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passionate-reply · 3 years

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This week on Great Albums, we look at a surprisingly experimental album from a band who got royally screwed by their record label: Propaganda, with their arguable only LP, A Secret Wish. Oh, and did I mention that that record label was none other than Zang Tuum Tumb, run by none other than Trevor Horn? Find out the whole story in the video, or in the transcript below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be looking at a relative sleeper of its era, with a unique sound that’s set it apart and won it a contingent of cult followers over the years: A Secret Wish, the first, and only, studio album from the classic lineup of Propaganda, first released in 1985.

First formed in Duesseldorf, West Germany by Ralf Doerper of Die Krupps, Propaganda soon relocated to Great Britain in the hopes of finding a wider audience for their music. Their lucky break came in the form of being signed to the record label Zang Tumb Tuum, headed by then-rising star, Trevor Horn. Fresh off his first major success as a producer, ABC’s The Lexicon of Love, Horn then lent his famous production chops to Propaganda’s first single, “Dr. Mabuse.”

Music: “Dr. Mabuse”

The first time I heard “Dr. Mabuse,” I wasn’t familiar with the titular character, and that might be true for you, too, if you’re from the Anglosphere like me. Dr. Mabuse was a literary villain invented by Norbert Jacques, and later made much more famous in a film adaptation of his tale directed by Fritz Lang, the mastermind behind Metropolis. A manipulative criminal kingpin, Mabuse wields strange powers like psychic possession and astral projection, which, despite their seemingly occult origins, often exploit modern technologies, like cinema screens that can hypnotize people. While he may sound like the perfect subject for a chilling, brooding synth-pop anthem, I can’t help but wonder if the character’s relative lack of recognition in the English-speaking world may have hampered this single’s success. While its ominous, gothic energy sets it apart from much of Horn’s other work, it still has some of his characteristic bombast behind its sinister hook, and has an evident “hit single” feel. Still, it performed significantly better in Continental Europe than elsewhere.

Much like ABC’s famous hit, “The Look of Love,” was expanded into a four-part suite that included an instrumental reprise on its LP, this version of “Dr. Mabuse” is listed on the album with the subtitle “First Life,” and assorted variants of it were available in different formats. It also received an arguable reprise with the album’s final track, titled “Strength to Dream / The Last Word.” The title is a bit more opaque than that of “The Look of Love (Part Four),” which made the relationship more obvious, but the synth sequences do bear a rather strong resemblance.

Music: “Strength to Dream / The Last Word”

Unfortunately for Propaganda, Trevor Horn quickly became a little too successful for his own good. Labelmates Frankie Goes to Hollywood achieved unprecedented success with Welcome to the Pleasuredome, and their famous singles “Relax” and “Two Tribes,” which led Zang Tumb Tuum to throw almost all of their promotional support behind their newfound golden child. The release of A Secret Wish was postponed, and Horn was no longer able to produce the rest of the album, besides “Dr. Mabuse.” But despite the fact that Horn isn’t actually here, there’s still a noticeable attempt to finish the album in an aesthetically similar, “in-the-style-of” fashion, and the end result is an LP that's surprisingly quite sonically cohesive!

Music: “Jewel”

With its abrasive textures, aggressive energy, and heavy emphasis on percussion, “Jewel” feels more like a track from the Art of Noise than it does Horn’s triumphant pop productions like “Relax.” “Jewel” also has an alter ego on the same album, and serves as a sort of evil doppelgaenger for the similarly-titled track, “Duel.” The two tracks feature the same lyrics, but vastly different treatments and moods.

Music: “Duel”

I like to think “Jewel” displays how a tumultuous relationship looks from outside, painful and unpredictable, whereas “Duel” is a bit like experiencing it yourself, and being so enraptured by the blissful pain that you don’t realize how frightening the lyrics actually are. Besides the much softer instrumentals, the lead vocal performance by Claudia Bruecken is also markedly different, and I think the contrast between the two is a testament to her vocal chops. Throughout the album, Bruecken’s voice is rich and full of character, setting her apart as one of the more distinctive vocalists in 80s synth-pop.

Overall, “Duel” is perhaps the most accessible and easy to like track on A Secret Wish, and it accordingly became the album’s biggest hit. But unlike most obvious singles, it arrives at the tail end of the album’s first side, after a slew of much more experimental tracks. Not only does “Jewel” arrive before “Duel” does, but the album’s opening track, “Dream Within a Dream,” is an eight-minute psychedelic opus based around a text by Edgar Allen Poe! “Duel” feels a bit like a break for refreshments after listening to the earlier parts of the album. It really is a surprisingly experimental work given its relative commercial success, reaching #16 on the UK albums chart. Still, despite that success, *A Secret Wish* doesn’t seem too strongly remembered today, which is something I’d certainly like to see change. Counterbalanced between pop and the avant-garde, this album sounds like a cross between the Eurythmics and Einstuerzende Neubauten--something I say with as much affection as possible!

At first glance, the cover of A Secret Wish almost appears abstract, an inky web of squiggles. But upon closer inspection, one can see that the object depicted on the cover is actually a dress form, a wireframe in the shape of a human torso, which might be used to display clothing in a retail setting, or in the design of clothing.

While this emblem may not sound particularly sinister, I’m tempted to compare it to Harry Harlow’s famous experiments on rhesus monkeys. Harlow took orphaned baby monkeys and offered them a “cloth mother” and a “wire mother.” Artificial effigies of monkey mothers dispensed food for the test subjects--one with a soft and cuddly body of cloth, and one with a cold and barren armature of wire. When distressed, Harlow’s monkeys sought shelter and comfort from the cloth mothers, regardless of which mother had dispensed food to them, suggesting that the comfort of their soft touch had a value of its own to the monkeys. The results of this research have often been used to suggest the importance of physical contact between children and their caregivers. Propaganda’s use of the cold, bare, female-coded wire frame, enshrined, alone, in the center of a drab-coloured composition, centers the idea of the inhospitable and the unloving. Perhaps it is a symbol of the inhumanity and alienation of modern life?

As I hinted at earlier, A Secret Wish ended up being the only album this version of Propaganda managed to put together, despite the tremendous promise that it shows. Feeling flagrantly under-compensated per the terms of their contract with Zang Tumb Tuum, the members of the band went to court, and eventually jumped ship to Virgin Records instead. That is, except for Claudia Bruecken, who decided to stick with Zang Tumb Tuum for several more years. Later in the 80s, she would team up with Thomas Leer to form the synth-pop duo Act, whose lone LP, Laughter, Tears, & Rage, is a worthwhile listen that I would consider the ideal follow-up to A Secret Wish--though it’s markedly less experimental and percussion-driven, sounding more like late 80s, post-Pet Shop Boys, baroque synth-pop.

Music: “Absolutely Immune”

My personal favourite track on A Secret Wish is the album’s final single, “p:Machinery.” With pounding percussion and buzzing synths, not to mention some dramatic and dystopian lyrics, this is definitely the track on the album that reminds me of Ralf Doerper’s industrial music roots! Apparently, parts of this track’s melody were composed by none other than Japan’s David Sylvian, who receives a minor thank-you in its liner notes. While I don’t think the finished track sounds terribly similar to anything of Sylvian’s, I can’t say I don’t find that pretty interesting. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “p:Machinery”

#music #album review #album reviews #great albums #propaganda #trevor horn #ztt records #claudia brucken #claudia bruecken #synth pop #synthpop #synth-pop

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rockmiyabideusexmachina · 4 years

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2020 Megaman Summer Fanart Contest Results Thread ~ Cat. 1 - Mariko-Sensei’s Hot Hot Hotspring Club

Sorry for the delay in these results. Those following me on Twitter know I had a little computer mishap the week after the deadline, when I had planned to get this all done. And once I went back to work, time to focus on this has not been plentiful. So I’m going to try to keep this a little shorter and concise, best I can. As has become the norm, I’m going to break up the results into separate posts for each category. Here are all the steamy submissions from Category 1 (that *ahem* hopefully aren’t too hot for tumblr nowadays...), and your winners, after the break:

Thank you again to all who participated! As always, you make it very hard to judge these pieces with how great they all were! I will be contacting all winners today, after these posts go live. For the full gallery with images at their actual resolution, please check out these two links:

https://imgbox.com/g/tUBHFYfbpd [Everyone’s entry, except...]

https://imgbox.com/g/N3dEQbKjjc [...inanehipsterslang’s multi-page entry]

I will also include a direct link after each entrant’s name, if the images won’t load or are crunched for legibility.

Category 1 - Mariko-Sensei’s Hot Hot Hotspring Club (this category focused on Megaman characters in an onsen setting. Mariko-sensei needed to appear somewhere in the entry, but did not need to be the focus of the piece.)

1.) Steph O’Dell: [ENTRY] *For coming in 1st, Steph has won $125 via Paypal*

Um, uh...sorry to intrude, Mariko-sensei... Gosh, this turned out so dang pretty! In terms of the overall background environment, your piece certainly felt the most polished. The details in the shading, from the rocks to the fence, and the opacity of the water and steam feel just spot on. Stunningly beautiful to look at.

2.) @dragonmarquise [PAGES 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] *For coming in 2nd, dragonmarquise has won $75 via Paypal*

♫ If you’re ‘fraid of hot springs and you know it, clap your hands ♪

You won points for having the most cohesive story and bringing the category’s titular club to life! There were a lot of panels that had both cute and humorous moments, (glad to know Match at least isn’t weirded out by showers XD) it read well, and felt like a unique and thought-out entry.

3.) Komito Amae [ENTRY] *For coming in 3rd, Komito has won $50 via Paypal*

As one of two traditional medium entries, I felt you did a really pretty job with your shading and highlights. Especially with everyone’s hair, but also details like the light shining behind Meiru and the pretty contrast in the sky. The rounded rock arrangement fit the composition nicely and stood out in a unique way against the other entries.

4.) Viruscore [ENTRY] *For being the Honorable Mention, Viruscore has won $25 via Paypal*

Keep your eyes closed or covered, everyone else. There’s not enough steam to keep Mariko’s buns properly covered, and I’m not talking about her hairstyle. _____

And here are the remaining entries that just barely missed the cut, in alphabetical order by alias:

@inanehipsterslang [ENTRY FULL GALLERY - 23 PAGES]

Man, I Love Frogs. Man, I had a good laugh at Shadow Man in that shirt! While I have a feeling you were more pressed for time to finish this entry as well as you wanted to, I appreciate that you were the only one who had characters in yukata for this theme, and still snuck in a little Akane bribery. Challenge me to censor your art, will ya? Well, this is what happens... ;p

Mattasaurs [ENTRY]

Layer sure was a popular choice in this theme, and her new XDive swimsuit skin was probably a catalyst. She looks super cute here! I think you nailed her new style perfectly!

@megagundamman [ENTRY]

Onsens don’t always have perfect clear blue color. There is actually a variety of types and reasons why they appear different colors. Being yellow, this one might have a bit too much iron or sulfer in it. Or maybe that sunken booty is where all the iron is coming from.

@tea-and-finalfantasy [ENTRY]

The watercolor look of this piece is just as soothing as the feeling Layer and Mariko must be experiencing in the waters. The flowers and berries mixing in help make it an even prettier scene, and the little ducky floating by is cute. I really liked how your Layer turned out; the extra wave and curl in her hair looks very nice like that.

#Rockman #Megaman #Mega Man #Rock Miyabi's 2020 Megaman Summer Fanart Contest

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dust Volume 6, Number 4

Guided by Voices just dropped record #30!

We enter April wishing all of you good health and financial solvency, though we know that many of the musicians and artists and appreciators that visit our site are in very dire circumstances. Our own crew is, so far, not infected, though we are coping with varying degrees of success to the new normal. Some are writing more. Others are struggling. Almost all of us are listening hard to the music that sustains us, and hope that you are likewise finding some solace. This edition of Dust is a big one, as a lot of us have the attention span for shorter, but not longer pieces. Enjoy it in good health. Contributors included Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell and Tim Clarke.

Aara — En Ergô Einai (Debemur Morti Productions)

En Ergô Einai by Aara

Swiss black metal band Aara offers a very high-concept LP, investigating the European Enlightenment, and the period’s complex and conflicting discourses on human rationality. In some ways, the historical period was enormously optimistic, featuring thinkers like Ben Franklin and Rousseau, who were committed to modes of thought that were scientifically rigorous and grounded in egalitarian ethics. But at the same time, European coloniality ramped up significantly, and capital became a rapacious, world consuming engine, churning out massive wealth and even more massive human suffering. Aara investigate that — or anyways that’s their claim. They haven’t published the lyrics to these songs, and the vocal stylings of singer Fluss are so brittle, so horrendously shrieked, that it’s impossible to decipher the words. The music is suggestive, however. It’s infused with a grand sensibility, and also charged with black metal’s negative intensities. The influence of Blut Aus Nord’s romantic Memoria Vetusta records is strongly present — and Vindsval, Blut Aus Nord’s principal composer, plays guitar on “Arkanum,” first track on this record. Its grandiosity is in tune with the philosophical enthusiasms of the Enlightenment. But it’s pretty cold stuff, like rationality itself.

Jonathan Shaw

Ryoko Akama / Apartment House — Dial 45-21-95 (2019) (Another Timbre)

Dial 45-21-95 by Ryoko Akama

The one time I saw Ryoko Akama’s music performed, the visual poetry of the concert was at least as compelling as the music that was made. During one piece she, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg walked calmly up and down a line of tables loaded with instruments and knick-knacks she picked up during her visit to Chicago, making timely sounds that seemed to accent their movements rather than issue from them. While it sounded nothing like the music on Dial 45-21-95 (2019), this album is likewise the work of sympathetic musicians expressing a composer’s impressions of a place and all that comes with it. The source material this time comes from Akama’s visit to the archive of filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski. Objects she saw, words that she read, and the episodic pacing of his works all became part of this cycle of leisurely, gentle movements of music that is small in scale, but not exactly minimalist. The musicians, in this case the English new music ensemble Apartment House, often seem to be passing phrases from one to another, each recipient conveying a reaction to what they’ve heard rather than the same information. In this way they impart the experience of a story without telling one.

Bill Meyer

Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis — Invisible Cities II (Karlrecords)

Invisible Cities II by Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis

What better time than when we’re all forbidden by pandemic to spend time in the company of others to listen to some quality sonic landscaping instead? Nadja’s ever-prolific Aidan Baker second duo collaboration with bass clarinetist Gareth Davis follows on the first Invisible Cities with a similar structure; Baker, credited on that first LP with just “guitar”, somehow summons up vast or subtle cloudbanks of hissing ambience, covert drones, even sometimes harsh blares (check out “The Dead” here) while Davis plays his clarinet like he’s carefully picking his way across a perilous set of ruins. Whether elegiac like the opening “Hidden” or more mysterious like the fading pulses threading around Davis’s work on “Eyes”, the result is a vividly evocative set of involving ambient music made using slightly unusual materials. Even though Baker and Davis fall into a set of background/foreground roles, both clearly contribute equally to what makes Invisible Cities II work so well (honestly, a little better than their fine debut as a duo), and although unintentional, the result can serve to give us temporary shut ins plenty of mental fodder as well.

Ian Mathers

The Bobby Lees — Skin Suit (Alive)

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The Bobby Lees may be from Woodstock, but they definitely do not have flowers in their hair. Skin Suit, the band’s second album, is a blistering onslaught of garage rock fury, at least as heated as last year’s Hank Wood and the Hammerheads S-T, but tighter, nearly surgically precise. Singer/guitarist Sam Quartin has a magnetic, unflappable presence, whether issuing threats sotto voce (“Coin”), insinuating sexual heat (“Redroom”) or crooning the blues. But everyone in the band is more than up to the job, whether Macky Bowman knocking the kit sidewise in the most disciplined way, Kendall Windall jacking the pressure with thundering bass or Nick Casa lighting off Molotov cocktails of guitar sound. Video (above) suggests that the record isn’t the half of it, but the record is pretty damned good. Jon Spencer produced and makes a characteristically unhinged cameo in “Ranch Baby.” Two covers ought to be a misfire—can anybody improve on Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation,” or add anything further to the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man”? — but instead bring the fire. Helluva a band, probably even better live.

Jennifer Kelly

Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby — Offering (Snailbongbong Records)

Offering by Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby

Sometimes when one musician gets top billing, that just means they ponied up for the session fees. But on Offering, the words “Rob Clutton with” signal that the Canadian double bassist conceived of a sound situation and procured material suited to that concept. Clutton is well acquainted with the American soprano and tenor saxophonist, Tony Malaby. Their association dates back two decades, when both men were resident artists at the Banff Centre For Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and they’re both members of drummer Nick Fraser’s band. That common ground gets the nod on “Sketch #11,” a Fraser tune that occasions some of the most swinging music on this wide-ranging and thoroughly satisfying session. But elsewhere the genesis of the material lies in Clutton’s own improvisations, which he recorded, transcribed and analyzed in order to locate nuggets of musical intelligence worth developing into discreet melodies — or further improvisations. Either way, Malaby isn’t just the guy on hand to play the horn parts, but a known musical quantity to be either be written for or set up to set loose. Clutton must have had his tone, alternately ample and pungent on soprano, and his imaginative responsiveness to the melodic, rhythmic, and emotional implications of a theme in mind, for his own purposeful perambulations seem designed to give Malaby plenty to wrap around and climb upon. While the music is ever spare, it’s never wanting.

