Escape Artist

Why do I do the things I do?

That question is, in a way, at the heart of this site.

I don't necessarily mean in the grand, existential "Why are we here?" frame of mind, but rather the more basic, if-q-then-p logic of my choices and behavior. No doubt there are trends that are apparent to others in my writing that evade my detection. I'm sure there are not only trains of thought but word choice as well. Words like 'haunting' 'fantastic' and 'surreal' often appear in my reviews of forgotten or under appreciated music, but to a certain degree that can be traced to the material as well as my vocabulary and predilection. But tracing that thought further back - why am I listening to so much music that can be described in those terms? It certainly betrays a fondness for music of a certain vein. The jumping off point for this article was similarly centered.

I was waiting for the bus the other morning and listening to Apex Twin when I realized just how often I find myself listening to music that many would find unpleasant or disquieting. To clarify, this was not the thumping-and-pounding, acerbic Aphex Twin of 'Come To Daddy' or 'Windowlicker' but the contemplative and cerebral work of his compilation Selected Ambient Works II. It's a lovely album, even if it is fifteen years old at this point. It's my understanding that Richard D. James, the man behind the madness, was essentially attempting to recreate soundscapes he heard within his lucid dreams, an idea that both fascinates and frightens me just a bit. I think it may be that same ethereal and intangible nature of our dreams that I'm chasing after when I spend my life with headphones on as I go about my business. Waiting for the bus, shopping for groceries, walking anywhere, really. There seems to be a fairly clean demarcation between what I would listen to in a car compared to what I listen to when I'm on foot. In cars, it's all hip hop and alternative from the 90s. On foot, it's ambient and surreal.

 Maybe it's a form of escapism. I've always been fascinated with my own dreams and the idea of experiencing lucid dreams. However, lucidity in dreams has never been something I've been able to experience. Take, for example, my piece on the Inception App for IOS devices - the way the code incorporates surrounding noise and reinterprets it along with a contextual soundtrack is, in a way, the closest I've come to that state of waking dreaming. In my early post about dark winter mornings and Akira Yamaoka's music I hint at this idea as well - that by adding that soundtrack to a time right after I wake up, it's almost as though I never left the sleep state. In the act of pumping ambient noise to my brain I'm blocking out the outside world, in what is a (perhaps not so) unconscious move to return to the subconscious.

 This is not to say that I find my life to be unpleasant or that I wish to escape from it, but I think more so that it's a move to block out some of the jarring sounds with more pleasant, dissociative white noise. One of my pet peeves is when people on the bus (or anywhere in public, to be frank) talks loudly on their phone. I'm willing to wager upwards of 90% of the passengers on my commute have phones, yet only a select few choose to conduct conversations on what is otherwise a quiet bus. While the reasons it bothers me are numerous, my reactions are limited. The best one I've found is to play music like SAW2 or the Inception App, which effectively filters out or negates the sound of half of a conversation I wish I wouldn't hear. Traffic and car horns, people yelling, construction sites - it all is a bit less disturbing when filtered through some heady music.

 This is why, I think, I have a predilection for ethereal and dreamy music that tends to skew my sense of reality. It's not some psychopathy or misanthropic nature, but simply a desire for a quieter, more serene experience as I navigate city life. Realizing this, I still choose to live in Minneapolis instead of, say, International Falls. Though, to be fair, if I had a decent wireless signal up there I might be tempted. Give it a shot - follow some of the links and see if it doesn't help undo some of the audio kinks of life. 

Burnout

Hey.


I'm burnt like a match head. 


As in completely devoid of combustive. Spent. Used up. This is not a matter of only getting to this now, but a matter of not having the mental and physical wherewithal to type something of legitimacy and significance that would warrant your attention. 


So I'm going to be honest. 


I'm taking a dive tonight, gang. I'm tucking in and hoping a decent night's rest will bring some restoration of character and will power. I sincerely apologize for the lack of mental sustenance tonight, but I promise you I have something on the horizon. Something unique and novel that I have never attempted on this site before. Something I think you'll be surprised to see, and it's pretty hefty. 


So I'm asking you to be patient. 


