A Question

So I had stated several weeks back that I would be doing video game music reviews. That has changed slightly, because now I want you, the community to do that. I’m looking for guest editors who would be interested in doing video game music pieces every couple weeks. I’m not asking for much. You can write as little or as much as you want, and I’m not asking for top notch stuff, although I do want you to try your hardest. I’ll probably only showcase one author per post, but I’ll make sure to cycle through people so that everyone’s voices shall be heard. So if anyone is interested please contact me via this post, or any other ways you know that you can get a hold of me by. I hope we have some takers, I can’t do this alone! Thanks.

Franz Ferdinand – Tonight (2009)

The Music:

Now here’s a band that seems to have really fallen off the radar in the last few years. I remember back in 2004 when “Take Me Out” hit the radiowaves and made it huge. Before you knew it, Franz Ferdinand was on the charts and on the up and up. Then only a year later their second album, You Could Have Had It So Much Better, came out, and to me, they reached a new level of maturity. The songs were a little less danceable, but they seemed to have more flavour. The album charted well, but I believe that many of the fans were disappointed that their music had taken a slightly different skew than before. Well I have bad news for those of you that liked the old Franz Ferdinand, Tonight takes the band you once knew and morphs them into something good, but different.

The moment the track “Ulysses” begins playing through your speakers, you feel at home, this sounds like a sexy Franz Ferdinand track that were used to. Then about 40 seconds in the synths hit and you stagger back for a minute, “Wait, what? Synthesizers? This isn’t something I’m acquainted with!” Well you’d better buckle your seatbelt, Tonight is riddled with this full, airy synthesizer sound and it isn’t going anywhere (Some older songs had synthesizer as well, but it was scarce). “Ulysses” itself is a fantastic single, and I think next to “Lucid Dreams” it describes the new Franz best. They no longer have the clean look or sound that followed them from their debut. They are still catchy as hell, but now it’s got a darker vibe.

The next two tracks on the album follow a more traditional Franz vibe. “Turn it On” just sounds like some of the more standard tracks from the previous releases, while “No You Girls” is the obligatory single with the staccato guitar hooks and strutting drum and bass section. “No You Girls” has a swinging piano chorus behind it though, which saves it from being too boring.  The music video is fairly entertaining as well.

“Send Him Away” is a breath of fresh air for those that are tired of the same old same old. The drums carry you into a swinging pattern that is seen less often now a days. The synths that carry on in the background of the song also give it a unique feel.  ”Twilight Omens” is also a different kind of track in that the reverberating synthesizers bring on a strange kind of trance like quality to the tracks over all foot stomping tempo. “Bite Hard” sounds quite a bit more minimal than the last few tracks, and it reminded me a lot of Iggy Pop. When the keyboards kick in 3/4th into the track it becomes infectious.

Now if you want music that makes you feel sexy, you often look for the songs with the best bass line. Franz has you covered on this front. “What You Came For” delivers by far the most sensual feeling out of all the songs on this release. Possibly on any of their releases, which would be quite a feat since a lot of their music is sexy. The lyrics “With a laugh like that, with a look like that, you make us all feel gauche, like its a smutty joke” delivered with a David Bowie like swagger, you can’t help but feel a little better about your own appearance just listening to it.

“Live Alone” doesn’t stand out too much to me, but its disco influences are easy to see. “Can’t Stop Feeling” has a wicked opening synth section and smooth bass section that carries the song, but the tricks get old after the first minute. At this point you begin to see that all of this sounds new, but it still seems fairly old. There is a comfortable unknown that you can’t quite put your finger on. You can tell its Franz Ferdinand, if only because Alex Kapranos’ voice is highly recognizable.

But the next track “Lucid Dreams” really tests you on that, and I think it is an interesting evolution. While radio edits and live versions of this song are still good. The album take which rings in at nearly 8 minutes is terrifyingly different. At the 4:30 mark is about where the radio version ends and then the drums and the synthesizers take seize of your senses, and put you in a trance. This is nothing like old Franz. Not at all, and it is welcome. I encourage everyone to find and listen to the entire thing. It is amazing.

“Dream Again” is another bizarre track, one that is more in line with “Lucid Dreams” than “No You Girls”. An off-kilter bells section and the complete void of recognizable guitar parts gives it a very different feel from the rest of the album. Finally “Katherine Kiss Me” closes off the album with a quiet acoustic outro, letting you know that they can still be the beautiful boys they have always been.

The Album Cover:

Oh no! What happened to Bob Hardy? Don’t cover it up Alex! The world sees how you’ve changed and now there is no reason to cover it up! A charming photo to be sure. I really like the font they used for the album title. This cover is definitely classy, just like the band.