Bill Meyer

Pia Fraus — Empty Parks (Seksound)

Empty Parks by Pia Fraus

Empty Parks, the latest album from Estonian neo-shoegazers Pia Fraus, deftly soundtracks crisp, blue-skied, late winter days when buds are emerging on bare trees and the promise of warmer days beckons. The Tallinn based band comprising Eve Komp (vocals, synth), Kärt Ojavee (synth), Rein Fuks (guitar, vocals, synth, percussion), Reijo Tagapere (bass), Joosep Volk (drums, electronic percussion) and Kristel Eplik (backing vocals) traffics in layered harmonies, swathes of synth and roving guitar lines over a solid, propulsive rhythm section. Most of the songs move along at a good clip with a great sense of dynamics and a focus on atmospherics. Sometimes one wishes they would let go a little and explore the hints of noise on standout tracks “Mr. Land Freezer,” “Nice And Clever” and “Australian Boots” which have traces of grit that, if given more prominence, may have elevated Empty Parks as a whole from enjoyable to compelling.

Andrew Forell

Stephen Gauci / Sandy Ewen / Adam Lane / Kevin Shea — Live at the Bushwick Series (Gaucimusic)

Gauci/Ewen/Lane/Shea, Live at the Bushwick Series by gaucimusic

The cultural losses inflicted by the current pandemic situation are so immense that no record review is going to hold the whole story. But this one might clue you in to one culture under unique threat, and also shine a light on the spirit that may bring it back again. Since the summer of 2017, tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci has been organizing a concert series at the Bushwick Public House in Brooklyn, NY. Each Monday starting at 7 PM up to half a dozen individuals or ensembles will play some variant of jazz or improvised music. This album is the first in a series of five titles, all released as either downloads or CDRs with nicely done sleeves, and each documenting a set that was part of the series. Live at the Bushwick Series is a forceful argument for the mixing of aesthetics. You might know drummer Kevin Shea from the conceptually comedic jazz band, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, or Gauci and Lane from the many recordings that showcase each man’s impassioned playing and rigorous compositions. Maybe you know guitarist Sandy Ewen as a started-from-scratch free improviser. But when you hear this recording, you’ll know that they are a band, one that makes cohesive and ferocious music on full of tectonic friction and fluid role-swapping on the fly. When the quarantines expire, there may or may not be a concert series, or a Bushwick Public House to host it. But it’ll take the kind of commitment and invention heard here to get things rolling again.

Bill Meyer

Vincent Glanzmann / Gerry Hemingway — Composition O (Fundacja Sluchaj)

Composition O by Vincent Glanzmann / Gerry Hemingway

A composition is both an ending and a beginning. It establishes some parameters, however specifically, to guide musicians’ interactions. But the publishing of a piece can also provoke many different interpretations, especially when the composition itself is designed to be a work in progress. Percussionists Vincent Glanzmann and Gerry Hemingway developed Composition O with the intent to revise each time they play it, so that while there is a graphic score guiding them, it is subject to change. So, don’t expect this music to have the locked-in quality of, say, Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, any more than you might expect it to evince the self-creating form of a free improvisation. It proceeds quite deliberately through sections of athletic stick-craft, sonorous rubbing, and eerie extensions beyond the percussive realm enabled by the distorting properties of microphones and the deeply human communication of Hemingway’s vocalizations, which are filtered by a harmonica. The score keeps things organized; the concept means that this music will evolve and change.

Bill Meyer

Magnus Granberg / Insub Meta Orchestra — Als alle Vögel sangen mein Sehnen und Verlangen (Insub)

Als alle Vögel sangen mein Sehnen und Verlangen by MAGNUS GRANBERG / INSUB META ORCHESTRA

In a previous review for Dusted, I characterized Magnus Grandberg’s sound world as “unemphatic.” The same applies here, and the accomplishment of that effect is in direct inverse to the size of the ensemble playing this album-length piece. For this performance, the Insub Meta Orchestra numbers 27 musicians, but it rarely sounds like more than four or five of them are playing at any time. The ensemble is well equipped to represent whatever Granberg suggests. In addition to conventional orchestra instrumentation, you’ll find antique instruments such as spinet, traverso and viola da gamba, as well as newcomers like the analog synthesizer and laptop computer. Granberg selects discerningly from centuries of compositional and performative approaches. The piece’s title, which translates to “When all the birds sang my longing and desire,” tips the hat to Schubert, but the way that timbres offset one another shows a working knowledge with contemporary free improvisation. It takes restraint on the part of the players as well as the composer to make a group this big sound so small in contrast to the silence that contains its music.

Bill Meyer

Ivar Grydeland / Henry Kaiser — In The Arctic Dreamtime (Rune Grammofon)

If Ivar Gyrdeland (Danes les Arbres, Huntsville) and Henry Kaiser had first met in an airport lounge or a green room somewhere, you might not be able to hold this CD in your hands. They’d have sat down, started talking about strings or pick-ups or their favorite Terje Rypdal records, and who knows where that might have led. But they met in an Oslo studio, and one of them had some means of projecting Roald Amundsen — Lincoln Ellsworth’s Flyveekspedisjon 1925, a documentary of an unsuccessful and nearly fatal attempt to fly two airplanes over the North Pole. So, they set up their guitars and improvised a soundtrack to the film on the spot, which became the contents of this CD. Neither man regards the guitar’s conventional sounds as obligatory boundaries, and much of the music here delves into other available options. Resonant swells, looped harmonics, and flickering backwards sounds alternate with shimmering strums, skeins of feedback, and unabashed shredding, radiating with an icy brightness that corresponds to the unending polar sunlight that shone down on the expeditionaries as they hand-carved a runway out of the ice.

Bill Meyer

Guided By Voices — ‘Surrender Your Poppy Field’ (GBV, Inc.)

Surrender Your Poppy Field by Guided By Voices

The ever productive Robert Pollard kicks off a new decade with a louder, more distorted brand of rock, his characteristic hooky melodies buzzing with guitar feedback. He’s supported by the same band as on last year’s Sweating the Plague— Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Bobby Bare, Jr. and Mark Shue, who like Pollard are lifers to a man. Songs run short and feverish with only a couple breaking the three- minute mark and the chamber-pop “Whoa Nelly,” clocking in at 61 seconds. And yet, who can pack more into a couple of minutes than the godfather of lofi? “Queen Parking Lot” ramps up the dissonance around the most fetching sort of melody, which curves organically around modal curves. “Steely Dodger,” layers rattling textures of percussive sound (drums, strummed guitars) around a dreaming psychedelic tune. The words make no sense, but tap into subconscious fancies. This is Guided by Voices 30th album. Here’s to the next 30.

Jennifer Kelly

Zachary Hay — Zachary Hay (Scissor Tail)

Zachary Hay by Zachary Hay

Zachary Hay is an American acoustic guitarist, but please, put aside the associative baggage that comes with those words. If you do so, that’ll put you closer to the spirit that informed the making of this LP’s ten un-named tracks. Like Jon Collin, Hay seems to be intent upon capturing the mood and environment of a particular moment. The sound of the room, or someone turning on a tap while he’s recording — these become elements of the music every bit as much as his patient note choices. Hay likes melodies, but he doesn’t feel bound to repeat them, which imparts a sense of motion to the music. Things change a bit towards the end, when he puts down his guitar and stretches out for a spell on banjo and squeezebox, humming along with the latter like a man who knows that he must be his own company.

Bill Meyer

Egil Kalman & Fredrik Rasten — Weaving a Fabric of Winds (Shhpuma)

Weaving a Fabric of Winds by Egil Kalman & Fredrik Rasten

Some music is born out of commercial or communicative aspirations, or philosophical structural prescriptions. One suspects that this music originates from some agreement about what sounds good, compounded by other ideas about the right way to do things. Fredrik Rasten is a guitarist who splits his time between Berlin and Oslo, shuttling between improvised and composed musical situations; he has an album out on Wandelweiser, which should tell you a bit about his aesthetics. Egil Kalman plays modular synthesizer on this record, but he is also a double bassist from Sweden who lives in Copenhagen, and he keeps busy playing in folk, jazz and free improv settings; one hopes that someday, we’ll hear some recordings by his touring project, Alasdair Roberts & Völvur. But in the meantime, give a listen to this record, which patiently scrutinizes a space bounded by string harmonics and electronic resonance. Rasten uses just intonation to maximize the radiance of his sounds and re-tunes while playing to subtly manage the harmonic proximity between his vibrations and Kalman’s long tones. The synth supplies a bit of slow-motion melody. The album’s two pieces were performed in real time, and the effort involved in maintaining precise harmonic distance gives the music a subtle but undeniable charge. The title mentions winds, but this music feels more like a sonic representation of slight but steady breezes.

Bill Meyer

Matt Karmil — STS371 (Smalltown Supersound)

STS371 by Matt Karmil

UK producer Matt Karmil’s latest release STS371 mines a lode of straight ahead acid house and techno laced with enough glitch and twitch to appeal to the head as much as the body. Lead single “PB” is a maximalist concoction of ricocheting hi-hat, blurting bass, the panting of the short distance runner and an undercurrent of soft white noise. Karmil uses just a few simple elements to build his tracks which foreground the beats. Hi-hat and kick drums drop on tracks like “SR/WB” to highlight woozy synth washes. It’s just enough to let you breathe before the high energy tempos return and the strobes flash once more. STS371 touches on Force Inc clicks and cuts and ~scape minimalism beneath the rhythms but most of all Karmil is interested in keeping you on your feet. Mission accomplished.

Andrew Forell

Kevin Krauter — Full Hand (Bayonet Records)

Full Hand by Kevin Krauter

Indiana musician Kevin Krauter’s sophomore album Full Hand floats by like a summer breeze. The Hoops bassist plumbs 1980s AOR and coats it in an agreeable fuzz to produce 12 tracks of gossamer dream pop heavy on atmosphere if not always individually memorable. Lyrically Krauter mines his memories and experiences growing up in a religious household, self-discovery and coming of age with poetic grace that his delivers over drum machines, hazy synths, delicate layers of guitar, and low-key yearning vocals.

At his most direct on the title track and “Pretty Boy”, Krauter explores queer identity and his wish to be himself and express his desire. “Green Eyes” and “How” confront the dilemmas of doing just that. The songs are less confessional or revelatory than the sound of Krauter working things out in real time, allowing his audience the privilege of listening as he does so. There are no “big” moments but one comes away inspired by his words and warmed by his music.

Andrew Forell

Nap Eyes — Snapshot of a Beginner (Jagjaguwar)

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Album number four sees Nap Eyes open up to take in broader, sleeker vistas. For the most part, lackadaisical country-rock’n’roll is nudged towards expansiveness by spacey guitars borrowed from My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything. Nigel Chapman steps forward into his front man role with more aplomb than on preceding albums, marshalling his bandmates around him to explore more colorful musical territories. Most successful are the singles, especially opener “So Tired,” plus the canny repurposing of the “Paint It Black” riff on “Real Thoughts,” and the deft guitar work on “Dark Link.” Sometimes there’s a loss of focus, a feeling of stretching for something just beyond reach. But that’s OK; after all, the shrugging acceptance of their shortcomings is right there in the album title.

Tim Clarke

Peel Dream Magazine — Agitprop Alterna (Slumberland / Tough Love)

Agitprop Alterna by Peel Dream Magazine

On second album Agitprop Alterna, Peel Dream Magazine sound just like early Stereolab, with occasional blasts of shoe-gazey guitar thrown in for good measure. It may come across as reductive, even dismissive, to make such an overt comparison, but there’s no getting round it. With Stereolab’s comeback reminding everyone how beloved the band is, it’s heartening that there are new bands carrying the torch of their glorious aesthetic. To anyone who grew up in the 1990s listening to this stuff, it’ll no doubt be startling how well Joe Stevens has pulled this off. It’s a love letter to the sound of droning organs, guitars hammering away at major sevenths, driving rhythms and zoned-out but tuneful vocals. It’s derivative, sure, but it’s so well done, and the song writing is so solid that the appeal is undeniable. A recording of John Peel’s reassuringly deadpan radio patter even makes an appearance on “Wood Paneling Pt 2,” midway through the album, as if posthumously giving the band his blessing. I can’t argue with that.

Tim Clarke

Sign of Evil — Psychodelic Horror (Caligari Records)

Psychodelic Horror by SIGN OF EVIL

Maybe music this astoundingly stupid shouldn’t be quite so fun. But Sign of Evil, a one-man-black-metal-psychobilly-mash-up from Chile, makes a racket that’s so oddly deranged that it’s hard not to be charmed. Imagine if Link Wray somehow managed to walk into a Dark Throne practice session, c. 1995, and decided to jam, and you might conjure some of the strangeness you’ll encounter on the doltishly titled Psychodelic Horror. It’s fitting that the best song on the tape is simply called “Horror.” Nuff said. But check out the whacko piano that Witchfucker (yep) gamely pounds through the song’s first 30 seconds, and then the wheezy guitar tone he abuses your ear with when the metal portion of the song starts. These are not the sounds of a well-adjusted intelligence. Nor are they the sorts of sounds made by jackasses that cynically profess misanthropic allegiance to Satan, even as they enjoy decades-long careers in the music industry. Watain and Gorgoroth and Dark Funeral only wish they could be this legitimately unhinged. It helps that Witchfucker isn’t a loathsome racist. Rock on, you weirdo.

Jonathan Shaw

Tré Burt — Caught It From the Rye (Oh Boy)

Caught It From The Rye by Tre Burt

Tré Burt has a rough-edged voice and fiery way with the harmonica that can’t help but remind of a certain Nobel Prize winning songwriter, though his words are less oblique. This debut album has a raspy, down-home charm, framed by raucous acoustic strumming and forthright Americana melodies. The winner here is the title track, which glancingly references the J.D. Salinger classic, but mostly reflects a soulful, restless search for meaning in art and life and music. “All my favorite paintings/ they keep on fallin' down/And I need savin' by the grace of god/But I know he's off creatin' /another one like me,” croons Burt with sandy sincerity. It’s a resilient sort of music, where Burt’s yowling voice plumbs emotional depths, but his rambling guitar line maintains a steady cheer. Burt got his big chance from John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, and as that songwriter hovers near death, it’s a good time to celebrate his legacy of leaving the ladder up.

Jennifer Kelly

Michael Vallera — Window In (Denovali)

Window In by Michael Vallera

Chicago photographer, musician and composer Michael Vallera releases Window In, a four-track album of ambient manipulated guitar and electronic drone. Vallera works in a liminal space between actuality and potential, with continual, albeit almost imperceptible, shifts from the general and the hyper-specific. He brings a photographic eye to his compositions. They are the aural equivalent of seascapes in which one basks before one is drawn to details and the secrets beneath. Vallera’s tracks float by on luxurious oceanic swells with undercurrents of hiss, subaquatic rumbles, the blips and bleeps of luminescent trench dwellers. In the process the source, the guitar, is rendered unrecognizable, erased from the results leaving only disembodied sounds that ironically feel anchored in the real. Fans of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Fennesz’ guitar based ambient music or Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops will find much to appreciate here. Window In is a meditation on stillness and calm in the eye of powerful natural forces, something we always need but more so now.

Andrew Forell

Windy & Carl — Allegiance and Conviction (Kranky)

Allegiance and Conviction by Windy & Carl

Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren have been creating ambient space-rock for nearly 30 years now. The couple’s cosmic yet intimate output may have slowed — this is their first album since 2012’s We Will Always Be — but their sound possesses a timeless resonance. Stepping into their river of watery guitar and bass drones in 2020 feels like little has changed since we last left them — and yet, strangely, everything is new. Windy’s voice makes tentative yet emotionally insistent appearances on five of these six tracks, her words hinting at small-scale revolutions (“In the underground, we’ve got a job to do” — “The Stranger”). “Will I See the Dawn” is the only wordless piece, where electric piano and tape hiss manage to speak volumes. At only 38 minutes, this is a short album for Windy & Carl, but one that has enough shadowy depths to qualify as a worthwhile addition to their intimidating discography.

Tim Clarke

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theeverlastingshade · 4 years

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Heaven Or Las Vegas- Cocteau Twins: 30th Anniversary

Of all the bands who couldn’t be better primed for a comeback from a cultural standpoint while being highly unlikely to ever reunite in any sort of compacity whosever, Cocteau Twins occupy a peculiar place within the musical landscape of 2020. Even if all touring wasn’t completely postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cocteau Twins (the predominant trio being vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, guitarist/synth programmer Robin Guthrie, and bassist Simon Raymonde) seem unlikely to ever reunite for the kind of festival comebacks that have brought back many a legacy act due to the implosion of Fraser and Guthrie’s marriage. And yet while they were largely unheard of up until their 1990 sixth LP and masterwork, Heaven or Las Vegas, their run from their highly promising 1982 debut Garlands through HoLV has continues to prove incredibly influential with each passing year on a multitude of underground and mainstream acts alike, influencing acts as diverse as SIgur Ros, Arca and so many more. While Cocteau Twins have never released a record that’s less than good, HoLV still stands as the pinnacle of their creative output, and the defining landmark statement of the increasingly ubiquitous sub-genre widely tagged as dream pop.

Since emerging as a gothic rock band at the beginning of the 80s, Cocteau Twins have cultivated a singular stain of pop/rock informed by the contemporary gothic rock and post-punk of the last several preceding years like The Birthday Party and Siouxsie and the Banshees of and the transcendent vocal harmonies of The Beach Boys and Kate Bush. Emerging originally as a three piece for Garlands, Cocteau Twins then stripped things back to just the two piece of Fraser and Guthrie for their great sophomore LP, Head Over Heels, before landing on Raymonde to lock down the low-end on their spectacular third LP, Treasure, solidifying their lineup for all future output. By the time that Cocteau Twins were gearing up to record HoLV, the band was simultaneously on the precipice of legitimate international success and complete implosion. Raymond had just gotten married, and he lost his father in the midst of recording the record, while Fraser and Guthrie had just had a daughter named Lucy Belle, and their marriage remained teetering on the brink of dissolution due to Guthrie’s frequent mood swings and paranoia as a result of his increased drug use. They had also just signed to the revered indie label 4AD after Victorialand, and following the lukewarm reception of their great fifth LP, Blue Bell Knoll, the stakes had been heightened for them to release a record that hit. There had been obvious populist sensibilities coursing throughout the music of Cocteau Twins as early as HOH, but Treasure was the last time that they sounded completely unabashed about their undeniable populist sensibilities until HoLV.