I appreciate that you're even reading my groveling. Trust me, it will be worth it in the end, I just need to charge the batteries desperately. In lieu of the written word, here's something to bide the time - some artwork based on my favorite television series ever, LOST. I can take no credit for any of the work, but it still blows me away. Enjoy, and hopefully I'll see you tomorrow.

Still here? Cool.


Quick sidenote about the Mellon Collie breakdown - a comment from an insightful reader completely broke it down for me in succint fashion. Rather than force you to find it in the back logs, I'll just quote the comment in it's entirety  here:


 "Corgan was writing from a prospective as a teenager here, not as a "rock star". He set out to write a concept album ("The Wall" of his generation he perhaps foolishly boasted early in the writing process), and didn't exactly end up with one, but the voice of the album is still a teenager, perhaps Billy himself (10 years ago at the time), perhaps not. That's why you get such bizarre swings of emotion...from "God is empty" to "deep in thought I forgive everyone".


See? Dude totally broke it down for me in a digestible, instantly understandable way. I was close, but pretty much off target. Funny to see why it made so much more sense as a teenager than when I'm closer to 30. 

Little Bugs

Alright, no pumpkins today.

Someday, though, I do intend to take a look at the Aeroplane set in depth. After gorging on a huge double album I thought I'd display a little self control. In contrast to the hugely popular behemoth let's take a look at Jar of Flies by Alice In Chains.

Once again the cool older brother gets full credit here. Alice In Chains was always his favorite of favorites, his band that he was into that I never quite hooked on to. Not to say they weren't a phenomenal band, by all means their Unplugged album still is hauntingly beautiful, a glimpse into a fractured and damaged band, revealing the beauty beneath the surface. I don't intend to do the typical dour look at the crumbling of troubled frontman Layne Staley - it's been done by every one else.

Jar Of Flies was really not supposed to be a thing. The band had just come off a big tour in support of the punishingly heavy Dirt and had found themselves booted from their homes. Having no where else to go, the band headed to the studio to crash, under the pretense of knocking out some impromptu songs. Its quite apparent this casual and unpretentious attitude was integral to the creation of this amazing EP. They showed that beneath the grungy metal band lay talented musicians capable of writing nuanced and moving songs.

Theres a beautiful, melancholic air to this EP, something that always brings me back to the cool fall night I first heard it, driving around our small home town. Th guitars are so clean and slick, like on the thwapping snaps of the low-end lick from 'Rotten Apple'. 'I Stay Away' is a fantastic example of the dynamics the band can work in - the verses are gorgeously picked acoustics while Staley's howling is backed by Jerry Cantrell's signature noodling. Plus the video is some freaky-deaky, always unnerving stop motion clay puppets. 'No Excuses' is a great, driving track that shows how strong they are, even without the grunge trappings. 

My favorite track on the EP doesn't even have vocals - the moody 'Whale & Wasp' creates an amazing atmosphere through the melody and the chord changes. It's that intangible air to it that really moves me. This is followed by the amazing and uncharacteristically sweet 'Don't Follow'. Built around a warm melody and Cantrell's husky voice, it's a great track and a sign of the amazing unplugged stuff on the horizon.

If you've never heard this EP, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Its still an amazing work almost twenty years later. The songs are distinct and dynamic, yet a cohesive and tightly made package. It's simply phenomenal and criminally overlooked.

Twilight To Starlight

So.


Day two of the Mellon Collie breakdown. I'm surprised at my own recollections of this album versus the experience I've had after listening to the second half. As you could tell from my look at Dawn To Dusk, I loved the first half of this album. I really looked forward to digging into Twilight To Starlight and seeing what I had forgotten about for years. It turns out not only was my grand, unifying theory flawed in its overarching assumption but also that there was a reason I hadn't really revisited this disc in a while.


I just don't get it.


Maybe that's too broad of a generalization, to sweeping of a hand. In fact listening to the first half of Twilight To Starlight I was pretty engaged - there's a fair bit of solid material. It just seems to sag under the weight of the execution towards the back nine. Too much of a good thing? Maybe. But conversely I loved (and still do) the outtakes, the sprawling and massive box-set The Aeroplane Flies High. At some point in the future I'll dig into those as well, but it's funny to think the album itself feels like weak-sauce to me now and the b-sides are more interesting. I don't really know what to make of it. But I digress.