Overall Rating:

While I really like how they’ve changed. The stuff that sounds like the old Franz kind of holds them back because it isn’t as good as stuff found on the other two albums. A 3.5 out of 5.0 will suffice.

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (2009) Part 2 of 2

The Music:

And so we begin day two of our look at Embryonic. “The Ego’s Last Stand” starts up disc two, punctuated only by a simple distorted guitar line, with Coyne’s voice weaving around it, this track stays fairly silent until about halfway in where the rest of the band jumps in. This track, actually, compared to a lot of the others, feels like standard rock fare. There is some bizarre instrumentation, but I could see this being on many different releases. The next track, “I Can Be a Frog”, not so much. Showcasing the creepier yet, childish side of Coyne’s lyrics, this track sounds almost like a lullaby, that is, a lullaby for a disturbed child. Here, watch the video.

Special side note for you Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans, the female voice in that song is none other than the beloved Karen O. She isn’t the only featured guest on the album either. One of 2008’s biggest rising stars, MGMT, is also showcased on this album in the song “Worm Mountain”. The latter mentioned song is a loud, loud, LOUD affair. Full of bass and drums, you can barely pick out MGMT’s voices among the cavalcade of sound assaulting you. Luckily “Scorpio Sword” will let you pull yourself out of the avalanche of noise that had just buried you, but you’ll find that your feet are still cemented in place as it pounds you in the face with a quieter, less controlled ruckus. But since the Lips know you need a true breath of air after such powerful displays of sound, they decide to be benevolent masters and give you “The Impulse”. This track reminded me a lot of the French electro band Air. It was very relaxing and ambient, and the robot-like vocals make this track stand out among the rest in terms of variance.

I want to travel a few tracks back to cover “Sagittarius Silver Announcement” next. The bass carries this track over a small amount of distortion, and ties in with a sighing background choir section, with Coyne’s vocals being delivered on top with a very echo-like effect. The whole experience here feels like you are sitting in an empty concert hall, gazing up at the universe. This ended up being one of my favourite cuts to listen to. Something you can just mellow out to; help you get the creative juices flowing.

“Silver Trembling Hands” is another track, that is slightly reminiscent of older Flaming Lips work. It falls into line with a  more standard definition of beautiful than most of these other tracks.  The drums here keep the pace going, and the harp gives it a nice worldly feel. And now we have only two tracks left to cover! “Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast” is a bizarre instrumental, a sharp synth blast jumps out of nowhere throughout the entire track, while some strange radio voice  rambles on amidst the noises of what appear to be a tropical jungle, this track is sheer ambience, another one that, in a strange way, makes you feel at peace. And then the closer”Watching the Planets” takes that away from you.

It’s as if Atlas himself grabbed you carried you to the peak of Mt. Olympus and then hurled you into the Milky Way, never to be seen again. Bands rarely close an album with a single. There is a reason for that. Singles are meant to be catchy, they are meant to be easy to digest. You don’t end an album with something so simple, that’d just seem like travesty. Well, the Lips do it, and they do it WELL. While “Watching the Planets” isn’t what most would call mainstream accessible, I believe that this is still a logical choice for a single. This is their sound, this is what they exude, this is the sheer madness, the stuff that will make you want to lose your mind, become primal. For these reasons, closing with this song, makes perfect sense.

I’m going to post a video here, the music video for “Watching the Planets”. BE ADVISED: This video has full frontal nudity, male and female, and it is not censored. While I don’t want this to discourage you from watching, I understand that some people do not take to this stuff well.  If that is the case, I want you to go find the track by itself, and listen to it, because you are missing out

As for those who are willing to give it a chance. I want you to realize that I took this video seriously. The novelty of nudity disappears fairly fast and you begin to appreciate the art of the video. By the end, I guarantee that you will not feel disgust, you may feel strange, you may not like it, but it exudes a quality that many videos miss, human spirit. Once again, if you do not wish to watch, please go find the single itself. It is amazing, and the video simply exemplifies that.

ONE LAST WARNING THIS IS NSFW AND CONTAINS LOTS OF NUDITY!

Here we go!

And there we have it. The end of the journey. Take a breath, it was a long one.

The Album Cover:

HUH? WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT IS GOING WITH THAT GIRL?!? WHAT IS WITH HER HAIR?!? THAT DISEMBODIED HAND IS PEELING OR SOMETHING!! MY MIND IS BLOWN. AND I’M NOT SURE WHY. Is this a good album cover? I don’t even know, I’m too confused.

