song, is from the With the Lights Out box set, and is catchy and could lead the listener down a whole 'nother path. School, Aneurysm, and Love Buzz keep things extra heavy. Pennyroyal Tea and Heart Shaped Box are both haunted songs that really showcase the loud/soft aesthetic and are two of the best written Nirvana songs. At 10 songs the listener get a wide breadth of material, yet the thing's the length of a short album. Enjoy!

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Most Punk Game Ever Made: Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto Four Launches in London
Initially, I didn't feel Grand Theft Auto IV was gonna be for me. I've played III and Vice City, but quickly lost interest in both, as the gameplay just seemed to boil down to jacking cars and shooting bystanders. Not that IV isn't that as well, its just the combination of its high and low-brow sensibilities, wicked humor and touching characters make it a true fuck-you-society art piece. This is because of its warped looking-glass reflection of real life: The references to television, politics and the blind-fear of post-9/11 western society are abundant, and hit hard because GTA allows you to fully function in a false-reality, like the Sims with balls. Now obviously the satire of this game was not lost on the average video game reviewer, but what stuck me was how the satire functioned in relation to other art.

Last summer I read an awesome review of Inglourious Basterds by Sean T. Collins (You have to scroll down August 31st to find it). He posits the idea that Inglourious Basterds functions like punk rock, as a "psychic survival mechanism" with which we cope with reality. What shocks me is how those opposed to GTAIV can only seem to latch on to the fact that you can buy hookers and then run them over with your car afterward, when really the game is much more subversive than such a shallow and comic act. Hate television? Watch Republican Space Rangers. Can't stand the radio? Listen to Iggy Pop swear, play an obscure Bowie song and hail the musical taste enhancing effects of scag. Afraid of terrorism? The character you play as is essentially a terrorist, a nihilistic criminal with the ability to search and destroy civilians, cops and other criminals. Just like Collins's article suggests, by simply taking reality and twisting it, making it just that more extreme and surreal, we can laugh and applaud it, as it undercuts the truth we all fear.

But what brings this fact into light as opposed to past GTA's is the realism that functions as the stage for the subversion, like Hitler's regime functions in Basterds. Niko, Roman, Jacob and the rest of the cast are fleshed out like hefty cinematic characters, and react much like you and I would. Its this that lets us buy so fully into the rest of the game, the ridiculous violence and gut-busting humor, because it doesn't really seem like that much of a stretch.

I mentioned Iggy Pop. Besides the fact that he wrote a lot of the book on how to give the fuck-you to society, his presence in the game seems to affirm for me what the creators had in mind. GTAIV is more than a game, its a looking glass wonderland that very much resembles our own. Enjoy it.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Alex Chilton, R.I.P.


Two days ago Alex Chilton passed away at age 59, much to the sadness of the pop and rock community at large. While I cannot claim to be any sort of Chilton expert, I recognize the huge loss this is to the music, and have much love for the first two Big Star records, #1 Record and Radio City. The fact that I haven't explored Sister Love/Third or his Box Tops material is I simply haven't been introduced to it or sought it out for myself, but I definitely have plans to do this at some point.

I was introduced to Big Star while studying abroad in Spain, and one of my American housemates at the apartment I was staying in introduced me. Upon seeing my immediate taking to Big Star as well as Felt's Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, he commented "Man, you like some poppy shit". And this is true, but his observation implied that not everybody has such an appreciation of well crafted pop music. Over time I've noticed that not very many other people my age, especially males, seem interested in Big Star. People didn't tend to take notice when I would play them. I've read that Big Star embodied early 70's rock music in a way that Bowie, T.Rex, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop didn't, without the glammy extreme theatrical edge, instead providing innocence and clean American songcraft not found often during the period. Rob Sheffield observed in his Chilton memorial for Rolling Stone: "Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids. Especially girls — for hipster gals who couldn’t necessarily relate to the abrasive machismo of Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, Alex Chilton was a dude who let female fans hear themselves in his music". While this is a wonderful sentiment, its seems the negative inverse of this is that a lot of boys who are otherwise into the Stooges and VU, bands whose records also didn't sell at all upon initial release, don't give Big Star the time of day that such an awesome band deserves.

Yet Big Star were such an odd matching of sonic parts that it created the kind of band that makes you want to keep it to yourself, your own secret. It's Southern charm run through the kind of clean songcraft usually reserved for 60's British invasion bands. Of course Big Star is much loved by many, but I don't know many of those people. All I can do is guarantee that Big Star is amazing music, well worth the time. And I've heard Southern chicks dig it. Keep it poppy!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

LA Bass- A Tribute to Carol Kaye


It was definitely a shock to me that the most recorded bass player of all time was a woman, and that she had played on over 10,000 records, but most of all that I had never heard of her. Being a huge fan of the Beach Boys, and like many of their fans, particularly of Pet Sounds, the fact that she helped craft the record as part of the Wrecking Crew, the legendary group of 60's LA session musicians piqued my curiosity into her story. She cut her chops playing jazz in the 50's, eventually moving into rock n' roll because of its commercial viability. As a session player she played on hits like "You've Lost That Lovin' Felling" (Righteous Brothers), "Light My Fire" (the Doors), and Zappa's Freak Out! album, yet has never gained proper recognition because of the square nature of sessions players compared to their drugged out rock star counterparts. Brian Wilson has had his break down during the SMiLE project linked to his drug use, among other things, showing an example of how destructive such activity was during the 60's, and how session players were a huge part of creating the polished, complete sound that rounded out there classic productions.

