I Assumed Porcupines Were Born, Or Maybe Hatched

Kurt's on vacation, so you get to read about some of the albums he's listening to in the car.

Porcupine Tree

In Absentia

Sitting somewhere between prog-rock and art-metal sits Porcupine Tree, an enigmatic British band who make long albums that aren't so much radio-friendly but are still laden with good, catchy music. They draw comparisons to Tool, which is how I heard about them. An acquaintance burned me a copy of it on "it's kind of like Tool, and you like Tool" grounds. I loved it and promptly purchased a legit copy. Funny how that music-sharing thing actually led to a sale that wouldn't have happened otherwise, isn't it? Okay, I'll stop editorializing.

In Absentia is atmospheric and big. The songs are more-or-less guitar driven, although you get some bass- and keyboard-heavy fare throughout. The album generally vacillates between up-tempo rockers and slower, more introspective lilting numbers. There's some playing-around-with of time signatures and lots of technically impressive musical feats (notably on the drums), but what the album really has going for it is solid song-writing, which thankfully strays out of the normal love-song routine.

Consider songs like The Sound of Muzak, a diatribe about the corporatization of the music industry whose chorus wails "One of the wonders of the world is going down". Or look at Heart Attack in a Layby, a sort of depressingly mellow song about having a heart attack. In a layby (that's a rest stop, for my fellow Americans).

The song I care for the least is, ironically, the single, Strip the Soul, which seems to be trying just a little too hard to shock without actually conveying much meaning.

Highlights: Trains is great, but my absolute favorite is the album closer, Collapse the Light into Earth which doesn't sound a whole lot like the rest of the disk, but it's a great listen.

Favorite lyric: "When I hear the engine pass I'm kissing you wide, the hissing subsides, I'm in luck." (from Trains)

]{p

Known For His Pepper Assault

Kurt's on vacation, so you get to read about his favorite albums.

The Beatles

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

This is the album that introduced me to one of the greatest bands of all time. I decided I needed to own some Beatles, and this is the album my parents got me. There's kind of a standing debate between Beatles fans about which album is their best, and the top contenders usually include this one and Revolver (although my wife prefers The White Album), and while Revolver is a great listen, I have to go with the Sergeant.

It is wildly experimental, wonderfully written, bouncy, jaunty, and infinitely singable. It was also the first mainstream "concept album", so it gets some props for that, paving the way for epic works like Dark Side of the Moon or... well... other concept albums. Some of their most recognizable material shows up on this record, including With a Little Help From My Friends and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds as well as the incredible and hugely progressive A Day in the Life.

I can fawn and awe over it a lot, but I'll stop. I don't have any complaints, per se, but I do think the George Harrison contribution Within You/Without You is a little weak. Pause the acid rock, kids, we need to do a quick sitar break. Which is not to say that it's a bad song, it's just a little out of place.

Favorite lyric: "Then somebody spoke and I went into a dream." (from A Day in the Life).

]{p

I Have Doubts

So Abby and I went to see No Doubt last night. I think the most disturbing thing I saw was a tween in a Hooters shirt. Here's the rundown:

The first opening act was called Bedouin Soundclash, but you wouldn't have known it because they only said their name once and who actually knows how to spell "Bedouin"? Pretty good, if you like reggae. They played about six songs.

The second act was Paramore, and it was obvious that many, many people in the audience were there to see Paramore. They played well, but I wasn't exactly wowed, but I'm not exactly a fan. The only song of theirs I genuinely enjoy is Crush Crush Crush, but I didn't care for their live rendition. The bass player did a flip at one point, and the band seem to have mastered the mythic "coordinated head-bang" pretty well--well enough that it was featured on at least 3 songs that I saw. They played a few new tunes and dedicated a song off the Twilight soundtrack to "Edward". Buh. Again, I was not engaged, but I was more or less entertained and it's not like I was there to see them anyway. They played a fairly short set.