Overall Rating:

There is no doubt about it. This album is genius in my eyes, and as thus gets 4.9 out of 5.0. This will one I will come back to for years to come. Hopefully you will to.

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (2009) Part 1 of 2

The Music:

Sometimes, once in a great while. Music makes me feel intense emotion. Songs that have been perfected to a point where they make you want to feel a certain way. Be it joy, sorrow, or rage. If music can move you, it’s a scary and exciting thing. Embryonic has gripped me in this way. Some songs on the album make me feel, well, downright evil. A nightmare that I don’t want to end, because it serves as a muse. This sort of music, layered with a thousand different sounds, makes your head want to spin right off of your shoulders.

Now the Flaming Lips are master producers. Their last four releases have held significant importance in my own musical life, and each CD has been unique. But Embryonic sees them take everything you thought you knew about them, and bashes it out of your skull. When you first pop in Embryonic, it’s like hitting a brick wall at 100 mph.  Gone are the days of the Lips sounding like happy songbirds flying through waves of psychodelica and airs of peaceful ambience. Here to stay is hypnotic music that will kidnap your mind and take you into space.

The opening track on the first disc, “Convinced of the Hex” attempts to shovel all the bizarreness into your brain from the get go. Full of distorted rhythm and a heavy bass, the track is hard to listen to at first, but give it about half a minute and the sounds begin to mesh together well. One of my favourite parts about it is the bell section that chimes in at every accent. Not many artists utilize instruments like xylophones, so its always a welcome addition in my book. We get a repeat performance by the bell section on track two “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine”, a much dreamier sounding track that still feels off due to some of the noises that invade it to keep you awake. “Evil” gives you a moment to rest with much more ambient feel, this track brings Coyne’s vocals to the forefront, and honestly, is much closer to the Lips of yesteryear than the others.

Here let’s take a breather. I want you to see how awesome these guys sound live, how exciting they are. Here is “Convinced of the Hex”, it doesn’t quite do their stage show justice, so I will also show a cool video that kinda shows you how their show is setup and how it looks (at like 50x speed).

As you can see, a lot of balloons and crazy lights are utilized at their shows, also note the giant vat of what appears to be embryonic fluid that is suspended above the audience. The Lips don’t mess around.

Next up is one of the several instrumentals on Embryonic. “Aquarius Sabotage” assaults you with wonderful noise, this beautiful mess sorts itself out by the end and carries you through it to “See the Leaves”, and here, is where you know that this shit is gonna get heavy. “See the Leaves” rings out with a commanding if demented bass line that drives you through the entire experience. I get chills down my spine whenever this track transitions over from “Aquarius Sabotage”, it is a perfect example of a song that makes me feel intense emotion. It’s so damn evil. The way Wayne Coyne delivers his lines is suitable to the tracks evil march,  he echoes, “See the leaves, they’re dying again. See the moth, it’s flying again. See the grass, it’s dying again. See the sun, it’s trying again”.

It’s perfect how the Flaming Lips are able to strike a balance between tracks. After your heart has been racing to “See the Leaves”, tracks “If” and “Gemini Syringes” slow you down, and the latter is quite beautiful to listen to, once again, because the bells are utilized! “Your Bats” is up next, and once again the drums come in to liven things up a little bit. This is another song that finds you wandering through a dreamscape with many sounds to sort through. Then stumble upon the final track of disc one, “Powerless”, a quiet bass led march into a soft spoken and dissonant guitar solo. This track’s sound and length makes it perfect for ending a cd, and that’s only the end of part one!

This is also the end of my first look at Embryonic. There is so much to take in here, that i’m going to break it into two posts over two days. So look forward to disc two soon!

Week 1 Poll Recap and Release of the Week

First off let me say thank you to those who participated. These polls could have failed miserably, but I got a decent amount of voters. I could ask for more, but the amount I was enough to get clear cut results. Without further ado, the favourite artist of the community award goes to…………………

That’s right folks, it looks like most were goo-goo for Gaga in week one. Showing that the power of pop music, can indeed be strong. So for those of you that chose, I hope you enjoyed the Fame Monster as much as I did. But how about the video of the week? Who won that one? Well….

Once again, this time, by a landslide vote, Lady Gaga steals the prize. Winning over half the votes, people have shown that even if a video is quite bizzare, it can still be loved.

Finally, I’d like to take this moment to pick my own personal album of the week. While I enjoyed all of this weeks releases, only one can win, and while Mastodon’s Crack the Skye was the highest rated, I’m going to give the prize to Major Lazer. The sheer uniqueness to some of the tracks helped give it the edge, and the production values are fantastic. This was also something new and exciting for people to listen to. So Major Lazer, my first inductee, welcome to the hall of fame.