The electric bass was a new invention in the early 60's, and Kaye trailblazed the technique of the instrument. Ironically, I feel the bass is perceived and personified as a masculine instrument (or at least an overblown phallic symbol). The fact that a woman defined the instruments place in rock history provides a unique perspective on female empowerment in modern music, as opposed to a PJ Harvey/Kim Gordon riot grrrl sort of empowerment (and long before). As the sole female member of the Wrecking Crew, Kaye was at a place and time where no other women were, on the cutting edge of studio musician technique.

I recently saw Brian Wilson perform at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and I have to say it wasn't kind of soul-crushing to see one's of my heroes have such an obvious disinterest and lack of focus in what he was doing. At times Wilson would just look at the floor while the hired help around him propped him up (Just musically, but at times it almost appear they would have to physically). Brian Wilson is one of the all time great pop musician, but it was obvious that the ravagings of time hadn't been kind to him, and I'm pretty sure drug use played a part in his decline. Carol Kaye has commented: "It's a sad thing to see that decades later, people's drug use [was] influenced by musicians whose records they idolized, that the real musicians playing on them were totally straight". Thankfully those sessions players were there to flesh out such fantastic visions, and you can't have any groove without the bass. Keepin' it sick!

Monday, March 15, 2010

I Got the Blues

17th January 1964:  British pop group The Rolling Stones in London. From left to right, Brian Jones (1942 - 1969), Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman.  (Photo by Terry Disney/Express/Getty Images)
The reinterpretation of blues songs has a long and storied history in rock n' roll. A recent point of fascination for me has been how the blues are sung, and two good people to compare are Robert Johnson and Mick Jagger. As the Rolling Stones covered many of Johnson's songs, their covers make up a solid body of blues work ripe for comparison. Now Mick Jagger has one of the most famous voices in rock n' roll, but its when he's tackling the blue that things can get really unholy, like on "Love in Vain", for example. His seems to leech upward, holding notes that flux in and out of tune, yet are undeniable powerful in their attack. Johnson, on the other hand, keeps things low, not going for the high-all-out-screech of Jagger, instead focusing on the soft and subtle eerieness of the song, and occasionally going for ghostly falsetto. The two interpretations make for drastically different rewards, and are both definitely worth your time.

A song you can compare over three artists is "Stop Breakin' Down", which has been played by Johnson, the Stones and the White Stripes. The Stripes are all reverb and hysteria, with Jack White's proto-Plant voice whooping over the jagged guitar jutting up from below. The Stones keep things shufflin' with the honky tonk piano and mercurial guitars so in line with the rest of Exile on Main Street. Johnson keeps with the quiet power of the tune, focusing the desolatory power of the blues. With the White Stripes pushing a storied American musical form into punk territory, one shouldn't fail to show a little respect for the blues. Keep it sickly and sweet!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

For Damon Albarn, its all a blur

Blur Perform In Hyde Park
With the new Gorillaz album coming out and with their impending Coachella headlining, it seems like a good time to reflect on Damon Albarn's musical contributions with his two successful acts, Blur and Gorillaz. I was recently relating to a friend how I though that Blur is an awesome band, possibly in a league with other seminal British acts like Radiohead, and even share similar themes of 21st century alienation and paranoia, yet were simple too obviously British and therefore not cool enough to break big in America. This implies that Americans have a fairly strict sense of what is cool, and that to embrace such an English aesthetic like Blur is to fall outside the boundaries of that cool.

Radiohead, on the other hand, don't seem to come lyrically from any geographical point; Thom Yorke is singing purely from his own disenchanted psyche, his own personal wonderland. Yet this leads to an inhumanness to the music, whereas Blur is all Essex flesh and blood, and therefore vulnerable to the scrutiny of American cool. Their masterpiece, Parklife, is a concept album ABOUT being English, among other things, and haunts the same emotionally desolate territory as OK Computer and Dark Side of the Moon, but because of the specificity of where the music comes from, carries a fun exoticness with it, as if your musical journey is both emotional AND physical.