The records that followed the glossy, populist propulsion of Treasure scaled back the immediacy while doubling down on the overall sense of immersion. Victorialand and Blue Bell Knoll, the two records between Treasure and HoLV, are positively meek with respect to the stratospheric heights reached on the former and latter, but they’re far from underwhelming, and showcase the inimitable trio refining their approach to melody while demonstrating a heightened sense of suspending tension. On HoLV, the band draw from everything that they attempted prior onto their largest canvass yet, and as soon as opener “Cherry-Coloured Funk” kicks off in earnest you can hear the warm immediacy of Treasure rushing forth in even greater force. Victorialand is their most insular, ambient-adjacent record, defined primarily by Fraser’s voice being mixed into the greater wall of sound instead of high in front leading the arrangements. The guitar work is some of their most gorgeous to date, but it lacked the immediacy that made Treasure pop. The same is true for BBK, but that record marks a notable shift in their trajectory towards more conventionally structured songs, even though there’s a sense of restraint that keeps a lot of the songs here from truly soaring. Regardless, BBK is still a great record from start to finish, and the highlights like life-affirming “Carolyn’s Fingers” and the exhilarating title track set the stage for where they were about to go with HoLV.

On HoLV, Cocteau Twins shift their gears from the ambient-leaning direction of Victorialand and BBK back to the ethereal pop of Treasure, but with a much tighter focus. On HoLV, songs barely dip past the 3 and a half minute mark, and not a second is wasted on anything other the absolute barest arrangements necessary to convey each song’s emotional heft. As is the case with pretty much every Cocteau Twins record, it’s Elizabeth Fraser who really steals the show throughout the course of HoLV. Her wildly acrobatic vocal runs shift from ecstatic, to wistful, to seductive, to empathetic on a dime, and while always a remarkably expressive vocalist she had never gone for broke with her vocal runs quite the way she does on HoLV. The instrumentation consists of lush, kaleidoscopic guitar/synth arrangements richer, and more melodic than anything that Guthrie had previously recorded. While Raymonde has always been a bit of the band’s secret weapon, there’s no mistaking this sublime basslines as the major grounding force that keeps everything tight throughout the course of the record. Raymonde’s bass lines are immediate yet forceful, providing a sharp sense of momentum even at the music’s most cathartic.

Cocteau Twins aren’t a band that are generally regarded first and foremost because of their lyrics, but on HoLV Fraser pens the band’s most heartfelt, and urgent writing of her career, focused primarily around the birth of her daughter. While some of the songs are more literal in their depictions of her newfound love (“Laughing on our bed/Pretending us newly wed/Especially when/Our angel unleashed that head” from “Wolf in the Breast” comes to mind), some of the songs like “Fifty-Fifty Clown” present more cryptic allusions to the exact nature of her feelings “And is this safe flowing, love, soul, and light/Motions in all motion, emotions all”. Throughout the chorus of the title track, one of the most spellbinding moments of the band’s career, Fraser delivers what seems to scan as the album’s thesis “Singing on the most famous street/I want to love, I’ve all the wrong glory/Am I just in Heaven or Las Vegas?”, proclaiming her desire for love above all else, and questioning whether the band’s success has brought them closer to bliss or oblivion. The vocal melody is her the strongest on any Cocteau Twins song, and her examination of success rings universal for anyone with the self-awareness to question why and how they got where they are, and where the path that they’re can lead if they get too caught up in the thralls of success. And the closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fire” has lyrics that seem sung in tribute to Ramonde’s father “And day from night take all/Bad thoughts and soothe/All he was/Knows you” effectively ending the record with the cycle of life and death.

In spite of the immense cohesion that holds it together in its intended sequencing, HoLV almost plays like a greatest hits record thanks to the filler free, 10 tight compositions that make up its runtime. Although each of their first five records are great in their own right, most have a few songs that overstay their welcome. Each song holds its own within the greater whole, with strong dynamics, hooks, melodies, infectious rhythms, and guitar/synth arrangements that are taut and immediate, but never dull or simplistic. The songs are bursting with color, but there’s never a sense of indulgence on display, and none of the songs waste anytime not building towards something or delivering some kind of release, all the more impressive given the brevity of each song. Highlights like the one-two punch of intro “Cherry-Coloured Funk” and “Pitch the Baby” are downright disarming in their succinct, yet dense arrangements coupled the wide-screen scale of the production which had never before sounded so rich and clear on any of their prior records. The title track and “Fotzepolitic” are the two strongest songs that the band have ever released, and propel HoLV to heights greater than it being just a spectacular pop record. The title track is propelled by funky basslines, a minimal electronic drum beat, radiant synths, and an squealing electric guitar lead that congeal into a sublime carnival that Fraser gets terrific mileage out of by belting out with more urgency than she ever had before, or has since. And on “Fotzepolitic” the band gradually build up a jangly, galloping guitar lead over a strutting bassline and those ever present gleaming synths. Fraser’s delivery is at her most playful, built throughout the last bridge she teases a palpable sense of flight and then her voice drops out of the mix as Guthrie delivers a solo that spirals into stratospheric, euphoric release. It's the grand culmination of everything that the band had done up to that point, and still exudes a legitimate sense of catharsis that very few other songs I’ve listened to have achieved,

Despite the fact that Cocteau Twins were almost completely unknown outside of the UK until the release of HoLV you can hear the angelic undertones of their singular strain of pop in a myriad of underground and mainstream music throughout the 90s up to the present. Any musician playing music that vaguely falls into the broader realm of dream pop likely owes Cocteau Twins an immense debt, as well as chamber pop luminaries like Julia Holter and Grouper, and shoegaze and post-rock legends like Slowdive and Sigur Ros. In addition to informing the aforementioned outre acts, the gloomy, sensual sensibilities of Cocteau Twins also went on to inform a great deal of down-tempo pop music. They’ve been namechecked by Radiohead, sampled by both Arca and The Weeknd, and you can hear their gothic stylings informing pop stars as diverse as Lorde and Billie Eilish. As poptism has completely shifted the critical music discourse towards accessibility above all else, HoLV occupies a peculiar position as a classic record. The stunning melodicism, sublime chemistry, rich instrumentation, and expansive production rendered HoLV an immediately recognized classic upon arrival, but not only has it gotten better with age, but it’s seemed to have become a notably more influential sounding record on far more than just indie music throughout the last decade. And yet for all of the attempts at reverb-addled bliss, no other musician has released a dream pop record before or since the release of HoLV that come close to matching its singular beauty.

Although Cocteau Twins only remained active to release two good but not great records following HoLV before disbanding, the mark they left on music on the whole is indisputable. Their rich discography set a new standard for melodically rich, adventurous pop music unbeholden to the commercial realities of the music industry in a way that ever diluted their idiosyncratic sound. Although Elizabeth Fraser has played live since their split, most recently with Massive Attack while touring the 20th anniversary of their opus, Mezzanine, the possibility of a legitimate Cocteau Twins reunion has always seemed live a stretch. The creative and romantic partnership that disintegrated between Fraser and Guthrie, coupled with the lingering memories of the immense tension that bore the bulk, if not entirety of their output may always prove a barrier to great to justify reconciliation. But even in the likelihood of that sealed finality, the records that the Cocteau Twins made during their golden years of 1983-1990 sound crisper, and more refined with each passing year. With each successive act trying their hand at dreamy sounding, reverb smeared pop music propelled by thick, groovy basslines and lush choral harmonies, the potency of the music that the Cocteau Twins made during those years becomes that much more pronounced. It’s been 27 years since their last LP, and yet the sound that they helped to cultivate and then crystalize on HoLV continues to grow in relevance with each passing year.

Essentials: “Fotzepolitic”, “Heaven or Las Vegas”, “Wolfe in the Breast

#cocteau twins #heaven or las vegas #4AD

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gwilymz · 5 years

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Unknown Pleasures- Brian x Reader

Summary: Buying a vintage guitar on a whim was a seemingly bad idea, until you find Brian, who agrees to teach you a thing or two about playing.

Word Count: 5,074 (my god i apologize)

Warning: ABSOLUTELY FILTHY: unprotected sex, fingering, oral sex (male receiving)

You had never been very musically inclined--you’d always been a listener, resting your head against the car window as a deep, mellow bass coursed through your body, your father playing oldies on the tinny car radio. Letting the cutting sound of the cymbals, the ferocious beat of a drum solo almost sync with your heartbeat as you listened in your room, alone. But the guitar had an unprecedented intrigue that left you in your flat, short of a few hundred dollars and staring at a semi-pristine, vintage guitar. You didn’t regret the purchase entirely, but you had definitely bought it on a whim.

You were walking through London alone--it was the first warm day of the new year and you longed to stroll through the city without an umbrella or a huge coat or soaked socks. Your feet tapped against the pavement as people pushed through you--eager to get to the train. Strangers in black coats whizzed past you, shoving against your shoulder, stepping on your shoelaces, glaring at you as you did the same to them. It was busy and stressful and you wanted to get away--so you sped to the first store you could find, jaywalking through morning traffic into a music store which was adorned with a crooked neon sign, flickering red against the clean storefront window. Vintage drum sets lined the back wall, drumsticks decorously hung on the walls. The lighting was harsh and the store smelled musty, but you felt welcome, calm. Your fingers absentmindedly strummed thick nylon strings of bass guitars leaned in a corner--and then you saw a guitar, alone in a display case, golden yellow, barely used.

“It’s a 1950 Fender, shipped in from California--she’s something, isn’t she?” A stout man said from behind you, wearing grey trousers and a formal-looking shirt. He looked out of place--but then, so did you.

“I love the color,” You admired, looking at the rustic metal, oxidized slightly, near the frets.

“Fender began in the late 40s, so this is a pretty early model. This specific sort is hard to come by in Europe, or really anywhere else. Sales of them surged at the birth of rock n’ roll in the 50s.” The man fished in his pocket, pulling out a keyring. He fiddled with a small brass key, unlocking the tall display case.

“Oh, I can’t play guitar, I was just admiring.” You blushed slightly, scratching the backs of your hands with your chipped nails.

“You could always learn. Just hold it. You’ll be surprised how natural it feels.” He smiled, picking up the guitar delicately, holding the neck with one hand, the curved yellow body with the other. He placed it in your arms, and he was right. It felt innate, warm even. The body was smooth, almost silky against your fingers, the strings rough and ridged.

“I’ll take it.”

And you bought it, without thinking about the fact you had never touched a guitar in your life. So you stared at it, sitting on the kitchen counter, still in its case--it’s makeshift cradle. You sighed, and took a bite of your toast, tying your hair back as you stood up to play with your new instrument. You lifted the buckles of the leather case--which the salesman gave to you for free, insisting you give a proper home to such a vintage beauty. You lifted the guitar, putting the strap over your body, already confused. You didn’t even know how to hold it properly. You felt awkward, helpless and stupid, unable to finger the frets correctly. You knew nothing about music notes, composition, the technical skills it took to actually play guitar.

“Y/N, what the hell is that?” Your flatmate, Janie set her purse down, it’s silver buckle clicking against the counter, where your new-old Fender once sat.

“It’s a guitar.” You mumbled, frustrated by how off-kilter the instrument sounded. It was flat--or sharp--you had no clue.

“I know, but you can’t play guitar. You’ve never shown interest in playing the guitar. How much was that?” She sat down across from you, eyebrows furrowed as she fixed her bangs, shaking her head slightly.

“I’ve always loved guitar, and I don’t want to talk about the price.” You glared up at her, your fingers splayed against the neck of it, definitely and completely wrong.

“Okay, forget I asked.” Janie rolled her eyes. “Well, speaking of music, Jonathan is taking photos of a band tonight at their concert. They’re up and coming I guess, so you can learn a few things from them maybe?” She nudged you, getting up to change her outfit.

You set the Fender down in its case, following her to her room. It was unorganized--accessories trailed around her desk, earrings mismatched, necklaces tangled. Scarves hung from a hook by her door, clothing was everywhere. She sat on her bed, pulling her boots off, sighing.

“When is it?” You asked, desperate to actually use your guitar; you felt guilty for buying it. Maybe you could learn a thing or two if you were close enough to the stage--and Jonathan, Janie’s younger brother--always had front row seats to take his pictures.

“Uh, I think at 8, maybe half past.” She put in hoop earrings and they jingled against her neck. “I heard the band is really good, actually.”

At eight sharp, you and Janie met Jonathan at the venue, a small theatre in west London which looked better equipped for a play than a rock concert. Velvet seats were lined before the stage, cramped together and deep red. You guys were the first in the small theatre, save for the band and stage crew. You could hear the resonating of the bass vibrating in the stuffy air as Jonathan focused on his camera, brows knitted together as he dragged on a hand rolled cigarette, tiny billows of smoke fanning throughout the immense room.

“I don’t like you smoking those, Jon.” Janie snatched the cigarette from his mouth, salt and pepper colored ash sprinkling the floor as she did.

“Oi! What the fuck, Jane? I’m an adult, let me live. I didn’t have to invite you to this. Rolling Stone said they’re the new Led Zeppelin, this is pretty elite shit.” Jonny grabbed his cigarette back, cupping a hand around the burning end of it, using his other hand to relight it as his camera hung, angled around his long neck.

A blond peeked his head out from behind the velvet curtain, the thick rope tassel swaying as did his hair. “Jonny boy, do you have another smoke?” He flashed a cute smile, holding a hand out, a white sweatband tight against his forearm. Jonathan playfully rolled his eyes, flipping open a rusted metal box to fetch him one.

“Good luck with the high notes with tar in your lungs, Rog.” Jonathan pat his back, giving him a light. Roger winked at you and Janie before disappearing behind the curtain.

“Is that the singer?” Janie yelled, scooting closer to her brother’s ears, as people began to file in as the clock was soon to strike 8:30.

“No, Roger is the drummer. He helps with the really high notes, his range is insane.” Jonny nodded his head before flicking the butt of his cigarette out of his fingers, putting it out with his leather shoes.

The music began to permeate the theatre, the thick bass rhythmic and warm, the guitar screeching, delayed, effortless. They were about to begin. Soon Jonathan was pulling you guys forward so you were flush against the stage, your necks craned up as he snapped pictures of their figures, emerging onto the stage like ghosts, nearly invisible.

“The singer is Freddie. Mercury. He’s very different, but in a good way. And he has quite the stage presence.” Jonathan explained, wiping his lens with his shirt quickly. “Roger, like I said, is the drummer. Cocky, very funny, kind of a slut.” He nodded towards the drum kit, where the blond was warming up, flipping splintered drumsticks between his fingers. “The bassist is John. Everyone calls him Deacon or Deaky. He’s shyer, but very friendly, super talented, he never misses a beat. You just have to wait for him to open up to you.” Then he nodded his head to the tallest of them all, with poofy, almost black curly hair, mouth parted as he strummed at a guitar which looked antithetical to your own. It was a red oakey color, classy and unique. “That’s Brian, the guitarist. Rumor has it he and his dad made that guitar from a fireplace and old motorcycle parts. Read in in Rolling Stone. He’s mad talented, acts like playing hard rock on the guitar is the easiest thing ever.”

Janie nudged you as you watched the band intently, their warm-up messy but somehow cohesive, communicative. “Maybe you can learn a bit from him, yeah?”

You did learn something--that you would never, ever learn to play guitar even one-eighth as good as him. His playing was relaxed, no matter how technically difficult. His fingers were assured, his face contorted in concentration, plump lips parted as he moved about the stage. Your neck hurt, perpetually craned upwards as you followed his legs around the stage, which seemed to take up more than three quarters of his massive stature.

As the concert ended, Roger cocked his head, drumsticks between his teeth as he deconstructed his kit, motioning for you guys to head backstage. Jonny raised his eyebrows, giving the drummer a thumbs up before leading you and Janie up onto the stage. It was hot and foggy and hard to see, but a beacon of light was being emitted from behind the side-curtains, so you followed it.

Jonathan and Janie beat you to the band, and he was already enthusing about the show, gesturing towards his camera, still hung around his neck. “The photos are incredible. I can’t wait for you to see them, I just have a feeling about them; it’s not often bands have such good chemistry, and I think it shows in the pictures.” He nodded, and Freddie kissed his cheek.

“I can’t wait! We don’t have many photos together.” He took a sip of champagne, clicking his class with Deaky’s who was dripping from sweat, ridding himself of his stage costume, in favor of a quite plain t-shirt.

Brian was silent next to you all, an abiding smile glowing upon his rosy face. His hand tapped nervously against his guitar, white nails scratching gently over the polished, wooden surface. You made eye-contact and strode closer to him, your hair blowing by the fan which was cooling the band down.

“You’re really talented,” You said, trying to raise your voice enough so he could hear. He blushed and pointed to his ears, shaking his head as a cue for you to speak up.

“Sorry, it’s really noisy, can’t hear too well after a concert.” Brian said, straight into your ear. He led you to a back room, with backup drumsticks, guitars, and broken microphones. His hand hovered over your lower back. “What were you saying?” He cocked an eyebrow at you.

“I was just saying you’re talented.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m glad you think so.” Brian sat down on a small couch, and scooted over for you to sit down next to him. He looked uncomfortable, nervous.