Finally No Doubt came on, and it was about what you expect from a band with that much experience: high energy, superb technique, very professional, lots of production value. But unlike some other touring-veterans I've seen (Tool come readily to mind), No Doubt managed to engage the audience. Gwen can work a crowd like no one else. It was a greatest hits show, so they played, well, every single song off of their greatest hits album (except Trapped in a Box, because nobody cares, really) plus Rock Steady (the song, not the album) and something I didn't recognize but that Abby tells me is from Gwen's first solo album, during which all the members of the opening acts came and joined No Doubt on stage and played trap sets while Adrien Young (No Doubt's drummer) walked out into the audience wearing a snare drum and a tutu.

So, there was some spectacle. Incidentally, I've decided that Adrien Young and Brian Viglione need to start a compendium for talented-but-clinically-strange percussionists. Anywho.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of the entire night was when Gwen found her "favorite person" in the audience and pulled this person up on stage. The "favorite person" was a girl, neighborhood of 8 years old, who was very nearly Gwen's miniature doppelganger with similar hair and matching black-and-silver-sequence dress. The girl immediately started crying (in that good shaken-with-emotion way, not in a bad-touch way) and then she and Gwen hugged and it was all very precious. There was some brief chatting and picture-posing and the girl gave Gwen something that looked like a hot-pink beach towel, but I couldn't tell for sure.

Adorable.

So I enjoyed myself quite a bit, but not nearly as much as Abby, who had a jumping-up-and-down-while-singing-every-single-word good time. In pigtails. That too was pretty adorable.

Looking forward to Incubus on the 23rd.

]{p

Note: Abby and I will be on vacation for a good part of next week. Expect filler.

And In This One, We're Gonna Shoot ALIENS!

When Halo came out on PC, it had already been out for the XBox for like six months or something. This was the game that brought Microsoft into the console game market--that made the XBox a must-have system of the last generation of consoles (a generation thoroughly dominated by the PlayStation 2). When the PC version came out, someone held a contest pitting PC gamers versus console gamers. Even though the console gamers had a six-month head start on the game, the PC gamers kicked their asses. This is because a hand-held controller will never, never match the control you get from a keyboard and mouse for first-person shooters.

Apropos of nothing, right? We'll get to that in a second.

I've been playing The Conduit lately, the much-anticipated game that was supposed to introduce hardcore gaming to the Wii. Thoughts?

First, let's take a step back and consider the sheer magnitude of the hype around this game. It was announced in, when, 2007? Finally, an exclusive title that was designed for serious gamers--a hardcore first-person-shooter with blood, cursing, the whole 9 yards. It won awards half a year before it was even released. There are hundreds of stills and dozens of videos from it on IGN, all leading up to what was being heralded as a--ahem--game-changer. It finally arrived, on my birthday, no less. And after all this anticipation, what could stand up to expectations?

Let's get a few things out of the way--it's a perfectly good game. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just not revolutionary. It's one of your standard FPS stories, you're a human and you're facing off against aliens--which I prefer, frankly, to the other stock FPS story: the WWII. You're a grizzled secret-service agent (as opposed to a grizzle space marine) trying to save the planet, or country, or president, at any given moment. The Conduit takes the Halo approach to weapon-management and damage control--two weapons, primary and backup, limited but replenishable ammunition, a limited damage bar that recharges if you can get out of trouble quickly, and grenades. The control scheme is based on the Metroid Prime 3 configuration, using the Wiimote as a gun and the Nunchuck for movement.

The controls are fully customizable, which is an awesome, awesome feature that I will never, ever use. Thankfully the defaults are pretty usable, and the addition of a button that makes you do a quick 180-degree turn was much appreciated.

The big new idea for this game is the ASE (short for All-Seeing-Eye). It's the story-driving McGuffin that you obtain early on, and it allows you to hack computers and find invisible doorways and enemies. Its use never exactly feels shoe-horned in, although it doesn't always feel completely organic. Since you can't, for some reason, carry both it and a gun at the same time, trying to kill off regenerating enemies while blowing up invisible mines and not running out of ammo makes for some tense moments.

