Make Do And Flatline

Rise Records curates an excellent four song split here.

You get two very distinct tastes, the first being Make Do And Mend's carefully collected emotion (think American Football and Hot Water Music) and The Flatliners close out the split wild, raucous and intrepid as punk ought to be. It's two songs by both bands, so this ought to last you a week. It'll be a great week, though.

"Don't" is another Make Do And Mend song. It's aggressive. It exists. But "Tell Me" is the scene stealer. "Tell Me" trembles. "Tell Me" has an ache like a tidal pull. It's one of my favorite songs of 2013 the instant I heard it. Think "Desert Lily," mixed with a smidge of "Coats," their song on Run For Cover's Mixed Signals compilation.

"Tell Me" centers around the chorus of "show me something life won't break / tell me something time can't take away." Yeah, it's dramatic, but like Make Do And Mend's best songs, it's earned with the lyrics "the end will draw you in, just like a moth against the wick" or "a hundred calling bells." "Tell Me" is earnest without being saccharine or using too much of cliche.

 The two Flatliners songs, by comparison are dexterous, fast and seem giddy on the possibility of what the band can do. There's a ridiculous (and ridiculously cool) guitar solo in "Caultron Girls" for the entire second minute of the song that sounds super Wilhelm Scream-y. Which is great. I love Wilhelm Scream. Said solo is one part fitting with the song, another part display of virtuosity, as if daring their friends to one up them.

The song appears to be about the young women who worked on the Manhattan Project without being told what they were working on, and if they spoke about what they did, rumor had it, they were killed. According to one participant, they watched numbers and moved dials, but weren't told why. This (and a cursory Google search) explains lyrics like "your life's a head game / when your job description is naivety."

"Daggers" first vocal is an almost doo-wop "ooooooooh." It's midtempo. Or, as close to mid-tempo as The Flats get. As mid-tempo as "This Respirator," I suppose. Hyperactive. Manic might be a better descriptor. Wait! It sounds like one of the good songs off of Dead To Me's African Elephants. Like someone fed The Flatliners horse tranquilizers and it didn't take.

As a fan of both bands, this represents some of their finest material to date and has me eagerly anticipating fuller portions, but hell, I'm an unwashed music nerd because these tiny portions sometimes contain incredible rewards. I hope they don't get reprinted in a year, by virtue of making the download or vinyl less valuable, but also, these songs being so good I view as the reward for paying attention.

And yes, they ought to be collected in an inevitable b-sides collection. Just in the future, okay? Not right now. Because right now, it's summer 2013 and while I don't have the coolest music or the most new music or the most groundbreaking music, it's new music from two very different bands who have hit their stride, but not yet their peak.

Alas, none of the full songs are on YouTube quite yet, but you can get a taste of the split below, which includes, luckily enough, 45 seconds of "Tell Me" and 45 seconds of "Caultron Girls."

Empty Three 2013

What the phrase "hardcore gamer" means to me, the morning of E3.

Starting today, most of the major players in making expensive, traditional videogame experiences will be speaking about their newest product. (Spoiler alert: Those newest products will likely be pretty fucking awesome.) That said, most of the developers I'm interested in are either so idiosyncratic or so large that they can either have their own conventions, or will announce things on their own time for their own reasons, that E3 seems like a colorful parade every year of which I have no very strong interest in anything being shown. I think "oh, that looks cool," for  three days straight. There are worse things.

If I'm honest, half the reason I'm here is to see Giant Bomb or Revision 3 talk about games. Those folks know what they're talking about and they seem pretty charming as they do it.

And that's probably a good thing, me passing out of the target demographic for "hardcore gamers." Depending on your definition, of course. I play Diablo 3 with my friends roughly every week and I've got the Humble Bundle open on a tab in Firefox as I write this, so I'm probably still a hardcore gamer, in the sense of James plays videogames and not just the ones that everyone else does, too. But my most recent console is a PS2 and it's staggeringly unlikely now that I'll get a new one for a couple years, ports being fairly easy to do and Steam and Humble Bundles being a fairly reliable line for excellent authored experiences. E3 isn't for me. It's for "hardcore gamers."

Here's the thing: I'm not sure I know any of those "hardcore gamers." I know persons who have been playing videogames since around the time they've been in lower school, but I don't know any "hardcore gamers."

