Dearly Missed Partycrasher

Partycrasher should be called Dearly Missed Houseguest. I understand why Partycrasher isn't titled that way, but at least in my home it is welcome like a friend I haven't seen in six years. Some perspective is useful: Their previous full length Career Suicide had an anti-Romney song ("Pardon Me, Thanks A Lot") whilst he was still best known as a Massachusetts politician. That's how long it's been.

Any outlet worth their salt is going to talk about how Partycrasher is two things: It is fast and it is

technical, and given how thoroughly saturated Career Suicide was with those two things, Partycrasher is worth marveling over. Those outlets are right.  What they're unlikely to mention, however, is melody. Syrupy melody, everywhere. At some points, Partycrasher feels like a DESCENDENTS record played by IRON MAIDEN. "I'll wait till the end of the world / to get the last laugh on you," Nuno sings and his voice almost makes me desire the apocalypse.

It's also a stunning record, quietly.  "Iceman Left A Trail" has some pitch-perfect BAD RELIGION oozing ahhhhhs beneath and behind the fretboard wizardry at the front and the back of the song. If you've seen A WILHELM SCREAM, you don't have to work hard to imagine this song being performed with Trevor Reilly and Mike Supina grinning at each other like madmen, trading off the racing, intricate guitar leads. "Devil Don't Know" drops an acapella chorus that I swear is stolen out of Motown.

This is A WILHELM SCREAM's first not-Blasting Room recorded full length, though it's Blasting Room mixed, and if the band didn't make a point to mention it, I doubt the listener would notice. Errr, well, Nick Angelini's drums are less prominent in the mix. Blasting Room does drums in a specific way.

As of this writing, there's six absolute stunners and five other songs that don't click yet. I'm not worried. I felt that way about Career Suicide when I first heard it, too.

Reilly once said something like the band wouldn't release another record if it wasn't better than what came before it. And if you've spent any time alive at all, that sounds like complete horseshit. Bands release records all the time that pale in comparison to their prior material for any number of reasons (no inspiration, no time, new members, lazy writing, lazy living, contractual obligation, listener expectations, listener error) and lie because, well, they've got another record to sell.

Trouble is, each successive A WILHELM SCREAM record actually is better than the last.

Mute Print sounds positively amateur now, Ruiner followed it up with a pitiless focus, while ratcheting up the degree of difficulty, a year to breathe and then Career Suicide appeared, doing everything better, in less time, with two very epic songs (five odd minutes) to wreck the curve. The stopgap self-titled EP in 2009 showed even more dexterous solos than Career Suicide, where bassist Brian Robinson had the standout solo on the record.

Partycrasher has more technically challenging parts better integrated with the songs they're a part of. There's nothing over four minutes, but the songs lose none of their wow factor. There is joyful virtuosity in these songs, evident in the couple seconds of teasing on "Boat Builders," "Devil Don't Know" and "Born A Wise Man."

Speaking of closer "Born A Wise Man," it is everything I could want from an A WILHELM SCREAM song. It is fast, it is precise and it it speaks about what I assume is the band's origin. It treads similar themes to Career Suicide's closer "We Built This City! (On Debts And Booze)"

1)A WILHELM SCREAM isn't in this for the money, because there isn't any.
2) There's a lot of hard work involved that will go on for a very long time.
3) In a touring circuit of liars, frauds and disingenuous "heroes" out for a buck, A WILHLEM SCREAM is sincere. We know this because they tell us.

It's y'know, boilerplate, but the specifics shine.

I've only listened to Partycrasher straight for six days. My gut is I'll be less enthusiastic in a couple months. But then again, I'm so enthusiastic now I felt compelled to write. I know I'll be listening to Partycrasher for years to come, if that softens the blow.

I feel strange recommending a record that half of which is either there or hasn't clicked for me yet. I doubt I could do this with other bands, but I'm talking about A WILHELM SCREAM. They're good for it.

I paid No Idea $7 for a download on Halloween. If I had known the download didn't come with lyrics, I would have hesitated, but hopefully No Idea will rectify that.

In short: Partycrasher is faster and more squiggly and more catchy than you'd expect, from a band known for all of these things. It's a marvel, but it's A WILHELM SCREAM. They've made marvels their job.