The story and story-telling are quite good, but not great. Ditto the voice-acting. The game looks good without being so über-realistic that it isn't fun (note to game designers, reality isn't fun, that's why we play games). Power-ups glow so they can be spotted at a distance, and the game is bright and colorful enough that it's easy to spot enemies. The map more or less directs you where to go, and if you get truly lost, the ASE can direct you towards your objectives. There have been a few moments where I was in the room I needed to be in so the ASE was no use as a guide, and it took me a while to sort out what I needed to do before I could advance. Annoying, but hardly crippling.

All in all, it's a perfectly good FPS, which is a little disappointing given expectations--but that's not my complaint about it. Here's where I tie-in to the Halo discussion above: as much as I've said in the past that the Wii is built for FPS's, as much as I still believe that a Wiimote gives you better control than you get from an XBox or PS3 controller for this genre, it still doesn't quite match up to a PC. Maybe it's all the Left 4 Dead I've been playing lately, but once you get immersed in the world of FPS's on PC, it's tough to go back to consoles, no matter how customizable the control scheme.

In fact, I can think of only one reason to put an FPS on a console rather than a PC: local multi-player. This is what made games like Goldeneye on the N64 take off, or even games like the aforementioned Halo. Halo may play better on a PC, but you can't have three buddies over to sit around and duke it out on PC's. So I suppose I would feel better about The Conduit if it had local multi-player support.

But it doesn't. Online only. Lots of online, but online only. And it's fun, but it's online, so you have the occasional lag, plus insurmountable load times. And if you want to play against your friends, they all have to have their own systems, their own games, and you miss out on the cat-calling and face-to-face antics of playing together in the same room. We've sort of gotten away from that, which is too bad.

Mostly because the people that play online are dicks.

]{p

The Sleepy Kurt's Revenge

It's time, once again to retrain the Sleepy Kurt. The Sleepy Kurt is the Kurt that only exists from the time the alarm goes off to about ten seconds after the alarm has gone off, and he's usually not a bother for myself (the Waking Kurt) and Abby.

The Sleepy Kurt, his brain more or less detached from his body, can detect the presence of a loud noise, and can often pinpoint the source, but he will not be able to identify it as an alarm clock. He might think it is a predator of some sort, or the distant cry of another Sleepy. But every few years the Sleepy Kurt figures out how to turn off the alarm clock (not hit the "snooze" button, mind you, but actually turn the damned thing off) and requires some stymieing.

This is best accomplished by placing a book on top of the alarm clock so that the Sleepy Kurt will reach for the buttons, become confused, and transition immediately into the Not-Quite-Awake-But-Mostly-Functional Kurt who is capable of realizing that if he turns the alarm off, his wife will oversleep and be angry.

I get tickled by the idea that I have to knowingly fool myself--that I have to set a trap that I will fall into. People talk about internal conflict all the time: arguing with one's self, lying to one's self. Me? I fool myself into not knowing how an alarm clock works for ten seconds or so.

I'm amused.

]{p

Enemy Of The Who, Now?

Over the weekend I received something in the mail that I've been waiting for since... well... college. MTV's The State has arrived on DVD, and through some funky (read as: "funky but legal") pre-ordering, I have obtained a copy a week and a half before its release.

I've been subjecting my wife to it. She's been a very good sport about the whole thing.

The State was MTV's first foray into sketch comedy via a half-hour show starring and written by an eleven-member black-box comedy troupe with some very strange ideas about comedy. It started in 1993 and ran for four seasons before the group moved to CBS and ended up disbanding to work on other projects. 3 members are on Reno 9-1-1, Michael Ian Black has been featured in every single VH1 I Love the ______ series produced (and there are tons of them).

Etc, etc, etc.