“I actually bought a guitar this morning--on a whim.” You sat down, the side of your legs were touching, the velvet of his pants soft against your bare legs. “I don’t know the first thing about playing music, so I’m not sure why I bought it.”

“What kind of guitar? Do you know?” Brian leaned into the conversation, fluttering his eyelashes as he listened intently for your answer.

“I guess a Fender. 1950. It’s yellow, and I guess I couldn’t resist.” You smiled, looking at your hands which rested on your knees. His hand brushed against your knee as he gestured with his hands.

“1950? I’d love to see that, or play it! I’ve always wanted to experiment with one.” He composed himself, annoyed that he had gotten overly excited, like he always did.

“Actually, I’d love for you to give me lessons, maybe? Don’t worry about it if you’re busy. But I don’t even know the first thing about guitars.”

Brian nodded, his curls bouncing against his forehead, brushing against his cheeks. He thumbed the charm on his silver necklace, a small, abstract shape which hung from his sweaty, lengthy neck. “I’d love to. It probably needs tuned. I can help you to get situated with it tonight, if you want.”

You hesitated, taking in Brian’s face. His eyes were drooping, he was blinking slowly, yawning into his arm, covered by long bell sleeves.

“Are you sure? You seem tired.”

“I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I never get sleep anyway.” He flashed you a smile, getting up and grabbing his guitar case which sat up against an exposed brick wall. He tucked his coat under his arm and led you out of the small room, back where the rest of the band was.

“Um, I’m going to help Y/N with her new guitar. Don’t wait up on us.” Brian took a quick sip of water from a glass sitting atop a broken amp, squeezing Deaky’s shoulders. The boys raised their eyebrows in unison, then collectively said their goodbyes.

Brian’s hand was on the small of your back, leading you out of the theater, into the cool spring air. It felt fresh, the smell of rain was raw and wet in your noses, the sky impossibly clear, illuminated by the occasional star, and downturned street lights lining the pavement.

“How did you know my name, Brian?” You looked up at his face which was watching the sky, his jawline prominent, his nose sharp like his cheekbones. But his eyes were soft and nice, his eyebrows gave him a friendly, approachable--very handsome look.

“I heard Jonathan. My hearing’s not so bad before the concerts.” He looked away from the sky to grin at you, his canines protruding slightly from his light pink lips, slightly chapped.

“And how did you know my name?” Brian teased, lightly pushing you to the side; you stumbled a bit, giggling.

“You’re a rockstar, aren’t you? Up and coming? Why wouldn’t I?”

He blushed, looking down at his shoes--scuffed white clogs, which were loud against the street. You walked up the stairs to your flat, fresh dandelions peeking through the cracks. Brian picked one, putting it in his unruly hair, smiling at you wordlessly. You were flustered being near him, your hands a bit shaky as you unlocked the door, letting him in. He hung his coat on the rack, taking yours to hang next to his, waiting until the wobbly piece of furniture was stable before strolling into the living room. He gasped as he saw the guitar case, setting his own down on the couch.

“May I?” His fingers hovered over the buckles of the case, looking at you, his mouth slightly agape.

“You know more than I do.” You nodded, eager.

He opened the case, flipping the buckles up with his thumbs before opening the top. “Damn, that’s nice.” He commented, looking towards you again, a silent ask for permission to get the instrument out. You nodded, scooting closer to him as he picked up the guitar carefully, just like the man who sold it to you. His fingers were wrapped around the neck of it, and he pulled a coin out of his front pocket, lifting his hips for leverage as he held onto your guitar tightly. He looked at you again, a barely audible, breathy laugh emitting from his parted lips as he strummed the chords to Keep Yourself Alive. He played for only a few seconds before he cringed and turned the tuning pegs slightly, playing after every small adjustment to listen to the sound.

“It’s very out of tune, but I can fix that.” He smiled at you reassuringly, holding his ear to the guitar to listen closely to the sounds. He turned each peg very slightly and with care.

“Perfect” He whispered, before getting back to his playing. He made it look so easy, his fingers gripping a rusted coin, strumming quickly, with painful precision. You looked at his face which was sinfully beautiful, eyes hooded, eyelashes fluttering against his cheekbones as his hair shifted like his fingers--quickly and gracefully.

“Do you want me to show you something easy? We can go slow,” He looked into your eyes, his hazel irises sparkling. The dandelion was still in his hair, placed haphazardly, almost falling out.

“That would be great, Brian.” You watched him as he took the guitar from off of his lithe body, handing it to you as if it were your child. You held onto it as he did, looking at him through your eyelashes for approval. He gently nodded and you held onto it tightly. He handed you his coin.

“It’s lucky, I like to think.” His breath fanned over your neck, warming the skin, and you felt blood rush to your face, streaming through your ears, hot. You took the coin, your fingertips brushing his, and he brushed your hair behind your shoulder, peeking over it to see what you were doing.

“Relax, try not to hold it so tightly. You can be looser.” He looked at you from over your shoulder as he sat behind you, his socks mismatched, his hair messy, lips parted in a small, pretty smile.

“Put your fingers on the fret to the left, and a little above” He pointed to where he wanted you to have your fingers, and he lightly moved them, making your whole body tingle, like warm Christmas lights lit up throughout your limbs, your neck, everywhere. You strummed with the coin, and the sound was deep, echoic, vibrating throughout the small flat.

Then the door slammed, and the sound of Janie and the rest of the band bickering overwhelmed the robust sounds; cut the tension.

“Did we interrupt something?” Roger quirked an eyebrow, slipping his shoes off as he hung his coat overtop of Brian’s.

“I was just helping Y/N with her guitar,” He scratched his neck, looking guilty. “Hey! Don’t put your soaked coat on top of my perfectly dry one!”

Roger mocked him and moved it to a different hook, rolling his eyes before sitting down between you and Brian. As soon as the door had opened, Brian moved away from you like a reflex, like he had something to hide.

“Nice guitar, Y/N!” Deaky sat on Brian’s leg, admiring the yellow coat as Roger strummed it mindlessly. You thanked him, biting the parched skin from your lips, pushing your hair behind your ears.

Brian grabbed Deaky’s shoulders and got up from underneath him, sitting with you on the other end of the couch. “Here’s my number,” he grabbed a pen from the kitchen and grabbed a small, torn slip of paper, writing it down on the hard, bony surface of his knee. Your knees were against his; they were velvety and tepid.

And then they left, giving you and Janie small waves, their rings sparkling in the ambient light of the foyer of the flat. Brian gave you a toothy smile, slightly lopsided and thoroughly adorable.

You called Brian the next day--midday. Your fingers twirled the coiled phone cord which reminded you of his curly locks which you found yourself thinking about more than once.

“Hello?” Brian’s voice was groggy, and you heard him yawn and groan a little. Tiredness was seeped into his every word.

“Oh! I’m sorry to wake you up, Brian. I’ll leave you alone.” You apologized.

“No! No, It’s fine. I should be awake anyway. My sleep schedule is just off. I’m glad it was you who woke me up instead of Roger though.” Brian laughed softly, running a hand through his hair as he leaned against the wall, as you were.

“I’d love to learn more, if you’re up to it. Janie is out, so we don’t have to worry about bugging her.”

Those words made Brian’s stomach flip and his tongue feel much heavier in his mouth; he felt the words becoming choked, stuck in his throat, still dry from just waking up.

“I’ll come over as soon as I’m decent.” He replied, only able to utter a few words at a time. You muttered a small ‘okay’ and hung up, quickly fixing your hair and changing into a skirt and a nicer, tighter shirt. You didn’t know why you did; it was just a guitar lesson.

Twenty five minutes after your call with Brian ended, he was at your door, wearing an oversized winter coat, a hood pulled over his head. His skin was wet from the steady afternoon rain, and he apologetically handed you a purple umbrella as he hung his heavy coat up. You shook the umbrella dry and your eyes widened as you saw what he was wearing. His forearms were tanned, contrasting from a light denim shirt which was rolled up, halfway buttoned. His chest and collarbones were angular, sharp bones protruding from barely freckled skin. He was wearing slightly flared trousers and his clogs--which were already taken off and by the door.

He pointed an agile finger to the couch you sat on the day before with him, and you got him a glass of water, watching him chug it down as you bent down to pick your guitar from it’s temporary home on the floor, against the kitchen counter in it’s tattered case. He gulped as you bent down, looking away, feigning interest on an arbitrary book in your bookcase--something about painting. You sat down next to him, perched at the edge of the couch, a few inches away from him. His legs were spread as he leaned back against the cushions, watching you intently as you strummed the chords he taught you. Your tongue poked out slightly.

“I think it would be easier if you sat between my legs. So I can show you more easily.” He clarified, his hands ghosting over your hips. You nodded and he pulled you back into him, easily. Your breath hitched as his fingers ghosted over yours. You could hear the blood pulsing through your extremities, flooding to your heart and away from your brain. He pressed his nimble fingers over yours, pulling them over the frets, making your other fingers strum gently, fingering the tough strings slowly, with expert precision. His fingers left yours to pull your hair behind your shoulder, and the soft ends of his own hair stroked your shoulder, moving across your exposed collarbone. His forefinger and thumb titled your chin, turning your face towards his. And you looked at his mouth, peach lips wet, his chin was peppered with day-old stubble. He leaned in, still holding your chin as his tongue entered your mouth, warm and gentle, massaging yours with a confident, tender control. He pulled the guitar strap over your shoulder, and then your head, gently setting the instrument in its case, which sat open on the floor by the couch. You leaned back into him, your back flush against his hot chest, his heart beating against your shoulder blade as he kissed you passionately, his teeth lightly clicking against yours as he deepened it even more. Your hand squeezed his narrow thigh, just above his knee. His hand left your chin and you leaned your head back as he kissed the junction of your neck and your shoulder, nipping softly at your collarbone. His hand massaged your thigh, just under your denim skirt. You whimpered slightly as his hand inched upwards, clean nails scratching gently against the inside of your soft thighs. He stopped kissing you and looked up at you with innocent eyes, dilated and fluttering with anticipation and lust. You kissed his neck, a silent command for him to continue. He unzipped your skirt, rubbing his hands over your hips as he pulled it down your legs which were moderately shaking, ready. He looped his fingers in your panties and pulled them down too, tossing them by the guitar case; they caught on the end of the neck. He kissed you again, moaning into your mouth as his thumb massaged your thigh more. He brought his fingers to your mouth, parting your lips. His incredibly long fingers entered your warm, wet mouth pressing down on your tongue. You closed your mouth around them, sucking his digits. He whimpered and your eyes fluttered closed.

“Look at me, angel.”

You opened them again, tilting your head back to make eye contact with him. His brows were furrowed, he was watching you intently. You could feel him harden against your bare lower back. He tapped your chin, signaling for you to open your mouth and you did. His fingers left from between your lips, a string of saliva connecting his beautiful fingers with your bitten, kissed mouth. He rubbed at your entrance and your hips bucked up, he held them down with his other arm, veins protruding, pulsing under his tanned skin, dark against the light denim shirt he was wearing. You held his wrist as he fingered you, pumping two long digits into your heat, slowly, deliberately. Your other hand held on to his necklace, gently tugging the delicate silver chain between your fingers.

“Brian,” Your grip tightened on his wrist, you could feel his pulse racing against your fingers, and still against your shoulder, where his chest was.

He pumped faster, curling his fingers, tickling a spot inside of you that made you scream, pulling on his necklace harder. Your knuckles were white as you moaned.

“Do you want another one?” Brian whispered against your neck, before kissing your neck gently.

You nodded, unable to form words, you were too aroused, too close.

“Use your words.” He commanded, tilting your head back again.

“Yes, Brian. Please, one more.” You pleaded with him, scratching your nails down his forearm. He was rock hard behind you, leaking onto his trousers which were becoming increasingly tight. He pulled his fingers out and you groaned in protest, feeling empty, disappointed. He sucked his own fingers and you turned around so you were face to face. Beads of sweat were dripping from his temple, he was panting. You looked down at his crotch. The outline of his cock was staggeringly obvious, thick, and long.

You sat on your feet in front of him on the couch, the rough rug scratching at your knees. You unbuttoned his trousers and pulled them down his thin legs, until they pooled at his feet. He was going commando; his dick slapped against his toned stomach which was visible, as he had unbuttoned his shirt during the process of you undressing him. You smirked at him and he shrugged his shoulders.

“They’re tight pants,”

You leaned forward on your knees and looked up at him as you spit on his tip, before you swirled your tongue around the head, sucking on it gently. He pulled on your hair and whined.

“Oh--my god,” He stuttered, his hips doing the same.

You stroked him as you took him into your mouth, as deep as you could take him, his length pulsing at the back of your throat. He guided your head, pulling your hair into a messy, makeshift ponytail. It was sloppy and your eyes were watering from the pressure in your throat, but you moaned around him, before licking a stripe on his shaft and focusing your attention on the head again, rubbing your thumb against a sensitive strip of skin on the underside of him. His eyes were heavy, his eyelashes fluttering as he whimpered quietly.

“I’m gonna cum, baby,” He announced, and you halted your movements, payback for him doing the same to you. You took him out of your mouth with a pop and he rolled his eyes, leaning forward before pulling you up on the couch, sitting you on this lap. Your hands rested on his chest, fidgeting with his necklace as he kissed down your neck and pulled your shirt over your head. He took your bra off with one hand, laying you down on the couch. He rubbed down your chest, licking at your nipple as he tweaked the other one, your back arching at his touch. His curls tickled your sternum, and you moaned as he rubbed himself against your entrance, teasing you.

“I don’t have a condom.” He realized, looking up at you with widened eyes.

“I don’t care.” You threaded your fingers through his hair and pulled him up, kissing him deeply, pulling his locks. He was putty in your hands as you massaged his scalp, whining as he thrust into you, his forearms resting by your head as he stared into your eyes, his mouth open, jagged, uneven breaths leaving his bruised lips. He was so deep, and you scratched down his back, whimpering as he thrust into you forcefully, moaning into his mouth.

His hips stuttered as you clenched around him, pulling at his hair swiftly.

“Fuck,” He cried, slowing down his thrusts to savor his approaching orgasm. “You’re so tight,”

You grabbed his face and wrapped your legs around his waist, locking your ankles, encouraging him to thrust faster. He did, and all you could hear was panting, strangled moans and his skin slapping against yours. You felt him pulsing inside of you and he groaned from deep within his throat, still scratchy from just waking up. He was about to pull out, but you pushed your heels into his back and shook your head, permission for him to do exactly what he wanted. He came immediately, and you felt full as his seed oozed down your leg, thick and hot. He collapsed on top of you, panting, and you stroked his hair. He was still inside of you for a few minutes, catching his breath. When he pulled out, more of his cum leaked out of you, and it covered him, sticky and semi-dried. His chest was blotchy and fiery hot.

He grabbed a kitchen cloth and soaked it with warm water, cleaning himself off before he wiped you down, you flinching from overstimulation. You both were in bliss, until you saw a massive wet spot on the couch that would be impossible to remove.

____

Taglist: @silencedleviathan @alexfayer @ledger-kaos @ma-ntequilla @discodeakky @richiethotzierz @thisloveisreal1 @heartsarecompatible @thelondondreamer5 @brian-may-brian-may @okqueenie @gailymlee @trickster-blr @bubblypenguin123 @queensdarlingg @soloosunflower @dvndermifflinassociate @fredthelegend @miez-lakatz @arrowswithwifi @mouse507 @mespetitestortues @yourstateofdreaming (sorry if i missed someone! message me if you want to be added)

#brian may #brian may fanfic #brian may smut #brian may x reader #smut #queen #gwilym lee #john deacon #joe mazzello #rami malek #freddie mercury #roger taylor #ben hardy #bohemian rhapsody #borhap #fanfiction #fanfic

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artyloreviews · 4 years

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Death Stranding (2019) - The Incoherent Ramblings of a Porter

Death Stranding is an equally flawed as it is innovative. Hideo Kojima’s new entry, unbound from the chains of his previous corporate affiliation is a divisive one, but offers much, both technologically and narratively. While perhaps not as memorable as the former Metal Gear series, it is an attempt at an experience that would otherwise be immediately shunned, were it not for the name and talent attached to it.

Death Stranding, much to no one’s surprise, is one of the most divisive titles to release among critics and players alike. As a longstanding fan of Hideo Kojima’s work, I too was questioning whether or not the experience of going through Death Stranding was worthwhile, as some notable review websites, following the lifting of the review embargo, refused to rate the game - let alone play it. There is some fault in me reading reviews prior to experiencing it for myself, but I believe it is necessary to disclose that particular bias, in spite of my somewhat feverish favor of Metal Gear and my almost instantaneous pre-order of the title upon it becoming available. I would go as far as to say that my acquisition of a PlayStation 4 had been somewhat influenced by the announcement of said new “independent” Hideo Kojima game all the way back in 2016. To say that I had nothing but expectations, would be an understatement. The reception being as divisive as it is makes it difficult to be objective on the topic, so I will allow myself the irregular personal remark every once in a while, if need be – consider that what you will. Think of this as less of a review, and more like the condensed ramblings of a madman. Alongside that, I will attempt to be as spoiler free as possible – at least for a time. I will make it clear whenever that is no longer true. If that sounds good to you, let us move onto the brunt of the topic…

Death Stranding is a spectacularly boring game. The eternal debate whether games should innately be fun or engaging comes to mind almost instantaneously upon first impression. You’ve most likely heard it: “Mindless busywork”. “Walking Simulator”. All signifiers of the core gaming demographic’s displeasure with whatever the fuck Death Stranding is. Its director Hideo Kojima, calls it a “strand game” – the first of its kind. Something I would consider to be one massive taunt towards the public, as if saying: “We’ve made something that didn’t exist before - a new color of game.” How much of that is true remains to be seen, as the future of strand games as a genre will likely be decided, depending on whether there will be many new strand games entering the ecosystem, or if the originator of the term remains the only example of their existence. The fundamental idea of the strand game is not an unfamiliar or an unappealing one – it’s what up until now was called “asynchronous multiplayer” or “network/online features”. Death Stranding is a single-player game at its core, but these online features are somewhat more integrated into the experience. Another term comes to mind that could perhaps adequately describe how that online element is integrated, and I believe its derivation from an antiquated term for a certain subset of MMO games is not coincidental - Death Stranding is a “persistent world”. Looking at Death Stranding as a type of MMO is not too farfetched, I believe. The importance of social aspects in that type of games is not to be understated and it just so happens to be one of the core themes not only of the strand game, but Kojima’s recent beliefs as a whole.

