KORG is love

This game announcement made me very happy, in both the content and the Steve Jobs style presentation.

Although I won't be buying this new product unless I get a DSi (which is still a ways off), I'm just glad to see it existing. The KORG DS 10 is great fun.

album of the week: 6-4

Sonic Youth

The Eternal

Kill Rock Stars (2009)

Why you'll like it: A mashup of old and new Sonic Youth

Why you'll hate it: Won't win over any newcomers.

Break out the ripped jeans and POGs, It's Sonic Youth! That may sound rather flippant, but this is a band that has made about a dozen albums and remained unblinkingly similar throughout. With The Eternal, it appears they are very well aware of this, and happy to bask in it. The opening track "Sacred Trickster" is the most by the numbers Sonic Youth track I've ever heard. Sporting a deadpan delivery, mindless rhyming, and a typical 90's grunge guitar riff... It's almost like a parody.

While the rest of this album maintains this general feeling, it's no where near as obvious, which is good. I suppose if anyone has permission to be a Sonic Youth rip-off, it's Sonic Youth. This is a very retro SY album. While there are still modestly paced jams akin to the last two albums, there is a lot of feedback reminiscent of their Goo - Washing Machine years. Some tracks, like "Anti-Orgasm" and "What We Know" combine the two with great success.

Maybe the 90's are just hip again. We've got Zack Morris on late night TV and the Ninja Turtles coming to Xbox. Despite its shockingly familiar sound, this is a very good album. I'm not a fan of much anything before Sonic Nurse, so hearing them pull off a dirty grungy sound while in their older melodic mindset may be a good combination.

Hit the win button!

I have a few nice things to say about Nintendo's patented "demo mode", which has been alluded to appear in the forthcoming New Super Mario Bros Wii game. If you are too lazy to read the link, what this new feature does is optionally help you with getting past tricky/monotonous/annoying parts of games. What is being proposed here is an option that will either play an instructional demo for you on how to play through a certain part, or just flat out skips it for you.

This is making the self entitled little brat, I mean, "hardcore gamer" faction very angry in internet land. Apparently some people think you have to work or sludge through every step of the linear path in a game you played hard earned money to have fun with. Maybe you can blame this on my brain's broken perception of the world, but whenever I come across a frustrating part of a game that I know is due to limited controls or something I find to be unfair, its an entirely joyless experience. I curse and swear for a half hour, memorize every note of the "you died" theme music. Then when I finally pass it, I thank my lucky stars, not congratulate myself, then say "Glad I never have to do that again."

This is coming from a proud retro fan. Mega Man 9 was my favorite game of 2008, and I would not have used the feature once. I'm not talking about just giving up on difficult challenges. I'm talking about skipping what you find is flat out stupid and/or a product of poor game design. Regretfully, a typical Mario platformer hardly ever has such glaring mistakes, but the recent Bionic Commando: Rearmed sure as hell did.

This has been a long time coming. I would have killed for something like this in 1990, when 90% of games were frustratingly hard rather than easy. When I rented Spy Hunter or GI Joe, all I wanted was to see what the game was like and experience it all. I wasn't fishing for confidence, just fun. All I ended up seeing were the first 10 minutes of the game, at most, and a whole lot of that game over screen.

Good for Nintendo, because honestly, how different is this than just looking at gameFAQs or passing the controller to a friend or sibling? Curb your ego, and have a bit of fun for christ's sake.

album of the week: 6.3

The Whitest Boy Alive

Rules

Asound / Bubbles (2009)

Why you'll love it - Mellow funky-soul tunes

Why you'll hate it - sounds like elevator music

Continuing two weeks in a row of more European releases that I was late on spotting: Erlend Øye's funky experiment, The Whitest Boy Alive, released their sophomore effort back in March. You may have heard Erlend through his modestly composed outfit, Kings of Convenience.

This album is basically version 2.0 of the first album, Dreams (2006). It's got more colorful dance moments and moodier emotional moments. I absolutely love the keyboard on this album! Even a buzzkill like me can't help but bob my head to the keyboard and tap my foot to the bass. The funk and dance style is not overplayed like say in a Red Hot Chilli Peppers way, but matured like Tom Jones.

In some ways, this album was what I was hoping last year's Zazen Boys 4 was going to be more like. Of course I wasn't expecting Mukai Shutoku to be as vocally restrained as Erlend, but it feels as if the modern attempt at funk with well structured synth loops and well paced bass lines has totally hit his mark here.