I've read that in switching producers (from Butch Vig to Flood and Alan Moulder) there was a re-focused effort to capture the sound and vitality of the Pumpkins' live shows. While the softer stuff may not equate so well, the harder material on this half of the album definitely make that effort clear. The first track, the meandering and venomous 'Where Boys Fear To Tread' could almost be a jam captured in the studio. Despite this natural, organic rock track there are fun little moments that were trivia-worthy at the time of its release - at key points in the track the percussion is augmented by the sound of explosions from the classic shooter Doom. You'll hear it if you listen closely.


'Bodies' is the Pumpkins at some of their best, a full on assault with buzzsaw guitars, Jimmy Chamberlains pounding drums and Corgan snarling "Love is suicide". It's a great song but has an abrupt transition into the peaceful, contemplative 'Thirty-Three', which is a beautiful and wistful song. Another natural single, 'Thirty-Three' has a bit of an old fashioned feel, a style Corgan seemed to dabble in around the time of making these tracks. 'In The Arms Of Sleep' is a dusty, lonely number that conveys the early aging of a performer and the draining affect the rockstar lifestyle can have. The guitars here sound so corroded and rusted, which not only give a great, creaky feel to the song but show Corgan and Flood's sense of keeping a track sparse. '1979' stands not only as a refreshing moment of pop cheeriness but also as a sign of what the band was really capable of - this massively popular song just never gets old for me, and the trick here might be that Corgan wrote the song as a love-letter to never growing up. It seems to be widely known as a song about youthful mischief and that no doubt owes a great deal to the accompanying video. It's a knock out.

Shame, then, that the jarring transitions continue. As '1979' drives off into the distance, waving goodbye, out of left-field comes a squeal of feedback and the band launches into 'Tales Of A Scorched Earth'. This is far and away the most aggressive track on the entire album. In it we hear Corgan screaming horrible things and how "I lie just to be real and I'd die just to feel". It's the Pumpkins at their most aggressive and if you can take the assault it's pretty great, just intense. Feels like their live show. As 'Scorched Earth' crashes to a close we hear a broken, tinkling piano and guitar melodies fade in, heralding the arrival of 'Thru The Eyes Of Ruby', a fantastic and grand song about the foibles of young love and youthful rebellion. It's a bit cheesy and cliched but it's so endearing and sincere that it sells itself on the love Corgan poured into it. Soaring guitars give way to Corgan singing earnestly "And with this ring I wed thee true". It's lovely, especially the small coda tagged onto the end. Almost hidden after 'Ruby' is the short and sweet 'Stumbeline', a song seemingly about Corgan realizing his own confusion and muddled ambitions as a performer. 


It's at this point I had realized my overarching interpretation of the frustrated musician only holds up conceptually and not literally - the second half of the album isn't a linear progression but more of a back and forth "I hate everything/I'm in love with the world" dynamic. I think it would offer something of an explanation of the jarring transitions and at times harsh segue-ways between songs, like how 'X.Y.U.' starts so abruptly. 

It's here that Twilight To Starlight starts to drag for me. This track feels like another rambling studio jam. Corgan's vocals are clearly a live take, very uneven but full of vigor and passion, but the song is too unpleasant to have much that would redeem it and it drags on too long. 'We Only Come Out At Night' is peculiar almost for peculiar's sake, the rote "I'm a weirdo" weirdo's song, although it does have interesting instrumentation and progressions. 'Beautiful' is a subdued, slightly sappy love song that redeems itself about halfway through, as the key changes and a great little riff shines through. 'Lily' is just bizarre - an old-timey, almost jokey song about watching your love through a window. I just don't get it, frankly. 'By Starlight' is a sweet love song but it feels to sleepy for me, but then again maybe that's the point. It's a dreamy number but there's something about it that just won't settle in for me...maybe it's that shimmering guitar tone. 'Farewell And Goodnight' is just a cute lullaby by the whole band, a sweet little end to the album with a reprise of the piano from 'Mellon Collie' at the tail end. It's a bit of an uneventful end to a huge and intricately produced album, really.