Every so often, you'd hear about "the hardcore," and usually with that phrase precisely, talking about how they were underserved by their console or publisher of choice. I remember it coming out of the Xbox 360 guys most heavily, though that could be my approaching senility. Mostly, it was around the time of the Kinect or Netflix or any of the announcements that Microsoft was making that they might just maybe want their console to do other things in addition to the videogames it already played.

"Is Microsoft paying enough attention to the hardcore" and etc etc. One must understand, this is in a console cycle in which those gamers were delivered the Mass Effect trilogy, the Gears of War trilogy, tree Street Fighters, the Orange Box, six or maybe seven Call of Dutys, Dishonored, two Borderlands, two Batman games, Grand Theft Auto 4, Portal 2, Red Dead Redemption, Spec Ops: The Line, four Halo titles, a couple Rock Bands, two Forzas, two very different Far Crys, a three BioShocks, two Fallouts, Skyrim, two Saints' Rows, a new Deus Fucking Ex, ninety Assassin's Creed titles, L.A. Noire, and oh by the way, this was the first console cycle when DLC was integrated into the experience and you had a direct line into indie games like Braid, Bastion, Limbo, Plants Vs. Zombies, the Penny-Arcade stuff, Shadow Complex, Castle Crashers and anything else you can care to name.

Given all this, they felt underserved.

Politely, I want to ask Geoff Keighley or Adam Sessler, who are nobody's fools except of course their wives', who are these "hardcore gamers?" Because I look at that murderer's row of content and the only word I have is sufficit. It is enough! Does the hardcore have nothing else to do? Do they have literally no other interests in this life that they can pursue?

Do they not read? Are they uninterested in music or television? Is the only thing they do for leisure videogames and are they completely incapable of playing a game again?

E3 is for them and all of the businesses in their orbit. And the excitement, at least on Twitter, is palpable, (An aside: Watching Twitter during the conference feels like I'm waiting for the news to come in from the wire) but it's hard for me to get excited about a bunch of cutscences with carefully scripted gameplay sequences that'll end up on YouTube in a matter of hours. I shouldn't front, though: Those cutscenes and scripted gameplay sequences look fucking cool. The trouble of course, is that it always looks fucking cool. And that's no longer enough.

I think hardcore gamer means that I can wait to be all excited and bothered under the collar about videogames after I get back from work tonight. I think hardcore gamer means if you need me, I'll be playing Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 with my friends and their fiancees. I think hardcore gamer means despite "hardcore gamers," I still love videogames.

It is enough.

In The Aeroplane, Hold.

Michael Bay directing Christie Front Drive.

That's not, technically speaking, true, but the sentence is pithy enough for retweets, so it stays in. It's a little bit true, though. Or maybe it's just that Eric Richter is singing. Hold has a very wide scope. Post-rock is the obvious genre tag.

My first listen to Hold was strange. I was on a plane to Peru and got two hours sleep the night before. So, I drifted in and out of light sleep while Hold played. The effect was disorienting and felt like the experience was swathed in a dreamlike haze. I'd wake up in one song, fall asleep and arise in another. I couldn't (or chose not to) grasp anything of tracklisting or detail. I could only glimpse at the music, through the shroud of fatigue and chance. Authorial intent? I'd been in transit a solid 14 hours.

When I touched down in Lima, I knew I wanted to hear Hold again.

There's an element of colossal, ethereal melody to the endeavor. It's not just the three guitars, though that helps. My knowledge of shoegaze is limited, so I'm not sure what the right language is for massive moments. I believe Highness' members all understand soft/loud dynamics and Richter's voice has a range of melody that they can dig into. Try The Out_Circuit as a comparison. Both go heavy into the soft/loud dynamics but use both fairly naturally, due to the composers previous bands.

Hold is 2 a.m. music, I believe. My touchstone for that is Deafheaven or Envy, but likely yours are better than mine. Explosions In The Sky? Maybe? I believe the softer songs work better than the heavier ones. And heaviness is relative, here. It's not Hope Conspiracy, but Highness can get aggressive. (See "Stitched Together.") "Forking Roads," which immediately follows "Stitched Together" is a wonderful instrumental, one of my favorites since the first two and a half minutes of "A Bridge Too Far."

Holds runs for about 37 minutes over nine tracks. Of the nine, one's an 1:38 interlude and the final track is a :38 outro, with all but one of the songs being longer than a rough 4:30. I suspect that my first listen insulated me somewhat from the minor, but noticeable meandering in the compositions.