Rules is an enjoyable album that doesn't lose steam through all 11 tracks. The catchy as all hell dance songs are well complimented by emotional breaks, and neither spectrum feels hammy or tacked on.

idle thought

Man, I should really just shell out the $20 and get the Young Oh-Oh DVD....

album of the week - 6.2

Camera Obscura

My Maudlin Career

4AD (2009)

why you'll love it: best twee pop band around today

why you'll hate it: mushy love songs

This is another band that never really changes, and I'm just fine with it. To review this album is to review Camera Obscura as a whole, which sounds rather boring; so lets keep this short.

They play twee-pop. The songs are quite mushy, yet done so well that you can't turn away from it. The album isn't as good as Let's Get Out of This Country (2006), but its still great stuff.

The end.

Three things I really loved about E3.

The annual major videogame expo, E3, had one of its biggest shows in years.  For once there was very little to sigh at.  Here are three games that made me giddy...

Left 4 Dead 2 - I was very apprehensive about this announcement at first.  Not as much as some angry neckbeards, but a bit taken aback knowing that the one online multiplayer game I play on X-box 360 will be snuffed out within a year of release.  Once I started reading interviews, I was won over.  The devs are intent on making the game more repayable and more random.  Best of all, it discourages survivors from stacking in corners instead of fighting.  I have no problems with paying $60 to make this jump.

Scribblenauts - Forget the smoke & mirrors of "Project Natal", a dinky hand-drawn DS game has done what I thought was technologically impossible.  They've imported just about every noun in the English language into animated form.

To solve environmental puzzles, you type in a word that manifests itself on the screen, and you can interact with it.  More surprising, is how deep the interaction is.  You can summon a time machine and time travel!  You can summon God and The Devil, and they will fight!  It's amazing how much depth this game has.  I never thought I'd see anything like it.

Shadow Complex - 2D LIVES!  As much as I can't stand the presentation of the macho Gears of War series, I know it's a competent game.  Now the studio is putting out a classic 2D action/adventure game for XBLA.  It looks like a Metal Gear Aesthetic mixed with Castlevainia exploration.  Totally down for this.

There was a lot more to love at E3.  Alan Wake finally shows itself, Uncharted 2's amazing trailer, a Metriod game with a fresh new take, 2D Mario, 3D Mario, a Splinter Cell game worth looking at, another Crackdown game....  so much time and money to be happily wasted!

album of the week - 6.1

The Paper Chase

Someday This Could All Be Yours (Vol 1)

Kill Rock Stars (2009)

why you'll love it:  jagged garage rock with a proper grip on horror

why you'll hate it:  gimmicky, depressing content

Horror is a very hard subject to nail.  To please a mass audience, you either have to get too serious or total camp.  The greatest horror films walk the line between the two, being serious about having fun with the material.  Replicating horror culture is even more challenging in music.  If you take it too far, like metal bands do, you become a joke.  If you go the camp route, you'll never amount to anything more than novelty.  

Brazenly, The Paper Chase walks that line.  Throughout 5 albums, the band has managed to get better and better at their craft of creating seriously fun horror.  I feel one of the biggest mistakes they avoided was taking on a gimmick.  These are regular guys in T-shirts playing that classic Kill Rock Stars style no-wave indie garage rock.  Their content is presented at a more abstract level.  No dressing up for trick-or-treat or terrible puns (I'm looking at you, Alkaline Trio).

I think the other reason why they have succeeded at their style is versatility.  Rather than shoehorn in cheesy horror gimmicks into a typical love song, typical political song, etc... the band settles on a certain unnerving piece of content per album.  Hide The Kitchen Knives (2002) has a Halloween style violence in suburbia angle.  God Bless Your Black Heart (2004) had that southern-baptist god fearing tint.  Now You Are Are One of Us (2006) was all about paranoia.  Each of the albums has a distinct pace to them.

FInally, with Someday This Will All Be Yours, we have an album which is, on the surface, themed around natural disasters.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that actually each song's titled disaster was just a metaphor for whatever the content each song had.  For example, "Your Money or Your Life (The Comet)" plays out as if its narrated by a psycho with no empathy for human life "I'm part of the sun, I married the moon, my brother the comet".  The album in general has a nihilistic theme of inevitable death.  I like the record clip at the end about the bitter reality of most deaths being anti-climatic.  

There is a lot of serious content on here, but its delivery makes it so enjoyable.  It feels as if only a true horror fan can respect a band like this.  I honestly can not find a way to simply explain this.  Either you get it, and can step back to find the sum of its parts brilliant; or you can focus on the individual mentions of macabre topics, and not want anything to do with it.  Personally, this is one of my favorite releases of 2009.