So what have I learned here? Interestingly, I still think the album holds up really well, it's just a bit of a niche thing if you're not now or ever a fan of the Pumpkins. I was surprised to hear how frankly conventional it sounds now, when it seemed to strange and unique fifteen years ago, but then again I should read what I'm typing here. The theme of Corgan being jaded and frustrated, writing about being a rock star still seems to tie it all together but it starts to unravel as the album winds down. Maybe that's part of the design. It was certainly a high water mark for the band. I'm really glad I went back and listened to it straight through a couple times over the last week, though. I still really like it. Dear god, do I have to do The Aeroplane box-set next?

Dawn To Dusk

Alright, I admit it.


Yesterday's post kinda sucked, huh? No biggie, I was spent and I still stand by it, pointless though it may be. I still dig Hulu. Hope you're cool with it. Let's switch gears, shall we? To contrast the brevity and vapidity of yesterday's content, let's take an in-depth look at a strangely huge album from the 90s, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins. Being a double album, I'll take two posts to break it down a disc at a time. Today - disc one, Dawn To Dusk.


The Pumpkins were, at the time of recording this album, a huge force in alternative rock. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) Billy Corgan was known for being egomaniacal and...kind of a dick. He had Pavement kicked off Lollapalooza, for example, because of a (possibly imagined) feud. That ego-driven attitude was both a blessing and a curse for the band, as it gave rise to the most prolific and fruitful time of their career but also drove them to exhaustion and temporary ruin. In late 94/early 95, though, they were ascendant. Burning away countless hours in the studio, Corgan constructed what would be his magnum opus one obsessive layer at a time. Although he finally began to include the rest of the band in the process, what emerged is still unequivocally Corgan's work. The resulting concept album stands as some of their best work. Let's dig in and see what we find, eh?

The album opens with the eponymously titled piano piece, serving as a thematic forbearance and subtle indication of tone. While pleasant, there's not a lot to it, but I will touch back on it later in this examination. The album really wakes up and leaps to life with the epic and grand 'Tonight, Tonight'. It's a massive song, one that signaled that the band had grown and taken steps in new directions after the streamlined Siamese Dream. 'Tonight' feels vibrant and alive, even today, with its lush strings and urgent lyrics - a natural choice for a single. The video is still charming and fun to watch, as well. 'Jellybelly' feels a bit like a return to old habits, for better or worse. It's a juggernaut of a song, pummeling and hammering down with fuzzed out riffs but also wielding a soaring chorus that rides the momentum. It sounds like it could have been left over from their last album, but that's hardly a knock - it's just not that original for Corgan. 'Zero' does see the band change their sound in a subtle way. There's something sleek and metallic about this tune I can't quite put my finger on, but Corgan referred to it as 'cyber metal'. They would eventually come back to this sound during the Machina years, but that would be six years later. 

'Here Is No Why' marries the new and old sound quite handily, and its here the theme of the album really emerges. A lurching, syncopated riff and some lyrics about teenage ideals and giving up show both Corgan's strength as a write and his stealth aim. He's claimed Mellon Collie to be about "mortal sorrow" and themes of life and death but if you listen closely on this song and the next, the debut single 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings', it becomes clear Corgan is actually writing about his own disillusionment with being a teenage icon, the Bishop of Generation X in the absence of King Cobain. His arrogance and egomania and relentless work ethic pushed them to the top, only to realize he was alone in his tower, looking out at a sea of youth that would eventually move on without him.


That's what I think Mellon Collie is about. 


The theme continues on as the album plays. 'Bullet' is Corgan actually realizing the hollowness of his dream and being "still just a rat in a cage". 'To Forgive' is an abrupt shift to a sorrowful song of saudade and lost youth, which I think furthers my understanding of this album. There's hint of a great song here, but its buried under uninspired chord changes and dour mood. The next track, the nihilistic and inscrutable 'Ode To No One', seems to be Corgan firing off a nonsense-laden missive at the audience, almost as a kiss off. The defiant and bizarre lyrics paint a picture of his frustration in his role as teen spokesman. The fuzzed out, cracked and broken dirge 'Love' could be a time travelling cast off from Machina. Synthesizer emerge around the corners here, with Corgan toasting to his "mistakes of cowardice" and justification in the name of love. The flip-side to damaged, damaging 'Love' is the saccharine 'Cupid De Locke', almost insipid in its banal simplicity. To be honest, I've never really gotten this song.