Listening to Hold like a sane human being would, front to back, without repeating tracks or sleep deprivation, gives a fairly clear "objective" assessment. It's an excellent  post-rock record, sewn together with Richter's voice, which sounds well suited for the task. His bandmates know how to hold down the rock end of things, and what you get is oriented in that direction, with Richter giving the players an excuse to try those melodies they've heard so much about in their previous bands but never quite got around to.

I don't know if you'll want to listen to Hold drifting in and out of sleep, but the experience was one that turned the familiar act of listening to a bunch of .mp3 files called a record into something exciting and unexpected. Whatever I heard, I heard and whatever I got out of it was my thoughts, without my thirty million filters collectively called the synthesis of my opinion.

In summation: I listened to Hold a couple different ways and I liked it both times. I suspect I'll still like it at the end of this year and perhaps the next. You can buy it here.

This is no longer representative of Highness, but the video I was going to use can't be found using Blogger, so, instead, here's something not quite as good, but still Highness' music.

Sacrosanct Space

I haven't played Sim City. I haven't played Dead Space 3. I haven't played Aliens: Colonial Marines. I haven't played any videogames except Penny-Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, Torchlight 2 and Bejeweled 3 in about a year. Wait. Maybe I've played Jamestown. I've played Diablo 3.

(Pretend I didn't list Jamestown. Shhhhhhhh.)

But I've seen a lot of people talk about DLC or "always-on" experiences and what comes to mind as a player is the idea that my experience of playing a videogame is being interrupted. In the case of always on, it means that I am at the whim of of a developer to make sure their own infrastructure is sound enough to play the experience I have already paid money for.

And that's not a thing that I should have to care about as a player. I've already put down my money. I've already showed, in some cases, sixty examples of good faith, plus tax. When I purchase a book, I don't have to worry about firmware updates to the paper getting between me and the experience.

One could make the same argument for videogame consoles before the current generation. I don't have to worry that my Playstation 2 will decide tomorrow that it needs to connect to the internet before I play a little Dragon Quest 8 before bed. I can play Dragon Quest 8, or maybe you'd prefer Burnout 3, or Persona 4 or whatever game I choose, because the architecture of the system is designed in a way to require the game and the tray and nothing else.

Anything always on changes that. Instead of needing two things, a player/customer now needs three. They need the disc to work. They need the system to work and they need the developers and publishers to be on the ball every day of each year going forward. That's a material change in the relationship between the buyer and the seller. I'm being asked going forward to take on faith that another party will have their ducks in a row.

That isn't a feature.

 

I would like whatever it is I bought to work when I have or carve out the time in my day to play it. I suspect that's why I read so many books as opposed to movies or videogames these days: I can pick up the book and it works immediately. I don't have to sit through five minutes of commercials for other products or anti-piracy warnings, I can just read the book. Books are also portable and easy to use, I say just a little bit facetiously. I can throw one in my bag and it's ready when I am.

I'm surprised I have to say this, but I'm enjoying the very retro feeling of having no popups appear on screen, whether it's an alert that a friend is playing the same game or the game announcing that "you got an achievement!"

What brings my interest in PS2 games and the aforementioned Steam games together is that at least once I'm playing, my playing experience isn't interrupted for an ad to buy more stuff. They take my time seriously.

I felt like I was in high school when I played Penny-Arcade's On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness 3. It demanded me until 3 or 4 a.m.. It accomplished this by telling me a story I wanted to know more about, by interacting with me in a way that felt familiar, but had a couple really excellent twists on the concept and least of all, not interrupting itself to sell additional content.

To a lesser extent, I had this experience with Torchlight II and Bejewled 3. These are games that respect the players. You bought the game, and now, you ought to enjoy it. I don't want to say that it's an "old-school" kind of experience, because Journey exists. But: The idea that the best ad for the next game is the one you're playing right now is a powerful one.

The cardinal sin of Dead Space 3 is not that microtransactions exist inside it, but how those are implemented into the experience of playing the game. The team has spent two odd years and thousands of hours to create an environment that scares the player and all that work is destroyed when the offer is made to you that if waiting 10 minutes to get supplies is too long, you can cut the time in half in exchange for more of your local money.

That's an offer that takes me out of the game, first. Second: Had I paid $60, I'd be furious. I just paid sixty dollars for an entertainment experience and there was something built in for the specific purpose of detracting from the meticulously crafted thing I paid sixty dollars for? Get out of town.