If this was ever a problem for Damon Albarn, he has definitely rectified it with Gorillaz, for better or worse. With this group it appears Albarn has reverse engineered American cool, or at least built a sturdy copycat, made up of spare hip-hop beats, smoggy ambient drones and the occasional folky guitar strum. Like a miniature British invasion, Gorillaz is once again selling us our own music, and obviously having more success than any successful American rock band right now. Gone are the British doldrums of Albarn's parklife, replaced with fiery narratives of America's impending doom. But in Blur it was obviously Albarn was really LIVING those doldrums, whereas now he's simply the wizard behind the curtain, a ghost in the machine, safe from the turmoil he's mapping out. And of course we eat it up, our most narcissistic impulses being stroked, for who wants to hear the Great American Novel more than America? While Yorke is suspended in his psyche, his own world, Albarn is suspended in the music machine he's built, made from parts not his own, but if he doesn't do it, who will?

While Blur was personal and local, Gorillaz is international (or American, but in this setting America's devastation is the world's) and has our hero acting more as a central nervous system than human, simply holding it all together. If you can't live up to a standard of cool, you can always reinvent yourself, but its hard to keep it all in focus. Keep it sickly!

Its the FINAL fantasy...AGAIN


So Final Fantasy XIII has touched down in the US with much anticipation, I guess 'cause its the first next gen FF, and from what I heard XII sucked, or at least the battle system was passive and led to boring, monotonous gameplay. Thankfully things on Planet 13 don't seem to be that way! You can read reviews to get the overall gist of the gameplay, but I have some specific thoughts on the whole thing. First of all, there's massive complaint about how linear this game is, how you basically just run down a restrictive path and fight enemies, more like a Super Mario Bros. level than an RPG. But its been brought up that past FFs are also linear, but disguised this fact by having an world map that gave the illusion of freedom. From what I can tell, this is a totally true and valid point. Classics like FFVII and VIII started off extremely limited, only opening up into a larger world far into the game, and even then your only option was to get to the next pre-determined point on the map. The only difference here is that SquareEnix chucks the illusion, instead letting you feast on the most bad-ass battle system I think I've ever seen in an RPG (Now, I'm not an RPG expert, my first RPG being Super Mario RPG (SUPER bad-ass game, check it out if you haven't) and then FFVII and VIII, most of the first Xenosaga, and yeah I think that's it).

But before I get into the battle system, I have to note that traditionally people have viewed JRPGS as have very strong, linear storytelling-based gameplay, and that's one of their strengths. So comparing FFXIII to, say, Fallout 3 (Oh yeah! The last RPG I played) reveals how insanely open ended gameplay (Fallout) can lead to a laundry list of problems, i.e., not knowing what the hell to do, trying to take advantage of the open-endedness but not being able to cause you don't have any equipment and get killed every five seconds, forcing you to follow the story line, and when you DO get into the open-endedness, finding a series of dungeons which are EXACTLY the same, and overall the game is kind of hypnotizingly depressing and fascinating and I suggest you check it out, but yeah open end stuff ain't all its cracked up to be. My point is that FFXIII shepherds through what seems to be an extremely robust gameplay system, and while yes the story is force fed to you, and the dialogue is cheesy, but I mean good grief don't play video games if you want Shakespeare! Concessions must be made, and open ended games like Fallout or even GTAIV just can't have the kind of graphics possible in the liner game like FFXIII. It seems like when you offer the open ended gamplay, there's just not enough time, money, and console power to offer both.

Another big complaint, and this seems to be about all new FF games, is the lack of charm. FFVII is especially noted for its charm, and from what I can tell this is referring to the quirky, funny, appealing characters, the "Ultimate Good vs. Ultimate Evil" nature of its story, and the awesome soundtrack. Oh, and the fact that there's towns. First I wanna address the characters. Now, nobody has seemed to have brought this up, but its seems the LACK of graphically capacity and the inability for voice-overs seems to have allowed for this perceived "charm" to take effect. Like reading a book with simplistic drawings, the Lego kids look and dialogue bubbles allowed the player to flesh out the characters in their imagination, basking in the absence of ridiculously delivered English-dubbed anime voiceover. Combined with the evocative, masterful score by Nobuo Uematsu, FFVII deliver great characters and story at the players leisure, yet this is ultimately due to the technological limitations of the time. But I have to give a special nod to the score, possibly my favorite from any video game ever. I think that score seriously elevates that game, and as many of the main characters (Aeris, Tifa) have incredible themes that give their characters a sort of sonic signature, the game would have charm even if made with today's standard of technology. But I can't help but feel those more simplistic, thematic musical themes were the result of the limited MIDI capabilities present in the PS1. FFXIII has a bombastic, at times Disney-esque score that at times is emotionally evocative yet usually only brings empty energy. And I guess everyone's bitching about the Lenoa Lewis theme that replaced the original Japanese one, so I'll have to look into that.

Now there is a flip side to that, and a great example is Metal Gear Solid 1. In that game, the voice-overs MAKE the characters, driving the plot and immersing you in the brutal, gritty world of Solid Snake. Yet the series ultimately falls victim to the same loss of charm, as seeing everything played out in the long cutscenes of MGS4 simply isn't as exciting as the radio-show back and forth of the first installment. The empty void is where the magic happens. By forcing us to fill-out, and thus take part in the creation of the experience, we are entertained. Imagination is the ultimate source of entertainment. Keep it Digital!