'Galapagos' appears on the surface to be a love song, but close inspection shows its actually about Corgan's insecurity about growing older and irrelevant to his audience, singing literally "Too late to turn back now, I'm running out of sound. I'm changing". 'Muzzle', a loose, jangly alterna-rock anthem, is just as literal, with the opening lyrics "I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone". It's a good song, not a great song, and a sign that even for someone as prolific as Corgan, a double album can be prone to serve indulgence. Fittingly, the penultimate track on Dawn To Dusk is the nine minute wanderer 'Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans', a drawn out number that seems to be about a variety of subjects. It's a gorgeous, sprawling song, a testament to what the Pumpkins were trying to accomplish on Mellon Collie - it just is a little vague. From the established themes it seems to suggest that Corgan finds relief in therapy and pharmacology. All I really know is that I love the near-two minute intro's guitar layers. They're sublimely played and structured. The final track on disc one is 'Take Me Down', a contribution from guitarist James Iha. Other than some lay-to-rest, sleep to dream elements, there's little relevance to the rest of the album. It's a nice song, but a bit sleepy. Maybe it's supposed to be a lullaby.


Dawn To Dusk, I feel, is just that. It opens at dawn with the soft piano piece. Day breaks and the band launches forth with 'Tonight, Tonight', singing of eventual plans and seizing the day. Weariness and disillusionment sets in, and as night comes we settle to bed after being tranquilized from anxiety and frustration. This is just my take on the first half. I'll post part two tomorrow and see if this holds up as strongly on Twilight To Starlight. 


Stay tuned!

It's Free & Legal Entertainment

Do I really need to tell you this?


Dude, it's Saturday night and I have to tell you what's up?


Alright, well...here's the deal - I'm getting married and have little time. My DVR is handy but fills up too damn fast. Really, it's mostly full of shows preferred by my better half. While I have little free time to kick back, especially in the coming weeks, it is important that my time be consolidated and used wisely.

Basically this post is just a short little reminder to use Hulu while you can. I recall the confusion over their bizarre ad campaign featuring Alec Baldwin and jokes about aliens and the atrophy of brain cells. Here I am, years later, with a long-standing account with play-lists and subscribed shows despite having cable and Netflix. It's fantastic, in a word. I can't always catch stuff as it happens and often times forget to record shows in order. Hulu has my back. Not only that, its modern and up to date - basically the only way I found time to watch Fringe and SNL this year was through their presence on Hulu. Now that they have my two faves back (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) I make even better use of the site. 

Honestly, it sounds like whoring and maybe it is, just a bit. But to be blunt, Hulu is awesome if you take advantage of it. It's free and incredibly convenient. Do yourself a favor and peruse the sheer volume of shows they have on tap before the pay wall becomes larger and more enforced. I'll see you, along with a more fleshed out post, tomorrow. Happy Saturday Night Viewings, kids.

I'll Shut Up

Alright.


It's Friday.


I've had way too much coffee to push through today and a couple Vodka/Sodas on top of it only exacerbates the problem. So I'll keep this confessional brief. I've made my share of apologist statements about mediocre music on this site in the past, so I figure what's one more?


I was in Europe when I first heard the Deftones. It was a class trip and I was indulging in cheap wine and cigarettes, so maybe sleazy things were on my mind. Whatever it was, maybe the person who introduced me to the ascendant screamo/nucore band, maybe the smokey little bar, maybe the crappy disc-man I was hearing them on, but I'll always see the Deftones, no matter how much I love the name, as a bit of a sleazy outfit. I think they cultivated that image on purpose.