Ladies, gentlemen, "Born A Wise Man." The whole song is great, but that thrashy outro is a challenge to us all. "The bar is now here," it says. "Who's up?"

Parts Of Summer, Waiting For Winter

It's great being wrong.

I remember being worried in my review of Castor, the Twin that Dessa's aim was to align herself with a field where she wasn't so interesting or striking, and by and large with Parts of Speech, she has done that. Sure, there's more straight-forward rap bangers like "Fighting Fish" or "Warsaw", but Parts of Speech is defined by Dessa actually full on singing.

And so, I expected the approach largely to fail to my ears. The trouble for me is, Dessa succeeds and at some points, gloriously.

Where I must eat a full plate of crow and maybe two or three is "It's Only Me." It's precisely the song I was afraid of. It's 3:48, with one verse, two choruses and a hyper-long bridge. Most of the song is soft cooing and light instrumentation, courtesy of Dessa's backing band. It's the thing I was most scared of and after living with the disc for three odd weeks, it's my favorite song on Parts Of Speech.

(Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain. If they ask, it's "Warsaw." Blade Runner club jam, bro. But you and me? "It's Only Me.")

It could not exist without Dessa's backing band, the same jazz guys on Castor, The Twin, who deliver on "It's Only Me" a restrained and soft background over which Dessa sings.

"I've been having that dream / it seems I always will / I don't know what the thing means / except it sends me to the telephone."

Parts of Speech is well-realized melancholy, the first record of new material written with and for a group of jazz guys to perform behind her. That should be clear on its face, but this writer has a keen grasp of the obvious. I was cautious during Castor, I think, because the record was written around Doomtree's compositions. Speaking of which, Paper Tiger does a great job on the one-two punch of singles "Call Of Your Ghost" and "Warsaw." Parts Of Speech does not suffer anything in interpretation.

As for the rest of Parts Of Speech, it's a regrets record. I listened to it in a darkened Las Vegas hotel room, complete with a two foot long stain in the carpet and my cell phone off. I drank a lot of tequila for a week and lied about why I was in town. Parts Of Speech suited that mood like a pair of opera gloves.

It's not all sad slow jams, but those stick out to me. "Skeleton Key" is upbeat and good in the sense of the song is solidly constructed, but I doubt it will be anyone's favorite. By the time you get past "Skeleton Key," you understand what you're in for. "Dear Marie" follows that one and it's a letter to a Marie, with the subtext I'm guessing, of Dessa kissing Marie's boyfriend. It is followed by a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm Going Down."

You did read that correctly. It is effective. The song feels morose and aches.

There's less powerful tracks, of course. "Annabelle" or "The Lamb" come to mind. I skip them. They're important stories, but unsuccessful songs, to my ears. "The Lamb" lyrically bears a very strong resemblance to the story of "The Chaccone."

The Chaconne:
"first a darling
then a marvel
when we met
I was still a young girl"


The Lamb:
"If they ask me, I'll deny it
But I remember what you did
While it's true you were a young man, then
I was just a kid"

"Call Off Your Ghost" is probably about the same person as" Go Home." "Icing Burns," a non-album track included with my bandcamp download, I'd bet money is about the same person as "Alibi."

Parts Of Speech got released in the spring/summer of 2013. It doesn't at all feel like a summer record. It feels appropriate for frigid weather. It feels like it ought to be there in your ears with winter's chill around your neck. Maybe I'm feeling too much of the Minneapolis in the record. Parts of Speech feels cold and distant, like a faraway wave goodbye.

In the Phonogram parlance, "It's Only Me" is a curse song. Listen to staring at a text message or a picture and it'll work its melancholic charms.

Humans! Make! Games!

Two quick disclaimers.
One: When I say assholes, I do not mean racist/sexist/otherwise dead-end beliefs and the people that espouse them. I mean people with opinions that deviate from the "Bacon is a vegetable" folks of nerdom.
Two: The article I'm responding to here is a couple months old now.

My favorite games aren't my games. "My games" are the products of the vision of a specific studio. I play Blizzard games. I play Supergiant games. I play Runic games and so on ad infinitum. But I can't claim them as mine, except in the sense that I own a license.