Surprisingly for some, the thematic elements of Death Stranding are not so obtuse and impenetrable like in the Metal Gear series, but rather surface level in comparison. In essence, it is a game about reconnecting people in an age of social isolationism. Kojima hints that the internet has served to connect people, but also widen the gap in actual physical connections through its ease of use and accessibility, making people more likely to stay at home and connect via all manner of messaging services, rather than meet face to face. This topic is also likely more culturally significant to members of countries like Japan and the USA, as the notion of isolationism in general has had a greater effect diachronically, as domestic interests outweighing the need for more outward connections has been at the center of both countries’ foreign policy at one point or another. It comes as no surprise then, that a Japanese studio sets their game in a ravaged American wasteland where conversations and physical contact are merely superficial, goods and services are delivered via a third party, and the outside is seen as hostile and the idea of connection is seen as dangerous.

The game’s story, however, seems to be disconnected from all of this. I would go as far to say, that you could change the themes for something else entirely and the implications would remain the same. The writing seems more interested in revealing the deciphered cryptic marketing materials shown prior to the game’s release. Phrases such as “Create the rope.”, “Tomorrow is in your hands.”, “Stick vs. Rope” and just the word “Strand” are littered everywhere, drawing vague lines between plot events, real world history and cultural practices, and Kojima’s own brand of conjecture. The naming conventions for people and things remain as campy as they’ve ever been, as the translation from Japanese to English seems to yet again have been the difference between something that sounds cool and western, to completely banal.

On a technological level, the game is a masterpiece. From simple rendering, to the way physics is implemented, to the effects and lighting. Kojima Productions (often abbreviated to KojiPro) have mastered their 3D scanning technology, since the creation of the Fox Engine and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Death Stranding was practically sold on the idea of featuring notable voice and film actors such as Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Troy Baker, Margaret Qualley, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Lindsay Wagner and directors such as Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn. Most people will likely see this as Kojima boasting about his connections to Hollywood celebrities, but the fact remains, that this is a star-studded cast of an incredibly high caliber. Particularly commendable are Troy Baker and Tommie Earl Jenkins, who through use of this technology enhance the fidelity of their in-game performance to almost life-like proportions.

The individual systems that make up the core mechanics of Death Stranding are made with the same level of attention to detail as one would expect from KojiPro. The same maximalist control scheme that spans the entire controller that was made infamous with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater makes a return in all of its “hold three different buttons and time a fourth correctly to perform an action you will have to do repeatedly” glory. However, the amount of menu time one has to indulge in has increased tenfold, as any and all rejiggering one has to do with their inventory and or interacting with the world requires about 2-3 button presses, holding a button to confirm and waiting through about 3-4 “micro-cutscenes” which are individually skippable by pressing 2-3 buttons per scene, even if you’ve seen that particular animation play thousands of times. And you will be seeing some of these animations thousands of times, because they are there for everything and anything, from the most core of mechanics, to the things you would never care to even see, let alone do. This is a very long-winded way of getting to perhaps the game’s biggest detractor:

Death Stranding does not value your time. Everything is very laborious, slow, monotonous and sluggish. While eventually you could get into the grove of things and begin to look at it in a different light, the fact remains, the game fundamentally works against you in every way, because the as view of it all likely reveals how little there is of Death Stranding to actually experience. Some have expressed that it should be looked at as more of a meditative experience, where the journey is not merely a means to an end, but rather time for you to be with your own thoughts and explore. While I wholeheartedly agree that that is somewhat of the core Death Stranding experience, I have to disagree that the game’s meditative nature and exploration are player-driven. Even the story itself has glaring pacing issues and it often wastes massive amounts of the player’s time through tedious backtracking, just so there can be a few hours of game in between cutscenes, even when everything is clearly urgent. Even some of the more appealing set pieces, get cut short as a spontaneous blurt of synth noises plays whenever even an insignificant gameplay event takes place.

Ludvig Forsell’s original score for the game is simply fantastic. While it doesn’t have the character of the scores for previous Kojima titles like those by Norihiko Hibino and Harry Gregson-Williams, it does retread the familiar cinematic tropes that seem to be more of what Kojima’s vision is shifting towards nowadays. Forsell’s prior work for Kojima on MGSV:TPP was forgettable, save for maybe one or two tracks, but for Death Stranding he seems to have had free reign to compose for this new IP, and has made some highly moving tracks that play sparingly in important plot moments, giving them that extra punch. Ludvig’s heavy use of synths is highly welcome, as it seems to be more of his specialty, rather than the grand orchestral compositions. In addition to the score, Kojima has picked out some select licensed tracks. Those seem to be of varying and sporadic quality, and barely any thematic connection to the game. It appears to be Kojima’s new thing; to just put in whatever he thinks will sound good and hope that it fits with little consideration as to its cohesion. Hideo’s recent displays of his taste in music seem to be embodied by the inclusion of one Icelandic band - Low Roar, whose entire discography is seemingly included, and frankly is the only one of the musical choices that seems to fit the tone and atmosphere of Death Stranding’s world, featuring somewhat melancholic and subdued vocals, backed by mellow synths and pads, slow drum beats and droning guitar. Low Roar seem to even have the range for more imposing tracks, as shown in the reveal trailer’s “I’ll Keep Coming” and the in-game track “Give Me an Answer”. If Low Roar were to be the only inclusion, I would frankly be happier than the menagerie of tracks that the in-game player provides. It is one of those cases, where less would mean more, as it would indicate a clearer vision than the strange assortment of tracks seemingly pulled straight from Hideo Kojima’s incredibly expensive Walkman.

I recommend you play Death Stranding for yourselves, despite my bold claims. I wish I could tell you why, but it is a Hideo Kojima game after all. Much lies in context and that frankly is as much as I can muster without going into it deeper. This is the point where I will not so reluctantly have to go into spoilers. And when I say spoilers, I actually mean “beat the game”. We will have to retread on some of the previous points with the benefit of hindsight. I’ve intentionally barely said anything about the actual content of the game but the briefest remarks, which you might find disappointing, but I assure you it is necessary. I would go as far to say that this is where the real review actually begins. Read beyond this point at your own peril:

Death Stranding is a spectacularly boring game… and it has to be. The ending of Episode 2 is what shifts the paradigm irreversibly. The moment Higgs – the particle of god that permeates all of existence, reappears following his brief appearance in the inciting incident with the corpse disposal team and kicks you in the head with the words: “So how ‘bout it? Aren’t you tired of the grind? Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for this whole time? A game over!?” Up to that point, I could understand the frustration that most people had with it. I myself even contemplated if this is worth my time, and was considering quitting the whole endeavor, genuinely seeing it as pointless busywork with little to no variation. But after it? Boy, was I reinvigorated to endure just a little bit more. Higgs’ fourth wall break was just a subtle wink, a hint that all of this was intentional. It recontextualized the sluggishness and the drab grinding, where it was used to make the eventual reveal hit harder, the reveal that there is so much more to Death Stranding, so much we people don’t know. It makes you feel like you’ve passed a trial by fire, where you’ve been forced to use only the most basic mechanics for the first twenty or so hours, delivering everything by foot with no aid, only to be among the few who have shown the resilience to be rewarded with confirmation that it was not all in vain. The world is miserable, depressing and unforgiving. Small mistakes can be irreversible and that carries the weight of constant hypervigilance. But with Episode 3 Death Stranding shows its true face. Suddenly you have more structures than you know what to do with, you can build roads, you can drive vehicles, you can enhance your abilities with exoskeletons, you can customize your backpack with actual useful trinkets, covers and pockets. From a game that was slow and drab, it turned into a game about actually “Rebuilding America” piece by piece, creating infrastructure and using the online features to make the game better not just for yourself but for everyone!

What a strand game truly is, is very akin to an MMO, in more than one sense; and in my opinion it is frankly better. There is this anecdote I read on Twitter while I was playing through the game. It was about how the simple act of placing down a rope over some difficult terrain carried weight, because you wanted to throw the rope back, so someone else who is following your path, can use it too; how no other game does that or makes you think of feel that way. And that is what I think is at the core of Death Stranding’s gameplay loop, distilled into one meaningful choice. No longer do you have to thing only for your benefit, but for those who will follow in your footsteps.

Building structures is your stake into the future. When you finish the game, you will most likely not come back to it for a long time, but those structures will remain, even after you’re gone (at least until the timefall eats away through them) and other people will make use of them to accomplish their goals. I can say that there are few experiences as immersive as creating a path, that evades a camp of MULEs and a BT field though a perilous mountainside and seeing that someone else is using it. That single message that pops up onto your screen, makes it feel worth it. Even the simple act of walking down a path makes it so that if enough people walk along it, it will turn into a beaten path, which is much easier to see and usually has no snow on it making traversal less difficult – a mechanic that I do not know how I will live without in other exploration-based games. And KojiPro have made an effort to make sure you know that is intentional, as seen in some of the interviews and e-mails you get, where they discuss how things like oxytocin and “likecin” are produced from physical contact and receiving likes as a porter (or even how receiving too many can lead to addiction, like in the case of MULEs and Homo Demens). There is one particular correspondence with the crew of the first waystation you ever connect up to the chiral network, and how they’ve slowly stopped using the synthetic oxytocin that you delivered to them and began producing it naturally, because you’ve given them hope and they’ve been going outside and celebrating with each other – restoring physical contact. I can’t even explain the weird sensation of meeting your first set of NPC porters out and about. After such a long time of speaking only to holograms, beginning to doubt if there even is anyone out there – meeting two confused porters, running around doing deliveries with tools strapped to their suits and being able to wave to them (or even trade items) is such a surreal experience.

Those are some of the more immersive elements of the game and frankly, I wouldn’t mind to see those explored further. However, Kojima had other intentions, and that is where I and the game’s story diverge. Sam Porter Bridges is so far from me as a player, that he might as well not even be controlled by me. His actions in the plot are so oblivious, that it is hard to sympathize with him, especially so during the final hours of the game. Fragile literally forces into the plot your love for Amelie, as if the estranged brother, who does not give a single fuck about his family or his country that (mind you) no longer exists, cares about this “sister” of his, that he is even somewhat forced into going to save. The way she manipulates him into kicking Fragile to the curb is also one of the moment that drew an even larger divide between where I was and when Sam supposedly was, and I surmise most players felt the same. There is this sentiment that most people don’t even refer to him as Sam, but rather as Norman Reedus, since Sam is not even an empty vessel for the player, but something even more abstract; something like a character that you only get to pilot in between bad decisions made in cutscenes.

The eventual reveal that the entire main goal of the game was in vain from the beginning, that you were being manipulated by Amelie, who was never in danger and needed no saving, just so that the overly forced End of the World plotline can take place, presented as a major subversion, felt expected. “Just like how The Patriots turn out to have been manipulating Snake in Metal Gear Solid from the beginning.”, I told myself when first listening to that pivotal Mario and Princess “Beach” dialogue. The fight with the big BT with Higgs stuck to it, firing rockets at the middle section and the radar dis-- I mean right shoulder of the BT genuinely felt like fighting Metal Gear Rex - especially with Troy Baker screaming in reverberated pain like Cam Clarke did in MGS1. That, followed by a hand to hand fistfight atop Re-- I mean, in a sea of tar with fighting game health bars and stamina meters to save the woman in the background – just like in my Metal Gear video game. It’s pretty blatant and it doesn’t really take a keen eye to see it.

“Getting a little touchy-feely there, Mr. Aphenphosmphobia. Well, congratulations. You won the game. Too bad you didn’t stop shit…” is where the game probably should have ended. What follows is what I would consider to be Kojima’s weirdest decision to date – explaining everything that was confusing and tying up loose ends in the same game that creates them. The next four-five chapters are just that – exposition dump after exposition dump. Nothing left for consideration, no pondering as to what something means. Kojima singlehandedly offered a MGS4 to his MGS1. A key to all questions at the very end, so that nothing is left uncertain.

Which takes me to my next point – the interviews. Slowly but steadily, the idea of the “codec conversation” in Kojima’s repertoire is phased out by optional cassette tapes or in the case of Death Stranding, actual text exposition dumps. Previously you’d at least get to appreciate someone reading them to you in character, but now you have to go through hundreds of emails and interviews by yourself. I can’t begin to imagine what understanding some of the concepts of the game is like without going through the interviews, even if I haven’t gotten to read them, as it most likely requires 100% completion. In Metal Gear, seeking out new codec conversations in random parts and events of Metal Gear, ensured there was quite a large amount of replayability and you’d usually find new details about characters or helpful tips and strategies on repeat a playthrough, but now, once you’ve completed the game, there is nothing new or different – It’s always going to be the same interviews, in the same place, at the same time. Death Stranding has no replay value whatsoever. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen all of it.

Speaking of in-game players and Walkman earlier reminded me that there is also the surprising absence of a portable music player in-game, for what is probably the most musically saturated Kojima title in years, as music is only available to you while resting in your private room or in a safe house, where you can listen to the owner’s collection of tracks, even those obtained later in the game. This is in a game, where about 90% of your time with it is in complete silence, save only the odd interjection by Sam, mumbling something to himself and the sounds of the wind and falling rocks in the distance. I feel like I would genuinely feel so much better and could stomach most of the detracting elements of Death Stranding, if I could only play some Low Roar, as I discover a nice view and decide to take a short rest to take it all in. If a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 could have an MP3 player in it and even load some podcast in for you in the goddamn war-ravaged Middle East, then surely we could have had one in this one as well, right?

The quality of Kojima’s writing also varies wildly, as genuine moments of subtlety and clever world-building are followed by incessant amounts of tutorialization, presented as dialogue that an actual human is supposed to produce in a way that sounds natural. All of that, mixed with hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways of saying “Thank you, you’ve really saved us out here!”, “Could you deliver this for me?” and “Boy, we sure do feel connected out here, thanks to you!”, littered with thousands of emoticons and expressions of adoration for your skillful and vitally important delivery of a couple of packages of old magazines and some rocks. This, complemented by the late realization that the world of Death Stranding isn’t actually that large in scale, so much so that I would bet you can pinpoint exactly were on the map a location is, given only a screenshot of a random assortment of moss and rubble; all makes the over-exaggeration of the effects of your feats seem like genuine lies, placed there to make you feel a false sense of accomplishment. Perhaps they do it with good and earnest intent in rewarding you for the things you’ve done for them, but you know what you’ve delivered, and you know it’s not that important most of the time.

A section of the game that I was particularly fond of was Episode 11 – i.e. the final episode for Cliff Unger in Vietnam. I recommend you all play that sequence again via the figurines behind Sam in his break room, but with “The End” by The Doors playing in the background. The whole bit is clearly an homage to Apocalypse Now and it almost feels timed to the beat. I felt like it was supposed to play, but they couldn’t get the license to it, so I added it on top myself and at that point I could feel Kojima and I enjoying the sentiment on the same wavelength. This is also the episode where Mads Mikkelsen finally gets enough screen time for you to really get an appreciation for his performance, which up until now had been quite subdued. Cliff is fear-inducing and nightmarish upon introduction, his voice reverberating throughout the battlefield, but with the events of Episode 11 you begin to see his more tragic side of the story’s main events. Mikkelsen lends his talent completely to the whims of Kojima, and that makes for an outstanding performance, much like those by Troy Baker and Tommie Earl Jenkins, yet somehow felt misused and underplayed, as Cliff simply fades away from existence.

The game’s ending has me holding conflicting opinions: at the same time, I genuinely do not understand why anyone would care enough for Amelie, not to empty a clip into her back, much as I did immediately upon being given the option, and at the same time despising having to just witness the non-decision you have to make in the game’s final moments. Having no choice but to hug her and listen to her ponder upon existence, and eventually having her make the decision herself whether or not to initiate judgement day. You only have to run around aimlessly and listen to her monologue about how much she cares, as your trigger finger is still itching to end it all, as the game eventually wins itself. Stylistically impeccable and unnerving, as the uncertainty of what is going to happen, continues to grow, only to climax with a whimper of what feels like a glorified deus ex machina. This is followed by Tommie Earl Jenkins’ powerful final scene, breaking down a character that up until now had seemed one-note and bereft of any emotional depth, only to reinvigorate him and shed any doubt as to who and what he represents in the world of Death Stranding. That however is thrown away, as it steps aside for the epilogue with Lou, as Sam has somehow synthesized a connection to him exactly as Deadman takes him away to delete his memories and their connection, yet Sam manages to carry it to the very end, where it is ultimately revealed that after all the displays of his renewed connection to the people and the world around him, he still doesn’t care for anyone or his country, burning his cuffs and forgoing it all, yet Lou is somehow exempt from Sam Porter Bridges’ final moment of decicive introversion. Even after all of this, Kojima adds one final series of subversions, as Sam is revealed to have been Cliff Unger’s son, through whose eyes we’ve been seeing those dream sequences, finally stitched together into one cohesive whole at the very end, revealing a backstory that ties up loose ends no one was really asking to have tied up. And also, Lou is apparently Louise – a girl. The ending is divisive, because you have the actual tangible story of Sam growing to accept people in his life, getting used to the taste of Fragile’s cryptobiotes and building a relationship with her, ridding himself of his phobia and getting in touch with the people around him like Deadman and Die-Hardman, connecting everyone in the UCA into a whole and living to see another day – only to throw it away at the last minute, but not entirely, out of fear that something would be left unaccounted for. It could have been so much more, or if not, at least somewhat better executed.