Regardless, I still love 'Be Quiet And Drive'. It's a balls-out, (at the time) modern take on the Californian interpretation of the Smashing Pumpkins. From the chords themselves to the progressions the song is written around, there is undoubtedly a specter of Billy Corgan in the midst of this (ugh) nu-metal song. But nuts to that horrible label and all the millennial  Fred Durst-ian connotations. The Deftones were always a little stronger than their peers, I felt. Look back at that lot - Limp Bizkit (oof) Staind (ugh) Mudshovel (wut?). Do you see how mad just my auto-correct gets? It's like these bands actually fought against any rational intelligence. In hindsight, maybe that was their audience. I dunno, maybe it's a case of rose colored lenses, but I still like 'Be Quiet And Drive', even after all these years. 

It's just usually through headphones and not in public, is the thing. You know what is absolutely, unabashedly worthy of adoration, though? The acoustic version - some serene dream pop there, kids. Listen.

Michael Wanted Someone

What's happening?


How are you?


I completely credit my better half for introducing me to Arrested Development, which still stands tall among the best created fiction in visual mediums of the last 20 years. An astoundingly funny and audaciously intelligent show that gave the viewers far more credit than we deserved. Everyone complains about its demise, yet no one is thankful that we got 3 (THREE!) seasons of the Bluth family. I still love it, and like anyone who has seen it and really connected with it, Arrested Development becomes part of your lexicon - no exaggeration, if my better half is around when the word 'Catalina' is uttered, we both a smile. But there's an unspoken integral element that gets little credit for the quirky nature of the show - the superb score and incidental music that gave life and set the mood for the absurd, bleeding edge series.

See, the thing is...I first saw the first season in almost a vacuum. It was just after New Years and I was in AZ with the better half. Her parents had flown back early and we were left to our own devices. On a supply run to Target she saw the first season (which was freshly out at this point, in 2005) and immediately picked it up, saying her housemates were swearing up and down that it was the funniest thing on TV. We went back home to nurse our hangovers and take a nap, putting in the DVDs almost out of curiosity. I was completely caught off guard, both by the quality and intelligence. Honestly, I hardly even saw it as a comedy. If you watch the first disc with little context of the broader series, it comes off as sweet and goofy more than biting and absurd. There was a particular moment, though, that really sold me on the beauty of the show and the music.

In the fourth episode, Key Decisions, Michael slowly wakes up to the fact that he loves his brother's girlfriend Marta. The development of the plot is wonderful and more poignant than it ought to be, but very sweet, regardless. The real tipping point for me (and apparently quite a few other viewers) is the musical cue by Gabriel Mann, his painfully brief song 'You Here With Me', a lovely little pop song that has all the major beats of a massively popular song in just under two minutes. It's a moving, genuine piece of music that was created for the show that people, for whatever reason, connected with. Watch the scene here (because Hulu is FREE AND AWESOME), and listen to the song here. It was, to be honest, a bit of a Holy Grail for me - tracking down the soundtrack to the show was really just an excuse to listen to 'You Here With Me' over and over again (and create some killer ring-tones from the ukulele motifs).

 I adore this song. 'You Here With Me' is a short, brightly shining bit of pop-masterpiece that shows just how deeply the quality and love ran on this show. Gabriel Mann is a very talented musician with a new, rising band called The Rescues. Give 'em a look, see what you like. I'm glad I found this bit.

Mindful Things

Word.


Like, a few of 'em.


That's all I've got for you today. The heatwave, short as it was, finally broke and those of us in the Middle West are coasting nicely back into comfortable temps where death is not a constant threat. It no longer fees like the fires of Hell blowing against your face when you step outside. Yesterday I wrote a bit about Portishead and how the heat reminded me of listening to them last summer. I got to thinking about what else had that kind of thing going for it, that same recollection and similar feel, and it hit me. 


Last summer when my better half was out of town on a business trip I spent my nights working through an unusual video game  doing so because I was afforded some uninterrupted time on the widescreen TV. That game? A re-imagining of the original Silent Hill for the Wii, subtitled Shattered Memories. The game is a slightly tweaked and twisted take on the original experience, with some novel concepts. Among some of these changes were setting the otherworldly parts in a frozen, icy landscape and removing all of the combat from the game, which had really been ancillary in past versions anyway. Most intriguing was the idea that the game would be psychologically profiling you as you played it, altering the game-play to respond to what it interpreted from your choices and behavior. It was an interesting experience, one that was quite unlike any other game I'd played before. I was torn on removing the combat - the game became more of a post-modern adventure but lost some of the danger, which I'm sure was the opposite of the intentions of the creative team. As always, what really hooked me was the sound.