Ben Kuchera's article, over at the Penny-Arcade Report (these days invaluable) largely avoids this point, when talking about assholes making your games, using Fish and Teasdale as examples. Fish, for saying hyperbolically what serious games commentators have being saying for years (Japan's games for this console cycle by and large have been disappointing or worse) and Teasdale for the mortal sin of being sick of space marines and off-brand Tolkien as settings for videogames.

The article uses a weak defense of personhood to throw a veil over Phil Fish or Mr. Teasdale. "Hey, guys, Phil Fish might piss you off on Twitter, but, hey, isn't Fez great" is the takeaway. That's weak and Kuchera ought to know better. A more vigorous defense might be: This person has an opinion contrary to your own. He is entitled to it. And, given that he's a game developer and a gamer himself, perhaps their criticisms are warranted.

And even that's weaker than the point that reminds us these people are individuals: They're allowed to be wrong and speak before his thoughts are fully formed.

Teasdale is an asshole for speaking his mind about sci-fi/fantasy games, apparently. He's probably just letting off steam. But more than that? He's right. Sci-fi and fantasy are well-trod settings for videogames, some incredible, most passable.

It's not a debatable premise that a setting involving American men with assault weapons in shiny space armor is tired. That's a fact of life in 2013. Same for the post-apocalyptic genre or off-brand Tolkein. Teasdale saying that he's not interested in those settings or trappings personally shows that he's a creative, discriminating human who has made those games for 15 years of his life already. And Kuchera ought to know better than to call that unreasonable.

For an example outside gaming: Go to any big comic convention and count how many male "zombification" artists or scantily clad women in zombie makeup you can see before you start taking sanity damage or lose interest in zombies as a storytelling device.

And yes, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" is a thing Picasso said, but in the canon of videogames there's terribly few artists, or, I suppose, studios with a chosen aesthetic and the a) vision and b) talent to properly exploit it.

But beyond these comments speak to something else in life: Many people who consume art/entertainment/whatever are dismayed to learn that discrete persons with opinions create "their" media. Take any well-known creative on Twitter and they will tell you they get people telling them "why do you keep posting politics on my twitter or I unfollowed you because you had an opinion I dislike."

(We pass over the cardinal sin on Twitter, being a woman with an opinion. Whatever you do, don't do that.)

Saying: "Well, you followed me and if you don't like what I say or think the unfollow button is right there" gets you branded as an asshole. Put a different way: Asserting your right to discrete personhood in the space which you designate as yours for mental overflow is being an asshole.

You can see how that's worrisome.

And so the problem isn't with "asshole" devs, or people with opinions, but gamers ourselves. Though, I could also substitute people.

Gamers are by and large, scared of people's different, opposing opinions. I suspect it's a matter of how young the market for console shooters skews is, but it feeds into a larger human feeling that we don't know we want something new until an artist has already put in the time to envision, create and distribute it, we'd largely prefer a more precise, better variation on an idea that's come before.

Case in point: Grand Theft Auto 3.

To sum up: I hope we get more assholes making games, the same way I hope gamers can feel less defensive about a person trying to manifest their creative vision. We've got a long way to go.

It's a blog about ideas, so have a song called I've Got An Idea... by End Of A Year/Self Defense Family. Enjoy.

Punk Rock For Young Avengers Fandom

Hello, Young Avengers fandom.

Perhaps you are interested in punk rock. Maybe you read that excellent Freaky Trigger piece about punk rock and Young Avengers and thought, "huh." Maybe you've heard a little before but Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie are getting you more interested. In that case, let me introduce you.

Please.

I'll dispense with the backstory: Nubile white men with guitars a good half century ago figured out you didn't need talent to play music, you just needed anger and momentum.

Punk rock's major contribution to music's history (aside from a reminder to get out before you start to suck) is the idea that an aspiring artist does not require someone else's imprimatur to make music. If someone isn't making the music you want to hear, you are now deputized to make it yourself.

Seriously. If you've got a song in your heart: Write it. Now. This very minute. Stop reading. Go. Do it. Now. Do it.