When it comes to technical execution, the game is spotty, but ultimately very well made. The physics of just walking from point A to point B are probably the most impressive thing you’ll probably experience this decade, even if it is sometimes unwieldy and comical. The whole element of keeping balance and the implementation of inverse kinematics to any terrain, is a marvel to behold and it will frankly be difficult to play anything that doesn’t have that much depth anytime soon. One could only wish they had put that much attention to detail into the vehicles, which drive like a load of bricks even on flat ground. When it comes to pure visual fidelity, the Decima Engine is stunning in its execution of photorealistic graphics when in the hands of KojiPro. The amount of landscaping that has taken place is probably mind-blowing, as a lot of the routes that the game takes you through are plotted in such a way as to lead to wide open areas of land, where the game’s more introspective moments occur, where you’ve just crossed a difficult to pass field of BTs or hostile terrain and the camera pulls back from Sam and captures the vista that unfolds before you, as the melancholic tones of a Low Roar begin to pierce the silence. I say it takes you there, because for those who have tried to make some more extreme routes, will know well that there are actually quite a lot of invisible walls all around you at all times, allowing routes to mainly take place in certain sections of the map. You still have the freedom to place whatever items in whatever location you wish, but there is almost always a clear alternate route that you can take, which more often than not has been placed there by the developers and only needs you to place the ladders and ropes along it. This is what I meant earlier in the piece by the exploration not necessarily being player-driven. The invisible hand of KojiPro is there to guide you at all times, as you can never really stray too far from the intended path, believing that you are doing so of your own free will and creativity.

Death Stranding is a divisive game because it really tries so hard to be this artistically extravagant video game with great implications, but ultimately renders its greatest threat as a Mary Sue very late into the game, way beyond the average span of interest, while it already has a very charismatic and well-defined villain in the face of Higgs from the very beginning, who gets somewhat shortchanged into being the self-insert fourth-wall-breaking tool, who is only played as a means to someone else’s end. Everything past Episode 11 feels unnecessary and diminishes from what the game had already done perfectly until now. The game’s length in pacing are all over the place as well: Excluding what I would consider to be the mandatory grind of Episode 2, everything else genuinely seems like padding for time, going back and forth across the whole map multiples of times for seemingly arbitrary reasons, haphazardly going into BT infested zones for items of sentimental value, while the threat of annihilation looms over every encounter with them, and by the time something actually engaging happens, you’re often too exhausted to do it.

At the same time, it is also offers this incredible amount of progression and gradation compared to how you started out merely two chapters ago with your ever-expanding arsenal of infrastructure changing the fundamental core of the game. It features all-around outstanding performances (excluding some awful line-reads by Léa Seydoux, which is a shame, because her character could have been so much more, only to be reduced to a fast travel NPC with a catchphrase, which she never seems to be able to pronounce). There is the amazing social strand system that takes the game from a regular single-player slog, to a somewhat indescribable social multiplayer experience, where everyone it working towards the same goal, but helping each other along the way, making travel more efficient and hauling larger loads easier. It also presents this horrifying yet beautiful world, that gets easier to traverse the more you know about its hazards and people, and in a way builds sympathy for the plight these people endure in their post-apocalyptic dystopia. Death Stranding’s world is somehow empty, yet full of substance, yet one-note in scope, yet thematically rich. A game that is equal measure incredibly gratifying, boring as shit, visually and mechanically impressive, a surface level social commentary, a love letter to war and kaiju films, an Icelandic alt pop album and a walking simulator – truly a feat only Hideo Kojima himself and Kojima Productions could accomplish.

7/10

#death stranding #game review #review #opinion piece #sam porter bridges #fragile #cliff unger #higgs #norman reedus #lea seydoux #mads mikkelsen #tommie earl jenkins #essay #ramble #analysis

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sangled · 6 years

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a brief retrospective of sang ‘sangled’ sangled’s art career

2011-2012 (age 12/13) - my entry into deviantart, as the iconic Sangkirb14

tools: mspaint and a mouse

interest: kirby. i was a goddamn kirby fiend. i barely even drew people

notable event: made a youtube account and uploaded kirby ‘animations’. you can still find them on my channel if you look :3c

fun fact: i got really fucking good at drawing circles because i doodled kirby like it was a thing to do. it’s a skill i cherish today

2013 (age 14) - a pile of ask accounts and entry to tumblr via total drama

tools: mspaint/gimp (?) and a really chunky, amateur tablet

interest: total drama and fandomstuck

notable event: i started getting socially aware at this point, meaning that i began pushing myself to draw more diverse characters

fun fact: i still have a td sideblog @totaldramamistake because i’m gay and i have bad taste

2014-2015 (age 15/16) - the ERA of @askthespacewitch

tools: paint tool sai and a wacom tablet

interest: h o m e s t u c k and a bit of steven universe near the end

notable event: this blog was pretty much my Main because i committed to it and had thousands of followers. it was wild how big it got

fun fact: drawing characters repeatedly while focusing on expressions and comedy ended up helping me a lot with my character-based art today

2016 (age 17) - sang explores the wonderful world of ~paint tool sai~

tools: paint tool sai and the same wacom tablet

interest: a lot of variety this year. mostly cartoons/games i liked

notable event: i started being more cohesive. i set up a main blog (here) and made a new deviantart profile to organize my art for once

fun fact: i also went back to my dusty old youtube channel and started uploading speedpaints this year. my first animatic came out in december

2017 (age 18) - coloring and composition are really hard but by god i’ll try

tools: paint tool sai and the same wacom tablet (it’s durable)

interest: more variety! cartoons, games, musicals, you name it

notable event: lots of steven universe comics and musical animatics this year, as well as an effort to commit to different platforms like instagram

fun fact: i started focusing more on my own characters this year, and the Spectrum Squad was eventually born

2018 (age 19) - art is dynamic and exciting! make it POP! (also kirby throwback)

tools: paint tool sai and i’ve had the same tablet since 2014

interest: the variety continues! but with notably more original art

notable event: i started really, really focusing on styles, brushes, and colors this year. i experimented a lot, and it paid off.

fun fact: since i’ve committed to developing a webcomic, character and comic design are now something i work on as well

it takes a lot of time, practice, and love to develop as an artist. a important mindset that’s helped me over the years is Don’t focus on making something perfect. put the work in, then finish it. feel like the pose could be better? that’s great! don’t linger on your past art, use that area for improvement for the next piece. allow yourself to make mistakes that you can work on later. this way, you’re always growing, always teaching yourself how to be better.

this is why my proudest drawings are always the most recent ones. i often look back on art from even a month prior and notice flaws or weak spots that i didn’t see at the time. the fact that i can critique art that i was certain was the best i could do at that point means that i’ve grown, even a little bit. making small, achievable steps is a productive way to work on your art, and seeing how you’ve improved in even the most minuscule ways is good positive motivation.

#sangspeaks #sang art #long post #i mean i've been drawing since i was 10 but i began drawing digital when i was 12 #so to answer your question: 7 years!

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succubused · 6 years

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truncated

//thanks to @shepgarrus who was the source of at least 70% of the conceptual framework for this

——

Hey, it’s me. Sorry I took so long to get back to you, it’s been. Well, I think I’d better tell you in person. You planning on coming back to the Citadel after this mission? I’m kind of jealous, I have to say. You’re out there blowing things up without me, and I’m down here, well. You know how C-Sec is. Tripping over red tape.

——

“Garrus?”

“Yeah?”

“You all right?”

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine.”

Her expression says a lot of things, and not one of them is I believe you.

“Really,” Garrus groans as he stretches out muscles cramped from hours hunched over a desk, typing fierce pleas into mountains of paperwork in a last-ditch attempt to get the clearance necessary to do his job. Of course, it has become apparent lately that Garrus and his employers hold vastly different ideas about what his job is. “It was just a long week.”

“You’re not your dad, you know,” she says. “He was cut out for this job. I’m not sure you are.”

Garrus chuckles. “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

“It isn’t a good or a bad thing. It’s just you. You hate C-Sec.” His mother shakes her head. “I never understood why you even took the job here in the first place.”

“Yeah…sometimes I don’t understand it, either.” He knocks back his glass of drossix in a single gulp and looks down at his hands. “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask your opinion on. Semi-related.”

——

Sorry, you said you were bored. I think your words were “send me a message with a stupid joke or a dumb story or something because I swear I am about to lose my goddamn mind.” You trying to say you miss me, Shepard? That’s sweet. Actually, there was something I’ve been meaning to ask your opinion on. Semi-related.

——

“Yes?” She lowers her arm mid-waving down the waiter and looks at him seriously. If there was one thing about his mother that never changed, it was her ability to hold liquor. She’d had three glasses and she was barely even blinking. “What’s going on, Garrus?”

“Well, you know—”

“Spit it out.”

“Remember that ship I was on last year? The Normandy?”

“The Alliance ship.”

“Technically we were operating under the Council, but yeah.” He chuckles to himself, remembering the smirk Shepard wore coming out of the comm room that meant she’d just hung up on said Council. “Captain was a human. Shepard.”

“I remember her, yes. The Spectre.”

“Yeah, that’s her.” He traces the rim of his glass with the tip of a finger. “I mean, you know I’m frustrated with C-Sec.”

“I do.”

“And I felt like—I don’t know—when I actually had autonomy, with Shepard, I felt like what I did mattered more. I was able to help people more when I didn’t have to get fifteen different documents notarized to prove that giving said help wouldn’t cause an intergalactic political crisis.”

“Coming back here was never going to go well,” his mother comments after a pause.

“You’re probably right.” Garrus sighs.

——

But first, dumb story. Okay. Let me think. Okay, I saw, two of my coworkers, an elcor play a prank on a volus a couple of days ago. An actual prank. You know, for a species that can exclusively speak in a monotone, those guys really can hold grudges. And they’re petty, too. So this volus, he’d been making fun of the elcor every time she spoke, repeating whatever emotional indicators she was using sarcastically, basically just mocking her, you know? And she took it pretty well, I couldn’t even tell she was getting mad. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, unless she decided to let me know, I guess. Anyway, this volus, he’s pretty damn spherical, and has terrible balance to boot. So when he falls, he can’t stand up without help. And she’d seen this happen a few times, we all had.

But one day, guy had to come in early to get some paperwork or something done, I don’t know what the details were. But I do know that the elcor was on the security cameras leaving the office about 30 minutes before the volus got in, and 2 hours later we found him on the floor, yelling and rolling around with his arms and legs in the air because he’d slipped in—she used a human thing—olive oil, I think? You’d know what it was. I really wish I’d recorded it, you’d have thought it was great, especially since this volus is an ass. Of course he accused the elcor, but they couldn’t prove anything after I doctored the security footage. And don’t tell me you didn’t know I’d done that as soon as I mentioned the cameras. Of course I did.

——

“You want to ask her if you can rejoin the Normandy crew.”

Garrus blinks and looks at his mother. “I—”

“It’s not hard to see,” she says, a note of amusement in her voice. “You were happy there. You were in constant mortal danger and you were having the time of your life. I could hear it in the voice messages you left.”

——

It’s true. Of course it’s true. He misses it. He misses them. He really misses Shepard’s stupid jokes, like the time she’d tried to imagine what it would be like for them to try to speak to each other without translators and laughed so hard she made herself cry thinking about how it would sound. And he had been worried, because everything he knew about human physiology said they only cried when something was wrong.

Shepard had just laughed even harder at the expression on his face. “No,” she’d choked out finally. “No, they’re, good tears. Good ones.”

“I thought you guys only cried when you were upset.”

“Nah. I mean, no, we do, but this is different. Different molecular compositions of the tears, even, I read that once. Can you imagine that? Sad tears and angry tears and laughter tears all have different molecular compositions?”

——

“I just…I think it was the right fit for me. I was going to bring it up with her as soon as she gets back from this latest mission, with the geth, but I wanted—well, you know. Wanted to see what you thought.” He shrugs.

His mother laughs, mandibles flicking downward. “What I think? I think you’re an idiot for not doing this earlier. Go for it.”

“But Dad—”

“Your father won’t benefit from his son suffering in a job he’ll never be right for, and he won’t be any worse off for his son serving on a ship that fits him like a glove. He’ll live.”

Relief sweeps through him in a heavy wave. Maybe he’d just needed to hear someone he trusted say that it was a good idea and that he wasn’t completely unhinged for thinking of asking permission to join the crew of an Alliance vessel.

——

Anyway, what I wanted to ask you was

——

“You’re getting a message.”

“Am I?” He looks down at his omnitool. Captain Anderson?

Normandy destroyed. Shepard dead. Don’t believe what you hear on the news. Stand by for more info.

He actually laughs. Disbelief. “That’s not possible.”

“What’s not possible?”

And then every screen in the bar shifts to a photo of the Normandy.

“…that the Normandy SR-1 has been confirmed destroyed in action…”

“The Normandy?” His mother stares up at the image of the ship. “Isn’t that…?”

“Yeah,” he croaks. “Yeah. It is.”

The phrasing only has one translation—

“…upon encountering unknown weapons systems that annihilated the ship’s defenses. The Normandy was operating in search of geth in the system, but it is currently unknown if they or any cohesive faction of a species are responsible for the decimation of the ship.”

—no survivors.

Destroyed. Annihilated. Decimated.

“Oh, Garrus,” his mother breathes. “Oh, no.”

“Mom,” he mutters. ”I—“

His entire body has gone numb. He drops his head into his hands. He can’t look at her.

“They haven’t said anything about the crew,” she says quietly.

“The crew?” Garrus doesn’t realize why he’s shaking until it’s too late to not ask the question. He hadn’t realized that he didn’t believe Anderson until he said it out loud.

“You don’t know anything for sure.”

A bright lancet of hope shoots through his chest.

“You’re right. Yeah. You’re, you’re right.”

He flinches when a second message comes in, expecting Captain Anderson, but it isn’t. It’s from Joker.

Joker was on the ship.

He almost doesn’t open it, wants to exist forever in this liminal space in which he is still permitted the cruel luxury of hope.

“What is it?” his mother asks, her eyes dark and worried. He wishes she wasn’t here to see this. He wishes he wasn’t here to see this. Every set of eyes in the bar is on those screens, as if they know that this is the end of the world, as if they have the slightest idea of how to care.

It’s a voice message, hoarse and cracked, but recognizable.

“Hey, Garrus. Uh, by now you probably, well, I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but. It probably is, so. I’m, I’m off the ship right now, I’m okay, but…it was really bad down there, Garrus, you have to understand.”

The guilt in his voice turns Garrus’s blood to ice.

“Most of the crew escaped. Made it to the pods in time.”

Oh, thank—

“But Shepard…”

No.

“No,” he says hoarsely, out loud. As though Joker could hear him. As though refusing it could make it a lie, bring her back, he already knows what Joker is about to say. It’s like he’s dreamed of it before, like he’s already felt this before in a million truncated lifetimes, frozen solid by the horror in this disaster that was knowing the truth.

“It’s my fault, Garrus. I wouldn’t leave the, the, I thought I could save her. The ship, I mean. I wouldn’t get up. They tried to get me to move and I wouldn’t go and Shepard, she knew if I stayed I was done for and so she came and she fucking dragged me out of there, she came back for me.”

Of course you did.

“And she got me into an escape pod…”

But you didn’t think of yourself.

“But she—god, oh my God, it’s my fault—Trinity was spaced.”

Trinity.

He slams pause on the recording. He’s breathing too quickly.

“Garrus,” says his mother softly, the edge that so frequently sharpens her voice dissolved. He’d almost forgotten she was there.

“I can’t.” He shakes his head hard. “I can’t, Mom.”

A long moment of unbearable silence. Garrus restarts the message.

“Her suit was transmitting to the black box, I, I have the data. I wanted to believe she…but her suit…it malfunctioned. The oxygen systems went offline, life support failed a few moments later. She’s gone.”

Gone.

Trinity.

No.

“I’m sorry, Garrus,” his mother says. “I know you were close.”

“She’s my best friend,” he croaks.

Was.

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

Distantly he notices his mother has placed her hand on his arm. She’s watching him, saying something, the worry on her face unbearable. It’s as though he’s deep underwater, so deep the pressure is liable to crack his skull, and she’s on the surface, trying to reach him, but he can’t hear, and even if he could, he wouldn’t care, and all he can think about is that last message, the one she’d never hear. Cut off before he could finish. He had been about to ask her about the Normandy.

If I’d brought it up earlier, would I have been there? Would it have been me choking alone in the dark, Shepard in the escape pod? Could I have stopped this?

The screens have begun flashing Shepard’s picture in place of the Normandy’s, one that they took of her when she became a Spectre that she hated; she was always complaining that it “misrepresented her as some kind of uptight bitch.”

“…we now receive confirmation that Commander Trinity Shepard of the Alliance Military, Captain of the Normandy SR-1 and first human Spectre, has been declared missing in action and presumed dead.”

“Listen, there’s one more—we’re about to get picked up, so I have to, in a second, but we were getting data from her—from Trinity’s suit up until the—the backup systems failed. And we found…after she was spaced she…she was listening to an audio message. Her last command to the suit’s VI was to play it.”

Anyway, what I wanted to ask you was...

“It was from you. I thought you’d want to know.”