But for those who remember, you can now own all 24 episodes of the show (MTV had some funny ideas about what constituted a "season" back then), ripe as it is with early 90's fashion sensibilities, bizarre sketches, memorable characters, and perhaps the most annoying theme song ever made.

Some favorites:

• Barry and Levon, in which two men in velvet robes romance $240 worth of pudding
• Service With a Smile, better known as the "Chicken Sandwich Carl" sketch
• The Barry Lutz Show, in which we learn important facts about monkey torture (notably: they hate it)
• Porcupine Racetrack, a musical
• Tenement, a dramatic script with the language "toned down" a bit.
• Muppet Hunting
• Etc.
  

I could honestly go on and on. But it's worth a rental if you enjoy sketch comedy. Some of the material is dated, and they did do that thing everybody does where they try to link sketches together with random go-betweens that only sometimes work. But their material was original, really funny, very strange, edgy for its time, and they kept the sketches short--unlike some other shows I won't (MadTV) mention out (SNL) loud.

Also, this DVD comes with the promise of a Daria set due out in 2010, so that's exciting. My teenage years come home to roost.

]{p

Do's And Don'ts

We've made it this far into the iTunes list, let's see what we have. First the Do's.

• Weird Al Yankovic - Do I Creep You Out
• Queens of the Stone Age - Do It Again
• Prince - Do Me, Baby
• Jimmie's Chicken Shack - Do Right
• Manfred Mann - Do Wah Diddy Diddy (any body else feel like they got a really rough take on this one?)
  
• OK Go - Do What You Want
• U2 - Do You Feel Loved
• Franz Ferdinand - Do You Want To (which, when played right after a U2 song feels drastically under-produced)
  

Then we get a break populated mostly by songs with the word "Dog" in the title. And on to the Don'ts, which is probably the longest stretch so far.

• SEATBELTS - Don't Bother None (regular and long versions)
• INXS - Don't Change
• Ben Folds Five - Don't Change Your Plans
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Come Around Here No More
• America - Don't Cross The River
• Gun's N' Roses - Don't Cry (two versions)
• Seal - Don't Cry (different song)
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Do Me Like That
• Weird Al Yankovic - Don't Download This Song
• Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over (80's-tastic)
• Dave Matthews Band - Don't Drink The Water
• Toad The Wet Sprocket - Don't Fade

Whew. Then we get two versions of (Don't Fear) The Reaper, the Blue Oyster Cult original and a cover by The Caesers. Okay, back into the list.

• Alice In Chains - Don't Follow
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Don't Forget Me Now
• Gorillaz - Don't Get Lost In Heaven
• R.E.M. - (Don't Go Back To) Rockville
• Elton John and Kiki Dee - Don't Go Breaking My Heart (a good song, but his duet of it with RuPaul was better)
• Limp Bizkit - Don't Go Off Wondering (Elton John into Limp Bizkit... not a smooth transition)
• Nerf Herder - Don't Hate Me (Because I'm Beautiful)
• Norah Jones - Don't Know Why
• Pink Floyd - Don't Leave Me Now
• Thelma Houston - Don't Leave Me This Way
• Weezer - Don't Let Go
• En Vogue - Don't Let Go (Love)
• The Beatles - Don't Let Me Down
• Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
• Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger
• Coldplay - Don't Panic
• The Beatles - Don't Pass Me By (such a weak addition to their catalog... oh well)
• The Offspring - Don't Pick It Up

Whew. Last leg. Note the total lack of Journey. We start off with Don't Pull It Down from the Hair Soundtrack. Then:

• No Doubt - Don't Speak
• The Police - Don't Stand So Close To Me
• Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop
• Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
• Yarbrough & Peoples - Don't Stop The Music
• Jonathan Coulton - Don't Talk To Strangers (yes, it's a cover)
• Madonna - Don't Tell Me (god help me, I do love this song)
• Metallica - Don't Tread On Me
• Ace Of Base - Don't Turn Around
• Husker Du - Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely

Damn. That's a lot of Don'ts.