There's connective tissue between punk rock and comics, if you know where to look. Most obviously, Patrick Kindlon and Matthew Rosenberg, to name two, have released some of my favorite music ever. Mike Cavallaro, known to the Eastern Seaboard as Johnny X from Sticks And Stones, Becky Cloonan, Rick Remender, Jen Van Meter and ad infinitum. Gillen and McKelvie's history with music and a member of punk's extended family, Britpop, is suggested by the above image. It's called Phonogram, there's two volumes and Volume Two, The Singles Club, forced me to confront my fear of dancing. It presented better arguments for dancing than my reasons not to dance.

This is not a history, but a survey. Five songs, cast widely to get a taste in your mouth. If you like it, come back next week. If not, you're only out the time you took to listen to five songs. These aren't my five favorite punk rock songs in the world, but these are five songs which all suggest many of the cardinal directions punk rock moves in. You may hopefully find something you like.

The songs hopefully suggest the focus, the lens, the catalyst and the fuel. There's a Romanticism to punk that I find still useful as I age. There's other parts to punk, the branded nihilism, the clear-eyed hopelessness, but those are doors to go through later on. I still need to get you through this one first.

Like all surveys, it's necessarily incomplete. Emo is a longer story than I have time for and oh God I'm rambling. Five songs. Play loud.






Until I figure out how to embed playlists into Blogger, just go here.

Metacritic: A Thing I Feel No Guilt About

In a conclusion to a well-sourced feature on the pernicious uses of Metacritic, Jason Schreier wrote something that as a longtime critic, I cannot countenance. He wrote that "[Metacritic is] harmful to critics, who have to deal with PR pressure and the guilt of taking money out of people's pockets."
 

That's wrong and I'll explain why.

 First, last and always: You're a journalist or critic. There's always going to be PR people looking to influence your opinions. It was around before Metacritic, it'll be around after Metacritic. That's the price of the job.
 

Second and more worrisome, it moves the guilt for lost wages or compensation from the people who signed a contract in good faith to the critic who isn't a party to that agreement. Critics are not responsible for a) the contracts that publishers and developers sign b) for a third party's secret interpretation and secret mechanism as to how they collate and weigh an unknown number of reviews, the end result of which they call critical opinion c) the quality of a videogame they didn't make.
 

Guilt is for when I actually did something wrong. Guilt is not for when people who aren't me secretly interpret my thoughts, then though a secret mechanism weigh it alongside 30 other reviews and spit out a number which two parties agree to use for the exchange of money. If developers and publishers want to use that for the distribution of money, the only place I have in that conversation is to remind them reviews are subjective, I am biased and the mechanism they're using changes my language and skews my intent.
 

The critic's job is to have an opinion, write it as clearly as they are able and defend it. The critic's job is to express their synthesized thoughts on an experience, whatever they may be. Good and bad in the same review. Certainty and confusion. Ignorance and knowledge. Transparency and more transparency.
 

This is not to say I am perfect. I have been influenced by PR people. I have failed in articulating my thoughts and I have failed in which ones I chose to publish. That said, critics shouldn't feel guilty for other people's use of Metacritic and anyone who makes them feel they should is not their friend.
 

To presume to speak to Mr. Schreier directly,  the next time someone blames you for not making an incentive because of a delicate score, you tell them you've got some sympathy for them, but that's as far as it goes. And you say it just like that, too, because the contracts signed by developers and publishers are things that are their responsibility, and any guilt they want you to feel is something that gives them cover. Now, if you made a factual error in your review, that's different and that's legit and you fix that. You make damn sure that fix is reflected in the conclusion or score.
 

But your score doesn't take money out of the hands of developers. Deals that make the money developers receive from a publisher dependent on Metacritic (an entity that openly admits to skewing a critic's words) do.

 











 

 

 

 

 "The Bride" by Crime In Stereo. I listened to this all of my junior and senior years of college, and not merely for the phrase "your bachelor's won't earn half the debt that you've incurred." It remains poignant today. As an aside, I had to write this blog four times before I got it to where it is now. This one is the shortest, best and most defensible, I think.

Lazarus, Finally.

On my way back from jury duty, I bought comics. I bought the new issues of Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman, Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye and Kieron Gillen's and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers.

These are all critically acclaimed comics, though Hawkeye more than the others, but I also bought one more: Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's Lazarus.