I don't mind DLC. Shit, I like DLC. But don't interrupt my play experience, the thing that got you in the door, to hawk me more shit. Maybe this is my recognition that I am no longer the target market for these experiences and on some level that bums me out. I don't think it is, though. I don't mind being offered DLC. But I do mind how the offer is made.

I want to support developers and publishers that view the time I spend playing their game as sacrosanct. That indicates a respect for my time and my attention, which I am happy and excited to repay with cash dollars, which I suspect is all those developers and publishers wanted in the first place.

As Many Principal Creators As Reasons To Die Number One

I bought Twelve Reasons To Die #1 at a con. My very long two cents follow.

The Twelve Reasons To Die #1 credits page is a nightmare. Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge are credited as creators. Adrian Younge, Ce Garcia and Matthew Rosenberg are credited with the story. Finally, Matthew Rosenberg and Patrick Kindlon are credited as writers.

Rosenberg is credited a third time, somehow, as the bookrunner. It's a comic book, so hearing that there's enough balls in the air that someone deserves credit for keeping them going who isn't an editor is a worrying sign.

But okay, those designations can be parsed out. The characters are Ghost's (because Mr. Killah sounds a little bit too on the nose) and Mr. Younge's. The story is a collaboration between Mr. Younge, Mr. Garcia and Mr. Rosenberg and the actual script specifics are Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Kindlon.

When you get to who's credited on the art, you may as well read tea leaves.

You have and this is no joke, two Illustrators, not one but three Guest Illustrators and this is the genius part, two Production Artists. Luckily, there's only one colorist and only one letterer, who do the herculean job of making sure there's at least some consistency between all of these pencillers. If anyone deserves a hand here, it's the colorist and letterer. Twelve Reasons To Die #1 doesn't have a chance to set a tone, because odds are good that if you flip the next page, a completely different penciller is telling the story.

(Oh, and the narration text takes an unexplained jump in size on the final page.)

Politely, it's a mess.

As a rule, the best comics tend to come from the singular vision of one person or a single writer/penciller team. By comparison, you have seven people pencilling this comic, and five people writing Twelve Reasons To Die.

The script makes me groan without pleasure.  In a scene where Ghost shows up to a club with his crew, wrecks some Italian mob goons with guns, the narration is, (from the perspective of the boss goon/strawman) and I quote: "He was something we had never seen before…we were soldiers…Anthony Starks was a fucking weapon." 

Rosenberg and Kindlon are both smart guys, so I find it very hard to believe they wrote something that stupid. Was this Ghost's people? Was this Ghost himself, making absolutely certain that he came off as badass as possible in his own vanity project? I have no idea. Given Wu-Tang's history with comics, it's hard to believe.

There's some solid panel to panel storytelling, for which Rosenberg and Kindlon and whomever pencilled it deserve credit, but there's one thing missed, which is kind of important.

Ghost dies and only one person mentions it.

Right. The conceit of comic, which, incidentally, I had to read an interview with Adrian Younge to figure out, was that Ghost was a mobster, who got killed as a certain record played, and through that, somehow, transferred his essence to 12 particular records, that when played, will kill the gangsters that killed him. I think? According to a different interview, these 12 gangsters are all heads of their own gangs. Awesome.

The problem is that Ghost dying off panel is incongruous, given the only other time he appeared, he was very much alive. The next time you see him, it's a disembodied face that comes out of a vinyl record.

Ghost makes an entrance in a club with his crew, shooting men with guns, beating them with chairs and then, taking a chair leg, slashing a dude's throat with it, then throwing that leg into the eye of a mobster and then after that, taking another chair leg and stabbing yet another mobster in the throat with the second chair leg. That's his entrance. He's got one word balloon and it sounds completely and utterly baffling with the rest of the story.

He says: "Niggaz heard y'all run the game 'round here. We got shit to talk about, ya nahmsayin."

Thus, the next time you see Ghost, with the implication he's dead, it makes no goddamn sense. The writers just set up Ghost as a walking Act of God, or if you prefer "a fucking weapon," so how in the fuck did he die? Old age? Venereal disease? High cholesterol? Because if the answer is he got killed by other gangsters, that flies in the face of how the character was portrayed the first time he showed up in the comic.

By and large, it's the parts that don't involve Ghost where the comic does well. I enjoyed the storytelling around finding these records and their effects on the gangsters they're meant for. My favorite scene, I think was the same gangster, I think, subcontracting out the finding of the pieces of vinyl to a young black man not too proud to take the job, but conflicted enough to desire respect for his work. The whisper: "We prefer the term crate-digger," is excellent.