There's a moment in the game in which the protagonist's car plunges off of a bridge into the partially frozen river below. Yes, you of course make it out at that point in the game, seeing that you're only halfway through. It was a tense moment, regardless. I fumbled around with the Wii's mediocre motion controls, frantically hitting the door locks and windows, trying to remind myself its only a game, when I accidentally hit the radio. In a beautiful moment of scoring, the radio starting blaring Akira Yamaoka's version of the Country Western standard 'You Were Always On My Mind', complete with amazingly haunting vocals by series mainstay Mary Elizabeth McGlynn. It was right at the chorus, the moment when this version is bubbling through some churning synthesizers as Mcglynn moans the title. 


The effect was serene and haunting, the best moment of the game for me.

I absolutely adore this version of the song. To be honest, the C&W versions are not my thing. This take on the standard, though - wow. McGlynn's gorgeous, breathy voice has been an integral part of the soundtracks to the games thus far. To be honest I'm a little ashamed I went this long without acknowledging her contributions, as some of the best tracks are due to her involvement. Check out the song and try to see what I experienced - it's dark and I've had some wine. I'm completely wrapped up in this psychological game, headphones on in front of a massive TV. An hour into the session, the car crashes and I'm fumbling in the dark, trying to hit the locks. Then, out of nowhere, but in a very real, believable moment, I hear this.

It's something that will stick with me for a long time, something I'd cite for the long-contested "Can games be considered art?" debate that rages today.

I'm Waiting Patiently

Heatwave.


Woof.


It's bad, gang. Furreals. Like, bad enough that my better half called me on the way home this afternoon to say the readout in her dashboard said 109 degrees. That's not okay for anywhere, ever, at least on Earth. Maybe if it gets down to 109 degrees (Fahrenheit) on Venus, then we'll talk. The heat is making me dumb. Groggy. Sluggish. Groggish. My favorite restaurant, a mere five blocks away, has closed due to power outage. It's the first week of June and there's some kind of minor brownout due to this insane heat. I'm tempted to go raid the coolers at Fuji Ya, just so their amazing selections don't go unappreciated in this mini heat wave.


I love it.


It brings me back to this time last year, when I was still mining the vaults of Portishead's canon. It was summer and my soon-to-be sister-in-law kindly bestowed upon me a gift card for iTunes, which still is one of the best gifts of which I can think. Seriously, it's like free reign to find esoteric stuff you would normally never experiment on! Anyway, free music in hand, I started poking around on the store, then remembered that there was something by the phenomenal trip hop band I had yet to hear - their stand-alone single 'Chase The Tear', released after their most recent and genre busting album, Third.

In short, I love it. It's a fantastic song from the band that not only shows they're still vibrant and full of life, this far into their career. Plenty of bands with this level of clout and free-pass would take the opportunity and squander it - Smashing Pumpkins, I'm looking in your direction: shape up or hang it up. Instead, Portishead, fresh off the heels of their rejuvenating and more-aggressive-than-ever Third, decided to go into the studio and record this single. Not only is it a great song, it's at a pace rarely touched by the band - trip hop and fast tempos are typically mutually exclusive things. Not here. Somehow the band flexed their creative muscles to conjure up a driving, hurtling piece that throbs and snaps, jerking you along with it. 

My only gripe is that we've yet to hear what else is coming down the pike. Word on the street is that while there are high profile gigs lined up for the rest of the year, there's no word on a new album or any new material. This single dates back to 2009 - I don't want to wait any longer, but for this amazing band, I will. Until then, I have the memory of last summer's (and now this summer's) steamy walks to work in the morning, getting a little out of my head on this crazy music and the summer sun beating down in the morning. I'll keep my fingers crossed. If I don't melt, I'll see you tomorrow.