And with that said. Good first week everyone. I will continue posting new reviews later today. So be on the lookout! Week two has begun!

Week in Review (Jan 14th-17th)

So this first week has been fairly quick. Five artists in only four days, and I’m only getting started. I want to know what people thought of the first week and will open this post to any comments you want to give. Let me know if you’ve been following my posts! I’d like to know my audience! I’ve also got some fun polls to take to give me an idea of what was liked and what wasn’t. Starting with your favourite artist of the week, and followed by your favourite video of the week (This can be for any reason, even if you didn’t like the song itself, you might still like the video.)

Thanks for sticking with me! I hope you guys had a fun first week! I’ll post the results in a couple of days!

Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do (2009)

The Music:

Wow, this release already wins my surprise hit of the year. The debut of the group Major Lazer, composed of the producers Diplo and Switch, manages to tread territory that is actually…not that common really. Get this, it could be pegged as a dance album, and it is, but the reggae influences found throughout are hard to deny. Some of the tracks make it very easy to see the influence, such as “Can’t Stop Now” or “Cash Flow” are very reggae in sound. These tracks serve their purpose well, but I really want to focus on the peculiarities of the other tracks that make this album really stand above the crowd.

The disc opens up with a song that could be mistaken for the Black Eyed Peas song “Pump It”. This song, “Hold the Line” manages to avoid being as grating as that track though is the fact that it really isn’t pop oriented, and the lyrics are much much racier, (Example: I make your jeans vibrate like a Nokia”. Actually I should point that out right now, most of the tracks on this album are dirty, more than half the songs are about sex or drugs. I have no problem with this, but for those who do not like the seedier side of life, I would steer clear. This album is not for the kids.

One of the best tracks on the album, if only for its sheer weirdness, would be the hardly veiled “Mary Jane”. The song not only sings about it, but sounds, and even reeks of a certain illegal substance. Not a classy track by any means, but the danceable marching band beat helps lighten the mood considerably. The other track that I liked that would make any grandmother blush would be “Bruk Out” a song about a meeting at a…ahem…”gentleman’s club”. The multiple voices, well used autotune, drifty synths, and marching back beat really pull the track together. In fact, half the time you’ll be too busy being entranced by the music to even notice whats actually being said. I also enjoyed “Anything Goes” quite a bit as well. This one has an overall heavier feel than some of the other dance reggae songs.

Now while these tracks are wonderful and all, nothing really pulls the album together, than the varied final four cuts. You have the song that is the closest to a mainstream pop song that you will find on this piece, that being “Keep It Goin’ Louder”. There is lots of autotune on this track, and yet, it seems to fit perfectly. Artists Nina Sky bring in a feminine touch and save the track from being drowned in the tool though. While the song is very accessible, the video for it…is…well…you should just watch it. If you know who Eric Warheim is, you will know that anything he directs is very…very strange…usually in a slightly whacked out way. Just a mild warning.

I really think that video sums up the album pretty good honestly. It is beyond bizzare. Speaking of bizzare, here’s another one, this time for the sweet reggae track “Pon De Floor”.

Warning: “Pon De Floor” showcases what I have found to be called “daggering” which is basically violently dry humping to dance music. While there is nothing R rated about dry humping. There is a lot of dry humping in this video. Like, two minutes of it. And come on, it’s directed by Eric again, so it’s just silly.

So…were you able to listen to the music while watching that? I hope so because the mixing on the track makes it sound super unique compared to the rest of the album. The next track, entitled “Baby”, may be the strangest track of them all. A short minute-nineteen track with a Jamaican man musing about a autotuned baby cry, with lyrics like “Oh my goodness, you have built in autotune, heh, better stop that mechanical crying soon” and “This generation is going to destroy the nation”, it is by far, the most hilarious track on the album, but while some of these tracks are goofy, I would never call this album a comedy release.

The final number on Major Lazer’s first effort is a call to dance the night away, “Jump Up”. This is a perfect example of dance reggae and is a good way to finish off the album. But at this point, I just want you to give the album a chance. There is something on here for almost anyone. The tracks are all varied, and as long as you like electronic music in some way, I’m sure you will find a track to love on this one.

The Album Cover:

Haha, really? This cover is bananas. That’s Major Lazer in the top right, just so you know. This kind of cover really isn’t my bag, I’m not a huge comic book kinda guy. This album art definitely didn’t tell me what I was going to experience aurally at first, but after I listened to it in full, I think it reflects it well.

Overall Rating:

Seeing as I have had this in major circulation on my mp3 player as of late, there is no reason I cannot give this release a 4.6 out of 5.0.