I oscillate on how I feel about the gangsters. If there's a popular media portrayal of gangsters that the writers don't lean on, it's not for lack of trying. You've got gangster with the veneer of nobility. You've got slimy gangster. You've got "we're just businessmen and we fought the Nazis" gangster.  I'm surprised they haven't gotten to off-brand Scarface. Maybe that's the next issue.

I think it's the same gangster, actually. With the shifting pencillers in the first half of the comic, I'm not sure what's flashback and what's present day and who is who.

Maybe I'm too harsh. This is a vanity project comic about gangsters. Perhaps off-brand Scarface is part and parcel of obeying and enjoying the genre. I'm not sure. This is pretty obviously a review I'm writing to organize my thoughts. I wrote this originally because I was disappointed in the issue. The original conclusion was:

I paid $4 for this comic, mostly because I wanted to support Pat Kindlon and figured it was worth a roll of the dice to see if he and Ghost worked well together. I now know. I would not do it again.

Considering the comic again, there's enough other things in the comic that hit well, that I second guess the statement. It should go without saying, though, if you're a fan of any of the writers' musical endeavors, get those instead. $4 an issue is asking a bit much for a story I'm hot and cold on, but if you're a fan of Ghost's stories or Wu-Tang acolyte, I think you'll enjoy it.





I suppose I ought to use something from the album from which this comics comes, but instead, here, have Ghostface Killah as the champ. Enjoy.
                                     

Chris Wollard And The Solo Thieves

"Obey and enjoy the genre." Michael Moorcock.

"They said guitar solos aren't punk rock, well, fuck you!" Chris Wollard.

I'm gonna talk about Canyons, the newish record by Chris Wollard And The Ship Thieves now.

It sounds like Chris Wollard having fuckin' fun. Hot Water Music (from which the songwriter and performer cannot possibly be divorced from now) is, well, emotive and anthemic. I wrote about "Seein' Diamonds." I could also write about "Paper Thin" or "The End." Best I don't.

Canyons? Unlike that. Joyous, packed full of guitar solos. I don't even like guitar solos, but I succumb to this disc. Do you need me to tell you what "Poison Friends" is about? I don't think so. "Sick, Sick Love?" Nah. You want anthems? Get outta town. I suspect Hot Water Music songs are a document of his life, but Ship Thieves doesn't have to be. Ship Thieves is "oh man, this is awwwwwwwwwesome."

I think Canyons is Chris Wollard's id.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a long jump from Ship Thieves to Hot Water Music.

(There will be no swimming jokes. Canyons' cover has a bird in flight on it and I am committed to theme.)

None of these songs would be amiss coming through a speaker at a hardware store. Well, they might sound a lot more polished, more soundly constructed, a lot fucking better, but they'd still fit right in. Well, okay. "Dream In My Head" is a little short for 93X the Rock crowd ("Working for the weekendtm", with a forty five minute commercial free block coming up in three and a half hours) or whomever, but it's short enough for the Hot Water followers to get a grasp of what comes next.

The trick Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves pull here is that they make it look casual. Tossed off. Of course it isn't. Of course it takes work. Of course these songs took days to put together, but the germs of them came naturally, I'm sure.

Ever hear a friend of yours talk about something they love and you get lost and enraptured in their enthusiasm for it and skill at it? That's what Canyons is. It is a vector for Chris Wollard's considerable enthusiasm for guitar rock. There's a ZZ Top shaped hole in my guitar music listening, so I have to be careful about how I talk about Canyons, because there's genre staples I know only from parody. Pretending to type with authority here sounds problematic.

In a sentence: I am prejudiced against guitar solos and I cannot help but enjoy Canyons.

Sadly, this song is not "Dream In My Head." It is called "Poison Friends." But! For "Poison Friends" not being "Dream In My Head," it's pretty good. Play guitar solos! Drink beer! Et al!
                            

It's Dessa In The Morning, But It's Good For Morale.

Talking about Dessa's music is an act that stretches my comfortable vocabulary. Maybe it's the M.A. Phil. after her name. Maybe it's the lyrics nerd in me. She's one of the artists that makes my obsessive attention to what's said worth it, I think. She...well...when the songs are played right, it feels like I'm reclaiming my vulnerability, to abuse a Thomas Barnett line.