——

Anyway, what I wanted to ask you was about the Normandy. I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea for me to rejoin the crew, if you’re up for it. I know it’s an Alliance ship, but if you’re there, I don’t really care about that. I know I can work with you, and I know I can work with you well. And I felt like I did more good in the few months on that ship than I did in my whole damn C-Sec career and I really can’t justify going back to paper-pushing when I know you’re out there kicking ass without me. Like I said, it’s probably a better idea for us to talk about this in person, so let me know when you’re back at the Citadel. I’ll buy you a drink. Not drossix, though. I know you keep saying you want to try it but when we say it’ll explode your insides, we really aren’t exaggerating.

So, yeah. Come back safe. I’ll see you soon.

#mass effect #shakarian #commander shepard #garrus vakarian #femshep #i uhhhhh dont know what else to put #im back on my bullshit and im gonna be late for work because of this #punch me in the teeth #posts

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recommendedlisten · 5 years

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There were hardly any blockbuster albums in 2018, but there definitely was no shortage of great albums either. For that reason, the year in music was better off for it. Similar to how this year's 30 Best Songs came from an open field where newer artists breaking through the underground could take a seat at the same table as innovative veterans and modern pop royalty alike, the 30 Best Albums of 2018 tells a similar story of a past not showing any signs of being beyond its prime, and a very promising future as to what its rookie artists might create one day when they're no longer the buzzworthy genre outsiders, punks, dance makers, and indie rockers the scene's radar. And speaking of the latter, it looks like many of this decade's earliest risers have proven themselves as worthy of the hype through greater substance and hitting their own strides. Less obvious, however, was that 2018 was a banister year for a new wave of hardcore band that continue to challenge the status quo beyond every circle of sound imaginable. If you've been waiting for the real thing, this year's top honors delivered it to you. 2019 has a lot to live up, because if it's half as interesting as the 30 Best Albums of 2018, we'll still be very lucky as listeners.

30. Hovvdy - Cranberry [Double Double Whammy]

With their graduation to Double Double Whammy for its sophomore effort Cranberry, Hovvdy have removed much of the digital tape deck hiss from their debut to make memories even more vivid when being stored inside their songs. And yet, Cranberry is still as soft a listen in a lovely way as its predecessor was despite its sharper clarity, which leads one to believe that the duo of Will Taylor and Charlie Martin are more focused on the way the listening experience captures a feeling rather than seeks out a way to recreate it. The songs’ tempos oft slowly trot through crisp strums and repetitive drum steps, occasionally fluttered in the warm hum of Casiotones (courtesy of fellow Austin DIY scene peer Hannah Read of Lomelda), but in defining their shapes in bolder lines with proper pop construction, Taylor’s plainspoken singing have a bigger space on the canvas to paint broad-stroked stories onto and allow the details – as muted as they are – to sink in full.

29. House of Feelings - New Lows [Joyful Noise Recordings]

What started as a radio show and dance night spinning some of the most esoteric sounds in dance and electronic vibes is now a living, breathing music collective of creatives from all corners of the underground built on an unbreakable foundation known as House of Feelings. On the NYC troupe’s debut full-length New Lows, multi-faceted songwriter Matty Fasano, YVETTE drummer and producer Dale Eisinger, songwriter Joe Fassler, and a cast of HoF collaborators familiar and new including Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves, Shamir, Denitia, and EULA’s Alyse Lamb, the group steps back into the darkest time line of our present reality after tripping out in an ambient post-apocalyptic freak out with last year’s club banger Last Chance EP. The pathways through which they travel are still treacherous as ever, but with blood-soaked shoes, sweaty bass lines, brass spirits, and synthetic doppelgangers for human emotion, they’re able to create a chic antidote for corrupt modern connections.

28. Oneohtrix Point Never - Age Of [Warp Records]

Oneohtrix Point Never breaks free of self-imposed insularity through collaboration and his own version of mass pop deconstruction to create “nightmare ballads” on Age Of. It is – along with the performance art installation that accompanies it – simultaneously Daniel Lopatin’s most ambitiously detailed, yet cohesively-defined auditory experiences since breaking through in 2010 with the melodic MIDI warping of Returnal, as it reconvenes into a pattern of brain teasing pleasure that had until now, been marked for deletion in his virtual garden. Dismantling pop cliches into a morbid art form has always been Oneohtrix Point Never’s M.O., but never has Lopatin challenged them so heavily as he has on Age Of by putting what’s obvious in front of listeners, then ripping off its outer layers of gloss to reveal what makes them work. Whenever these songs feel as though they are encroaching upon a natural climax, OPNs pulls the hook away from our ears, as if to tantalize our reward ever so softly while testing the natural habits of our cerebral mechanics no doubt shaped by larger machines in the process. Now, that’s a scary thought...

27. Ava Luna - Moon 2 [Western Vinyl]

Moon 2 is the perfect title for where Ava Luna are today as artists. It’s their new phase – One in which the NYC art pop band shed the skin of the term “collective,“ and instead join tentacles to become a fully collaborative species as varied as their backgrounds are. That LP 5 is their most streamlined effort to date may come as an even bigger surprise given the latter detail, as each member of the five-piece has spent the interim since 2015′s Infinite House expressing themselves mostly on their own. It could be, however, that in learning to stand on their own feet and flexing these creative muscles that Ava Luna has become stronger as a unit, as stylistic cohesion is threaded through the album from the moment it creaks into infinite space. Gravity-free vocals and ambient waves glide through Felicia Douglass’ hushed breaths and silk-covered runs, Becca Kaufmann bumps energy into the alien disco, while guitarist Carlos Hernandez’ and the band’s rhythm of Julian Fader and Ethan Bassford maintain its physically kinetic geometry. In this phase, there’s no one who can do it all with the fashion and finesse like they do.

26. Gouge Away - Burnt Sugar [Deathwish Inc.]

Maybe more exciting than the arrival of their breakout Burnt Sugar is that Gouge Away are really only getting started. At its core level is vocalist Christina Michelle who lives and breathes her every word, be it gnarling in daily anxiety and frustrations with hope, or controlling the chaos with a sung seance. Since their debut ,Dies, she and her bandmates have evolved into a more intentional force with in their use of emotional intensity as Mick Ford’s guitars remain razor-sharp when need be, but conceal themselves in a softer casing that rolls down your spine before tearing into your skin. Burnt Sugar also gets some of its charred flavoring by pillaging the grime and grunge of ‘90s post-hardcore and noise influence, as Tyler Forsythe’s bass lines dent and wobbly through tension without resistance as Tommy Cantwell’s drums find a gnarled groove between the dark crevices they leave in their quake. Its brimming with so much possibility as to where they can go tomorrow, but for now, leaves a lasting bittersweet taste in your mouth.

25. Hop Along - Bark Your Head Off, Dog [Saddle Creek]

Bark Your Head Off, Dog finds Hop Along mastering the art of embellishing rock with finer detail. While it may require additional lengths to let it sink in, it’s definitively the Philly band’s most ambitious effort to succeed on all fronts.Their latest sonic evolution continues to bristle with rawness, yet hooks are deeply entwined in intricate chord progressions while Frances Quinlan’s storytelling has become a thing on the scale of an American classic in literature as she continues to observe the mundane of everyday living with deep existential analysis. The quartet’s overall sound reflects that need to uphold that imagery with compositions just as tangled in the ornate, and demanding greater patience on the part of the listener to hear exactly where knotted guitars untie themselves and fray into choruses, or where elastic, funky footwork begins to effortless flow with ease into melody. Bark Your Head Off, Dog is not just something to behold because of its creative maturation, but a fun practice in dissecting and digesting music (and subsequently, the world around us) that rewards the experience with resonating tunefulness hidden in between.

24. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love [ANTI-]

Deafheaven’s fourth studio effort Ordinary Corrupt Human Love shares many of the same organs and bone structures as its ancestors, but it’s a different animal altogether. It’s Deafheaven putting every one of the eccentricities they have nourished in their sound out there from the start into the wilderness, free to roam and form an album that embodies the humanity within their metal machine. Piano interludes, dreamy soundscapes indebted to slocore and indie rock traditionalism alongside guest vocal apparitions both weave even further layers to an an already ornate tapestry of scorched earth black metal and post rock, if maybe adding a touch of fragility to Clarke’s core existentialism. He ruminates plaintive thoughts on nature, aging, and empathy with a poetic grandeur that makes no apologies for being transparently earnest. That earnestness in all facets is what differentiates Ordinary Corrupt Human Love from any other Deafheaven album, or any other album that seers together a heavy heart and inner peace for that matter.

23. Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Epic Music / Sony Records / Wonderland Arts Society]

Dirty Computer bares the familiar signatures of Janelle Monáe’s past work – a rollout full bonkers visuals overlaying forward-thinking production that sets synthetic futurisms on an asteroid collision with the funky torchbearing of the Purple One’s legacy – yet it doubles down on radio-equipped hooks and choruses grounded like no other effort she’s set forth. There’s a full reveal of the political being personal in that aspect, as the album celebrates Monáe’s “PYNK”-themed coming out party as a pansexual woman of color, redefining the “Crazy, Classic, Life” of the modern American dream in the process. Her freedom roar, be it sung with sex and smoothness as she exudes in album bangers ”Make Me Feel” and “Screwed” or rapped with sharpened poise on ”Django Jane” is limitless is strength. Monáe’s star power dwarfs even the legends of tomorrow accompanying her journey back to Earth, be it Brian Wilson’s cosmic harmonies on its title track, or the electric empower-ade made with Pharrell Williams on “I Got the Juice”. Now that she’s graced us within arm’s length, it’s time we start recognizing a world where everything revolves around Janelle Monáe’s universal message to be just as you are.

22. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships [Dirty Hit / Interscope Records]

On their third LP A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s here where millennial melody makers the 1975 come into their own with their most actualized commentary on modern connection and pop music. Frontperson Matty Healy’s guides the dialogue through astute observations as a voyeur as well as his own ugly overshares for public consumption The album especially glorifies the latter in its arrangement. Like the dopamine rushes and exhaustion of life’s sudden highs and unexpected lows, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is pieced together in an unpredictable path of emotions in mind as it plays out. The listen combs through a post-Burial static plane, Auto-tuned trap pop, power ballad bombast, and even pulling off some oddity moments of loungey jazz. There’s a lot to not like about how our world is revolving, with the only optimism echoed here is the acknowledgement that we’re suffering through the darkest timeline together. For a generation whose attention’s spans are at peak deficit, hashtaggable plugs and genre-hopping get that message across through production-perfect content baiting reach.

21. Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth [Young Turks]

The year’s biggest adventure through the sonic cosmos comes by way of Kamasi Washington who takes you further out than you expected with Heaven and Earth, his latest grandeur display of avant jazz adventures composed with the special powers of the video game superheroes he invokes when aligning big brass purists and less discriminatory crossover crowd on the same universal plane. The double LP featuring 16 tracks average in 10 minutes in length each may as well be a quadruple one by today’s standards, though it also finds the Los Angeles saxophonist and his band in top form with cohesively connecting the dots in his experimentally sound genre reconstructions that encompasses free wheeling eruptions and percussive winks into the realms of rock, soul, and R&B. Heaven and Earth mediates his world of the weird and technically proficient with out current pop climate changes, and there’s more than enough sonic sight seeing in this journey to keep your senses in awe.

20. Iceage - Beyondless [Matador Records]

What began as an exorcise in violence, nihilism, and anxiety personified in the least suspecting of scenes within Denmark’s desolate DIY basements has evolved into a meticulous exercise in punk polyglot experimentation on Beyondless. Here, Iceage weaponize gothic purveyance to subdue their louder abrasions, but not necessarily their ability to confront the dark with any softer hesitation for a grander stage. The Danish quartet’s fourth studio effort is a new peak culmination in their insatiable desire to further themselves well beyond the limits previously drawn in their musical sculpture. The way they brandish danger and bleak existentialism in tandem with their bootsy grit is sexed up for pomp and glam through its incorporation of strong brass winds and cantankerous jazzy fits. Elias Rønnenfelt has written himself a charismatic stage persona to match – Consumed by the theatrics of a rock god and the Devil himself at once. Their unholy ritual has been completed and satisfies all heathens.

19. Tomberlin - At Weddings [Saddle Creek]

Sarah Beth Tomberlin was born to a strict Baptist household where her father was a minister, and she honed her craft as a songwriter through praise hymnals sung at Sunday sermons. She wasn’t allowed to discover a musical world outside of that sphere until she began secretly sneaking Bright Eyes CDs into her possession during her formative years. At Weddings, her debut full-length, is her way of forging her own path in a post-theist world that gives her – as she puts it on its opener “Any Other Way” – a sudden feeling that she doesn’t “have a place.” There’s more to her story than just existential queries hollowed out in a negative space where her voice, rendered in a delicate, yet devastatingly beautiful coat of reverb, echoes out as vast as the Midwestern fields she was raised. While At Weddings doesn’t conclude with her finding that place in the world she can finally rest comfort in, the ellipses it leaves listeners with is awe-striking in the way it makes you wonder right alongside Tomberlin where her path will lead her in the end.

18. Speedy Ortiz - Twerp Verse [Carpark Records]

Ever since they arrived on the scene as fresh-faced college grads of the school of indie rock with their 2013 debut full-length Major Arcana, the combination of singer Sadie Dupuis’ particular prose and she and her Speedy Ortiz bandmates’ higher level learning of idiosyncratic songwriting has been the thing that has made them stand out in a pack in the scene’s new wave of artists heavily influenced by the thinking person’s underground. With 2015′s Foil Deer, they proved that they had not only studied up on every book inside the indie rock laureates' libraries, and knew how to put that knowledge to proper use in writing their own chapters within it for today’s impressionable minds, but their latest effort Twerp Verse is a selfless endeavor devoid of needing to prove anything to anyone. Instead, it’s the quartet’s most outspoken commentary on modern day righteousness made all the more digestible with some new tricks from Dupuis’ second degree in spooky pop experimentation gained during a semester abroad under her sad13 guise. Speedy cram a lot to chew on here about common decency, but rest assured, these are choruses that will stick to your brain as much as the corrective lessons for a better society do, too.

17. Daughters - You Won’t Get What You Want [Ipecac Recordings]

Before going on indefinite hiatus in 2010, Daughters helped carve out a particular sound that stylized post- and grindcore scenes in the mid-2000s. Elastic guitars, intense drumming fits, and a frontperson in Alexis S.F. Marshall who sounded like an unhinged cog thrown in the machine whose job was to cause malfunctions at every turn was their modus operandi. Through sealed rifts, Daughters have since reunited with its most recent incarnation of Marshall, founding drummer Jon Syverson, rhythm guitarist Nicholas Andrew Sadler and Samuel M. Walker on bass, yet they're not the same band we heard on their return effort You Won’t Get What You Want. The Providence quartet’s fourth studio effort makes a concentrated effort in reshaping the outlines of their hardened history in an industrial fusion of human parts and robot arms melding into one alongside sea-sawing droning, smoldering blues, and gothic epics. Just as Daughters’ past indefinite hiatus status made no promises, You Won’t Get What You Want feels like they’ve entering a new phase where the unease in uncertainty fuels the thrill ride to defy any expectation/

16. Wild Pink - Yolk In the Fur [Tiny Engines]

Despite having cut their teeth in the Brooklyn indie scene these last several years, Wild Pink don’t sound so much like your standard guitar-chugging city dwellers on their breakout sophomore effort Yolk In the Fur. The trio of John Ross, TC Brownell and Dan Keegan have grown beyond the concrete jungle and ventured into an equally captivating impression here of ‘80s synth-bleeding, Americana-influenced rock that has made storytelling sentiment glimmer like a borealis in the way it has for the album’s kindred spirit Tom Petty and more recently, the modern day journeys of the War On Drugs. Yolk In the Fur has its own handwriting to share, however, with Ross emoting existential philosophies while gazing through the monotony of the every day and millennial melancholia. It’s there where Wild Pink transcend beyond subways and human-saturated streets and into the vast fields, rivers and star-lit skies -- Their own version of escapism becoming contagious.

15. Camp Cope - How to Socialise & Make Friends [Run for Cover Records]

Speaking to Camp Cope’s How to Socialise & Make Friends is a daunting task, especially from this end seeing that any cisgender straight male isn’t the most qualified to do the kind of heavy lifting these Melbourne indie rockers’ do here on their sophomore effort. The listen protests and shouts just as much as it lets out heavy sighs as singer Georgia Maq airs her grievances, be it via acid tongue or a higher road empathy. Her targets include gendered double-standards and an exhaustion with cultured misogyny in every facet of her daily life. She sings from both the unjust experiences as the frontperson of an all-women band within a male-dominated punk scene and as a humanist, with dudes behaving badly toward both in and out of those circles. The sound Camp Cope wage war with words with burns with an anti-authoritarian DIY spirit and emotive frustration equivocally, as Maq’s unfurling guitars over Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and Sarah Thompson’s steady rhythm clear a path for her to break the patriarchy, if even by throwing just a single stone into every glass ceiling at a time.

14. Snail Mail - Lush [Matador Records]

Lindsey Jordan knows the roller coaster emotions of being young better than most indie rock songwriters out there right now, perhaps because she’s still figuring out a way to deal with them. With her debut album Lush, the 19-year-old’s creative outlet Snail Mail invites the entire world into the thick of her Tiny Little Corner of Anywhere where the doldrums of suburban living collide with teenage romance and its ensuing anguish in a manner where even a minor happening in heartache is enough substance to soundtrack a turning point in the coming-of-age experience. How she does so is through a stronghold in sharp earnestness wise beyond her years with lyrical specificity wrapped up in slowburning melancholic hooks that might otherwise suggest what ‘90s indie rock might have sounded like had it been put to her eloquent pen in the present. Yet, Lush is through and through about living in the moment, growing pains and all, and Snail Mail is in no hurry to shake the ride.