My friends on Twitter who also like comics are new to comics and are committed to Hawkeye and Young Avengers in a way that gives me hope. Both series are anchored by creative teams that are absolutely essential to the premise. Without Matt Fraction writing or David Aja drawing most of Hawkeye, I'd be out. Not interested. Ditto for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie on Young Avengers. When they leave, I'm out the door too.

Gillen's hinted that his end is in sight, and Aja's talking on Twitter about how he'd like to do something creator owned with Matt Fraction after Hawkeye wraps up.

Though, if Aja leaves and Fraction stays on then I can be persuaded to stick around, if Steven Wacker can keep finding new, excellent talent to pencil the comic. Mr. Wacker being an editor that keeps emotive and imaginative pencillers up his sleeve, that's a meaningful consideration. Hawkeye and Young Avengers are proudly superhero comics and that's what powers them. There's conflict and loss and fear without the appalling "grittiness" that invades a post-Brian Azzarello comics industry.

And that's not me taking a swipe at Azzarello. His Wonder Woman is a great comic. It's strange, and a friend of mine argues it has terribly little to do with Wonder Woman and I still am not on board with the Amazons being praying mantis style murderers, but it's Wonder Woman being written by an A-list writer that isn't being pushed into crossover hell. I'll take it.

That this is the best of all possible worlds in DC brings me to Lazarus.



The first image of Lazarus is a pistol being discharged and the second image is the bullet impacting a woman. The first double page spread is of said woman lying on the ground, bleeding out at least two quarts of blood.

Lazarus is not all-ages.

I talked to a different, dear friend, who I have to plead with to get him to read Global Frequency, I told him that Lazarus (or at least its first issue) was about family and money and power. And I was right, but I wasn't being terribly precise. Sure, it's about family, money and power, but it's mostly about manipulation, control and violence.

Two people get shot in the head in Lazarus and I suspect a lot more will further down the road. Words are thrown around, but the people who live their true value tend to die real quick.

I tried to read other comics after i finished Lazarus. I could only stomach Young Avengers because of the baleful twist at the end, with entire swaths of Hawkeye's dog issue being lost on me. Hawkeye #11 is a masterpiece of virtuosity from Fraction and Aja. It didn't entirely land with me. I respect the hell out of it, since I can see the work that went into it, but that's as far as it goes. As for what happened in Wonder Woman, I straight up cannot remember. Lazarus leaves me with a chill beneath my skin, sinking into my bones.

I do not believe the Twitter crew would be so excited for Lazarus as they are for Hawkeye or Young Avengers. Lazarus is Greg Rucka writing for penciller Michael Lark with a point and letting his anger power his storytelling. Lark, the co-creator is methodical, precise and not flashy. What they concoct is vile and perhaps even corrosive. Put another way, I don't think Tumblr's feels are ready.

Lazarus is 100 Bullets one hundred years in the future. It's a hard sci-fi comic about a handful of families that control the world's wealth and spend most of the their time scheming over how to take other people's money while jealously guarding their own. This gives Lark a chance to pencil what he's known for: conflicted people with handguns and also lets him do design and world-build. What I see looks plausible, sadly, and even accurate.

In 2011, I read Rucka's novel Walking Dead as I rode along the Amalfi Coast. Whatever joy I was supposed to take from the gorgeous scenery was obliterated by Rucka's exacting, unswerving vision of the global web of sex slavery. I didn't enjoy the book, it wasn't meant to be enjoyed, per se, but it was pernicious and it was precise. Between now and then, Rucka published another novel called Alpha and was given an offer he couldn't refuse by Steven Wacker to write the Punisher, but neither of those works, despite also featuring men with guns, had the same kind of tone. (We pass over Stumptown, since there's too much humor.)

It is now 2013, and Lazarus exists. It feels like it should have come sooner, but it's still timely. Alpha was about geo-politics and terrorism scares. The Punisher was about a man keeping his word, however baleful that word may be. But Lazarus is about right the fuck now and what's coming for us down the pike.

Welcome back, Mr. Rucka. We missed you.






I said elsewhere that I wanted to write something that feels like how I feel when I listen to Cursed. I think Lazarus has a very, very good shot of being that piece of media. Below, find  one of my favorite tracks, called Magic Fingers. "When they say amen/they mean I hope you live forever/hand to mouth."

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."