One of my favorite moments from a Dessa song was a re-worked Frida Khalo line. She's an rapper who writes rhymes where Bertrand Russell gets as many big-ups as whiskey. Of course her new song, "Warsaw" sounds like a lead pipe covered in grime, left out in the pouring rain. You're supposed to dance to it. If The Knife menaced people with knives? Yes, it sounds like that.

This was an interview for AbsolutePunk.net in advance of Castor, The Twin and then Jason Tate ignored it, so here you go. First interview of the new cycle. Suuuuuuure. Read on.

What have you been reading recently? What books (if any) do you bring on tour? After tours, who has stuck around? What's surprised you positively about coming back to the bed, the books and the rotary phone after the U.S. tour?

I buy books constantly on tour. I usually go for dense, academic material: science or philosophy I'd always meant to explore, but never got around to--exactly the opposite of what's appropriate for a person living in a noisy, moving van. Most of these books end up on my coffee table. I resist shelving them to sustain the delusion that I will be reading them very soon. At the moment, however, I am 50 pages into The Tin Drum and 75 pages into Sting's autobiography, Broken Music (gift from Dad). 

"Dots and Dashes," that opening "vision quest at the Best Western, the best dressed wreck at the hotel lounge, I found out the message in the bottle is the booze" is pretty wicked. There's gotta be a story behind it, right? Do tell.

Um...not really. As a touring rapper, I guess I just spend a lot of time in economy hotels. Sooner or later, life seeps into the imagination and is re-expressed in a lyric. 

If Poe in the glovebox, Plath on the dash is true, how do you get up in the morning?

Most mornings I get up with some reluctance, hitting my stride right before bed. I suppose I've always tended toward the melancholic, and have always been attracted to dark narratives. To romanticize sadness is a teenage impulse, but to acknowledge it--rather than looking for a ray of cheeriness to blot it out--seems like the clear-eyed way to live. 

Let's say a venue wants to treat you right and leaves you some whiskey backstage. What do they buy? Or if that's too casual with the alcoholism, are you worried about the whiskey catching up to you or has it already?

I drink Godfathers: one part whiskey, one part amaretto, on ice. I'm more mindful of my drinking than I used to be, in part because the hangovers are more vengeful than they used to be.  

Will there be a Mineshaft III on the next one?

I think the Mineshaft narrative ends with the second installment, the prequel. Time to explore some new themes. 

There's a line in "Low Light, Low Life", where you say Bertrand Russell was right, but it's irrelevant. As an M.A., you know better than most, Russell wrote a lot. What else was he right about? Also: Does philosophy help with being in hip-hop? Does it complicate matters in a way that's useful?

Bertrand Russell wrote a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. I'm an atheist, and although I certainly don't spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of their faith, that book was a beautifully written, intelligent expression of some very elegant arguments. For me, the study of philosophy was game-changing, it informed my understanding of sex, conflict, faith, human rights, money, ethics, and art. Philosophy has affected everything I do, rap included. 

Your bartender (from before you were old enough to drink?) does backups, that woman from "Alibi" I assume is a friend and "Dixon's Girl" sounds like a character from a Chandler novel. How do you meet these people?

I'm taking this question as a compliment. I think we've all probably got some pretty compelling stories. There's a trick though in telling them well. 

Is there anything like "Dutch" or "Scuffle" on No Kings or your 2012 record? (I'm partial to the abrasive/rapping songs, but listening to "Palace" and those Minneapolis Public Radio sessions on YouTube has me convinced this whole singing on tracks has worked out pretty well for you.)

There are plenty of aggressive tracks on No Kings and on my new disc. Castor, the Twin is mostly wings; the next one's definitely got some teeth too. 

Judging by "The Man I Knew," it sounds like one of your friends has discovered cocaine. Is that gonna be awkward when this dude hears the song? Does he know about it?

I called him, and he said it was cool. Still not totally sure he's listened to it the whole way through. He's an awesome dude though, we'll make it just fine. 

There's tons more questions, but let's end it with the really important one: Now that Astro lives in Minneapolis, when are you and he going to sit down and do a song together about whiskey and rapping?
Very proud to say that I booked Astonautalis' housewarming show: just a few days after he moved to Minneapolis, I had him on stage at the Guthrie Theater. He's one of the smartest lyricists out there, glad to have him on the hometown team.

"Warsaw" sounds like a club jam from Blade Runner. I don't think I can say it sounds pretty, bleepity and distant all at the same time better than that.