13. Vince Staples - FM! [Def Jam]

FM! -- an 11 track, 23-minute-long project from Vince Staples -- extends the Long Beach M.C.’s streak of success through an endless summer party meant for momentary escapism. The listen is no different than tuning into the long-running Los Angeles hip-hop station 92.3 and its show, Big Boy’s Neighborhood, that serves to bind together Staples’ latest duality of disenfranchised disparity against fame and prosperity over a series of intros, skits, interludes and, to greater effect, a group of Cali-minded guest features that would fit in effortlessly next to the radio fodder Staples’ cult rap skills usually sit on the outside of. It’s a current snapshot of the Vince Staples of today without forgetting where he came from, and he gets a few hits in that way by dropping ugly realities into an otherwise mostly white Coachella crowd-pleasing playlist where tough-as-nails honesty and ear-softening commercial pleasure find a middle ground. FM!’s fun from the outside looking in, yet a complex commentary when you stick your head in closer, and nothing less than we’ve come to expect from rap’s best thinkers.

12. Vein - errorzone [Closed Casket Activities)

The Greater Boston legacy of heavy has long been a place where hardcore and metal collide with an awesome vigor, and that lineage continues to expand beyond the Baystate today with Vein, a group of Merrimack Valley thrashers who are amplifying the intensity of the scene’s groundbreakers in the likes of Cave In, Converge and American Nightmare, and bare down the void with their own young nihilistic bulldozing. Their debut full-length errorzone uses the framework laid before them and fuses its pieces into a sound of apocalyptic proportions where human adrenaline and natural forces smolder into the quintet’s firestorm to form a death-wielding vehicle. The end result tears shit apart in every which way. Lead screamer Anthony DiDio is a wrecking ball on his own two feet, but backed by Vein’s seismic riffs and stone pummeling rhythmic core, errorzone is unapologetically harsh in seeing that everything burns to the ground. Taking into account the current state of the world, that might just be what this place needs.

11. Beach House - 7 [Sub Pop]

With 7, Beach House’s singular sound has settled on a narrative that has no concrete objective in sight, but rather, an unharnessed exploration into the unknown of what possibilities may manifest. That it’s their most curiously daring listen in a career that’s already been defined by surprises is a fete most veteran indie rock acts these days should be envious to achieve themselves, and for that, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally can thank their lucky intuition for guiding their spirit in a directionless path. 7′s specific magical power is their ability to transform that darkness into an unsuspecting beauty, as the album oft confronts such instances fit for these tumultuous times by embracing the ability for empathy and love to grow out of that trauma, capturing the free-fall from resistance into giving in with a lightness. Explorations with psychedelic hues and cosmic lights in their smoldering, vapory dream-pop soothe even the bleakest questions that float through the timeline of an otherwise frightening reality. Beach House, in their present formless existence, endure in its brave embrace of it.

10. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs [Tan Cressida / Columbia Records]

Aside from being a grade A wordsmith, Earl Sweatshirt stands out among other rappers from the younger era thanks to his ability to connect with audiences by talking to real life context in ways that never look like fashion statements or image crafting. It’s neither a Drake-ism or an emo rap algorithm ploy -- It’s honest, ugly reality checks that have gone toe to toe with anxiety, depression and death talk without glamorizing any of them as a welcome lifestyle. Last we’d heard from him were the incisive cuts levied through weed clouds and paranoia on 2015′s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, yet, like many of his Odd Future alumni, Earl has grown out of his tumultuous teens, and with Some Rap Songs, the 24-year-old cult hero is beginning to piece together life’s puzzles clearly -- at least through prose. Throughout the listen, his rap style transcends any comparison to what his peers are creating as he delves into an abstract collage of background noise made of layered beats, samples of voices from the outside, and a control over his own as a hookless wonder. With the smoke clearing from the room, it turns out that the avant direction fits Earl Sweatshirt perfectly.

9. Robyn - Honey [Konichiwa Records]

In the 8 year absence releasing her ultimate legacy-cementing effort Body Talk, Robyn’s footprint on the pop universe has become permanently entangled in the DNA of its modern current. Now that she’s made her return on her sixth full-length effort Honey, however, we’re not just given everything we could hope for in a Robyn album – But something from a different creative pop genius than the one we last danced our worries away with. Experiences with grief and loss have changed the shape of the way she breaks our hearts and teaches us how to put them back together this time around, as Honey brings different facets of light into her singular sound to separate itself from similar flavors. Bright, shimmering whirls of synths and soft caresses sweep up a familiar warmth as any other Robyn endorphin rush, but glamorous house parties, funked up bass lines and breezy lite R&B turn the corner toward a different perspective in the healing process. Though we never truly know what pains life may bring our way, Robyn reminds us that there’s always a way back to the sweet stuff with Honey.

8. Pusha-T - DAYTONA [Def Jam / G.O.O.D. Music]

Stretches of ominous silence in between releases have worked to Pusha-T’s advantage in massaging his work into a hard craft. Ever since his 2013 debut My Name Is My Name and 2015′s followup King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude, the pursuit of perfection has equated to him needing to waste less time to get people talking about what he’s saying. His X-acto knife precision consistently coupled with an ultra modern beat design never ceases to cut right where it needs to, and with his latest album DAYTONA, we get 7 tracks in just a little over 20 minutes where the Delaware son savors his words for deep impact. What’s left in its wake is a proper torching of the entire hip-hop landscape with his long shadow and knife-like flow that gave 2018 one of the year’s most talked about rap beefs. Darker moments surrounding loss of friends and the double-edged sword of fame swallow the soul whole into itself as well, and in aligning himself with Kanye West’s post-Pablo production (basically, the only good thing ‘Ye gave music this year...), the reign of King Push remains unrivaled.

7. Soccer Mommy - Clean [Fat Possum Records]

The opening moments from Soccer Mommy breakout Clean don’t idealize romantic expectations, so don’t get your hopes up that the rest of the album is going to find its way to some kind of happy ending either. Clean is the result of an ongoing bedroom-born lullaby inward that had been slowly forming the outlines of Sophie Allison’s persona over the years, with her debut full-length transforming early broad brush strokes into more detailed ones through a rickety walk of structurally-sound acoustic strums, hints of twinklecore in her alternative slow burn, and a healthy measure of studio trickery that puts a stamp with Allison’s name all over her confessionals. There’s an intense relatability to her storytelling as well as her underdog status of being on the losing end of relationships that makes her work resonate deep within the every-person, and they’re all necessary, too. Unlike all of the girls who she isn’t we meet here on Clean, owning up to her differences is what makes Allison sound realer than the rest.

6. Cardi B - Invasion of Privacy [Atlantic Records]

Social media-assisted personal brands may seemingly grow overnight these days, but one thing that won’t ever change is how they’re only a piece of the puzzle – if at all – in guaranteeing a successful rap career. If you were expecting Cardi B’s debut album Invasion of Privacy to change any rules of the game, it doesn’t over-promise in that regard, but it’s still an assured first step that includes Cardi delivering on her end of the it with a solid performance of real life character work backed by a roundtable of reliable modern production crafted by the likes of Boi-1da, Murda Beatz and Benny Blanco. It’s an early indication that proves she knows herself better than most others have in this position when it came to making money moves with natural instinct, and it’s perhaps the biggest reason why Cardi B managed to parlay her hustle from behind a smart phone into a #1 dream come true while her detractors keep bloating streaming algorithms in hopes of guaranteeing themselves a cheap hit.

5. Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour [Mercury Nashville]

With Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves continues to be just as brave enough to color outside the lines of country with her honesty as she does in the palette she paints with as well. Disco-inflicted pop crossovers, cosmic countrypolitan, psychedelic steel pedaling, a refracted spectrum of ‘70s style classic rock piano balladry worthy of Elton’s rhinestoned co-sign, and in between everything, Golden Hour shining with that simple purity of fully lucid designs Musgraves has always brought to the table in dripping honey-combed acoustics into melancholia and pop that bring even a basic approach to songwriting into widescreen view. The album amounts to something akin to an actual rainbow for that matter – All colors vivid and unique in their own way, but when they collect together, they suggest something much more, be it in its wonders of life, love, and enjoying every second of it in the present with your senses filled with them.

4. American Pleasure Club - A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This [Run for Cover Records]

At the end of 2017, Sam Ray ditched the Teen Suicide moniker in favor of something more empathetic and conscious by redubbing his punk band American Pleasure Club. After years of making music inspired by depressive fits, substance abuse, and an aggressively nihilistic world view, he’s realigned his sound as well thanks to sobriety and finding domestic bliss with fellow musician Kitty Ray. With that, the band’s third proper album A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is where Sam Ray has adulted beyond the bitter teenage malaise of his past while giving his loyalty of listeners every reason to continue working toward defining happiness in their own messy lives. That’s mirrored in a juxtaposition of vibes throughout the listen, varied in mood and style as vast as bedroom pop melancholia, pop-punk jitters, wallowing alternative waves, and hazy R&B that circle back to a big picture of coherency. Its a soundscape Ray has tinkered with tirelessly since the project’s inception, and has now found a fulfilling sweet spot in American Pleasure Club’s sound thanks to acknowledgement the reality of a love in a world that will never truly be a personal heaven nor hell.

3. Mitski - Be the Cowboy [Dead Oceans]

Mitski’s fifth album Be the Cowboy is brimming with ideas in brevity, yet it never falls short of articulating them with considered judgement that proves Mitski Miyawaki is in full control of her directive wheel. To give of herself even the slightest glimpse into the 27-year-old songwriter’s psyche through song is her gift to the Earth, with her pen blurring a universal connection between the personal and creation by mining its many striations of disconnect. Her other half on the surface level is often framed like a lover, though she’s hinted that sometimes the relationships that break her heart the most are those not reciprocated in her commitment to her work. Be the Cowboy finds her acting out every role in the story inseparably through the bombast of indie rockisms,an incorporation of songwriting worlds both traditional and modern that render new benchmarks of perfection for her timeless prose and even disco-pop, making it all the more difficult to decipher, yet that’s the point: They’re all designed as self-reflections given equal moments to be honored in her dark and light.

2. Low - Double Negative [Sub Pop]

Slowcore innovators Low have evolved far beyond the patient wonder of their music in several different styles over their storied 25-year career as a band, but nothing in their catalog is anything like their latest studio effort, Double Negative. The listen answers the question of what may exist of the Duluth trio if you were to destroy in their sound all the natural beauty that has endured gracefully these last three decades, and attempts to reconstruct it by fragment, particle by particle. That’s done intentionally, as the band holds a shattered mirror up to the world and reflects it onto themselves, as LP 12 embraces their most abrasive traits fearlessly through deconstructed and corruptly digitized instrumentation sucked into the vacuous production of. B.J. Burton, go-to producer at Bon Iver’s April Base home studio. The uncertainty in Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker vocals, while remaining tender all the way through, surface anxieties felt by many humans amid the disarray. We don’t know what tomorrow brings, though Double Negative captures the present in all its brokenness flawlessly.

1. Turnstile - Time & Space [Roadrunner Records]

Pull the 25-minute-long sprint that is Turnstile’s major label debut Time & Space apart by its guts, and you’ll hear that it’s so many other things than just a record that is guaranteed to insight a lot of free-falling bodies flying off stages wherever they take this record live. Even as a screamer, Brendan Yates is rather Svengali in his anti-et. al resistance, feeding his existential crisis into grungy despair and plunging down that rabbit hole lined in hybridized metal. Guitarists Brady Ebert and Pat McCrory alongside bassist Franz Lyon and drummer Daniel Fang are integral to controlling the listen between a slam dance and a hardcore meditation, meeting every signature call to the pit with a far out reverberation such as “Moon”, a lush, hazy pop-punker of a track. If there’s a single takeaway from Turnstile’s proper introduction beyond the DIY spaces they came through, it’s that the Baltimore quintet are prepared to take risks to reshape hardcore as something more than just punk’s harder edge of sound. It’s one continuous nonstop feeling, and one that’s bringing the whole scene into an entirely different level of being.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The French Dispatch Review: Wes Anderson’s Love Letter to Journalists

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There’s a line early on in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch that will surely make any room full of journalists howl in amusement. Sitting at his desk, and under the typical kind of droll bewilderment we associate with Anderson heroes, Bill Murray’s editor of the film’s eponymous magazine exclaims, “She was told to turn in a few hundred words. This story is 14,000!”

Anyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom can feel seen by a throwaway line like that. Which is of course by design since Anderson’s new film exceeds being simply a love letter to the press; it’s a fawning portrait of adoration for the printed word in general, and The New Yorker in particular. Because in spite of the film’s intentionally embellished setting in Anderson’s current home of France, The French Dispatch, as both a fictional periodical and a film, is a painstaking recreation of the real wit and urbane conviviality we associate with that magazine. It’s a film filled with human interest stories, quizzical languor, and the occasional earnest epiphany. It also isn’t afraid to run long.

However, as with many an issue of The New Yorker, some of its stories will generate a naturally greater interest than others, which can be more of a bug than a feature when Anderson’s publication is also trying to build a larger, cohesive narrative through its many vignettes and storytelling cul-de-sacs.

Beyond the interstitial (and occasionally interluding) grind of daily life at the Dispatch, Anderson’s 10th film is primarily a triptych depicting the insulated world of Ennui-sur-Blasé, a fictional grand old city that’s as stereotypically French as that name implies. It was there that Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Murray) moved as a young man in the early 20th century, convincing his Kansas newspaperman father that the folks on the great plains needed monthly reports from the South of France. Quickly nurturing one of the most cosmopolitan reputations out of the Midwest, Howitzer’s The French Dispatch is a titan of prestige by the 1970s—which is when the film’s latest issue, with the articles that comprise our film’s vignettes, is going to print.

Among those stories are “The Concrete Masterpiece” by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), an art critic who’s turned the life story of psychopathic murderer, but brilliant artist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro and Tony Revolori at different times in his life) into a bemusing treatise on the war between art and commerce. Meanwhile Frances McDormand’s Lucinda Krementz guides us through “Revisions to a Manifesto,” and her questionable reporting and support of a student uprising led by the young Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) who is outraged, OUTRAGED!, that he is not allowed into his school’s female dormitories. Finally, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) provides the strangest review to ever come out of food criticism when “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” turns into an unlikely kidnapping and hostage scenario.

Ever a visual perfectionist, Anderson imbues The French Dispatch with so many sumptuous sequences that it is probably his most decadent feast for the eyes to date. The film continues the adroit compositions and perfect symmetrical lines of his previous work, but it also attempts to surpass it. Recall The Life Aquatic scene where Anderson creates a life-sized diorama of all the rooms on Murray’s ship? I counted at least two sequences in Dispatch that did the same, including with a similarly bisected airplane. And remember the storytelling significance between the shifting aspect ratios in The Grand Budapest Hotel? Every “story” in The French Dispatch plays even more ambitiously with that trick while also throwing in punctuation marks of color or animation in its otherwise largely black and white, 4:3 presentation.

The French Dispatch truly does appear to be Anderson’s most richly composed film in the sense that nearly every frame is so densely populated with details and subtle visual quips that only when folks have the ability to pause the film will half of them become discernible. For Anderson’s longtime fans, it’s luxuriant—to the point of hedonism.

However, the way it feeds its essentially anthological storytelling structure proves much more cluttered.

The film’s wrap-around narrative about the Dispatch itself is Anderson at his most whimsical and familiar; it is therefore unlike most anthology films in that I suspect the film’s bookends will be most viewers’ favorite bits. But other than one other brief amuse-bouche of an “essay”—the Owen Wilson-led short, “The Bicyclist,” which is essentially a table-setter—the dry whimsy usually associated with the filmmaker is mostly supplanted by a more wistful melancholy befitting Ennui’s name.

That marriage between light and dark, and absurd and dreary, works best in “The Concrete Prison” when Del Toro’s self-loathing modern art painter and his obsession over his muse/prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux) is sardonically juxtaposed with the lustful capitalism of Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), who is the businessman who makes Moses an internationally sought after artist. The pure cynicism in the tale, and the way Cadazio plainly demands “a double standard” be applied to a great artist who may have “accidentally” decapitated a bartender, is only complemented by the vignette’s flashes of color and anamorphic framing whenever Moses’ art is viewed onscreen. Beauty drowning out rapacity.

It’s a concept strong enough that it could’ve easily been a feature-length Anderson film. And yet, by contrast, “Revisions of a Manifesto,” barely has enough gas to sustain its less than 30 minutes of floorspace. That article’s similar experiments with color and form, and even French New Wave influences, feel more arbitrary than inspired, with the resolution ultimately reading as glib. In this way, the whole film suffers from being Anderson’s most detached and remote work to date. To be sure, it is as personal a tale as any for the filmmaker, with it not being hard to imagine the Texan-born child of the ‘70s growing up in his own American heartland backyard and dreaming of cosmopolitan living through episodic narratives arriving each week in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

But perhaps for that reason, the only characters with any genuine sympathy and emotional resonance are a few of the journalists, particularly Murray’s editor and Wright’s final essayist, who’s off-the-record conversations with the boss give the movie some fledgling pathos. There are overarching themes, of course, about the sanctity of art and narcissism of youth, but in a slighter work it becomes fairly muddled.

But even as a minor experience in the director’s oeuvre, The French Dispatch is still a worthwhile one: a treat to discover in the mailbox for those already subscribing to Anderson’s catalogue (myself included). It’s just for this issue, the illustrations buoy articles that you might’ve otherwise skimmed.

The French Dispatch premieres at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 2. It opens in the U.S. and UK on Oct. 22.

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