Archive for 2011

Old 97′s – The Grand Theatre, Volume Two (Music Review)

The Grand Theatre, Volume Two cover

Old 97's - The Grand Theatre, Volume Two

Judging by the album artwork, the Old 97’s latest release tries to draw a sharp contrast from The Grand Theatre, Volume One. While that one featured a sweeping picture of a stately theater, Volume Two uses the high-contrast, washed-out aesthetic of DIY punk photocopies. The choice arguably has some merit, since this volume is focused more on the simple, repetitive rock that makes up the core of the Old 97’s sound. If it was meant to define the album, though, it’s a little disappointing: Volume One was most notable for its broad range, including a few songs in this very style. Volume Two, though it still features strong songwriting, feels more like a step back than an alternate approach.

The basic approach is a straightforward country-rock beat with simple vocals and upbeat guitar. These songs are usually showcases for clever lyrics, but when those fall flat (“You call it rain/I call it the parking lot gets a bath”), there’s little left to justify the song. However, the band’s best songs are noteworthy. “The Actor” is a catchy but despairing character study whose sparse style fit the washed-up title character, and “White Port” is a punk sea shanty that provides a welcome exception to the mostly-consistent sound of the album. “No Simple Machine” is a crowd-pleasing story about women and men who want more than the standard shallow love interests. I question the motives of the narrator of that song, who seems a bit more bitter and boastful than may have been intended, but it’s an example of the band’s lyrics at their finest.

Both Grande Theatre volumes have made the perhaps questionable choice of filling the middle of the album with standouts while starting and ending with the more generic or less notable songs. It’s not the best way to grab listeners, though it did make both albums fun to discover over time rather than all at once. Volume Two doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by the first, but it’s always great to hear a band with such excellent pop instincts refusing to stand still.

Grade: B-


2011
10/21
CATEGORY
Country
Music
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Interactive Fiction Competition: Keepsake and Fog Convict

Here are my next two reviews of games from the 2011 IFComp: Savaric’s Keepsake and Andrew Metzger’s Fog Convict. Though I try not to reveal all the games’ secrets, there are spoilers, so I’ve hidden them below the fold.

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2011
10/19
CATEGORY
Adventure Game
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Interactive Fiction Competition: Andromeda Awakening and Blind

Like a lot of people, I still have fond memories of old text adventures. You know, the games like Zork, that describe your surroundings to you with text. You enter commands like “go west”, “examine the vase”, or “hide wig under troll”, and the game responds with more text explaining the results. Though text adventures stopped being commercially viable decades ago, they are still being made today by a dedicated community of enthusiasts. Now usually called “interactive fiction”, a name that reflects an interest in the literary possibilities of text that responds to the reader, these free games are often better than the ones people used to pay for. The biggest event of the year in this community is the annual “IFComp“, which accepts any interactive fiction games with the caveat that they should be completable within two hours.

I’ve drifted away from the interactive fiction world in the past decade or so, but every couple years I try to use the IFComp as an opportunity to get involved again. This time, it looks like I really will succeed: 15 days into the 45-day voting period, I’ve played 5 of the 38 entries. I’ll get to slightly less than half of them at this rate, but I’m pretty happy with that. And, of course, I’ll be reviewing them here.

If you are new to text adventures and interested in getting started, they can be a little confusing at first. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there to explain them. And while some games are specifically aimed at beginners, probably the best thing you can do is check out the IFComp games. Since they’re intended to be shorter works, and they all contain walkthroughs to help you out when you’re stuck (either in standalone text files, or with the “HELP” or “HINT” commands), you can learn a lot by exploring as much as possible and then turning to the help when needed. The IFComp games range from unplayable messes to masterworks, so start out by trying out the winners from past years.

Also, of course, I’m not the only person reviewing this year’s games. A lot of other discussion can be found from the relevant IFWiki page. I recommend Emily Short’s reviews, which are very well-written and often focus on interactive fiction as a narrative tool.

Below the fold, (slightly spoilery) reviews for Andromeda Awakening and Blind.

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2011
10/16
CATEGORY
Adventure Game
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Ray Wylie Hubbard – A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C) (Music Review)

A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C) cover

Ray Wylie Hubbard - A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C)

Ray Wylie Hubbard has been around for decades, but his country-blues style has never found popular appeal. On 2010’s A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C), he seems perfectly comfortable with his place in the industry. This is the sound of an experienced, confident artist making the music he wants.

Hubbard’s sound is calm and even, singing over rhythmic, bass-heavy music that recalls the days before country and blues evolved into separate genres. His voice betrays his age, but in this genre, trading energy for soul is always worthwhile. His attitude feels perfectly authentic to his Texas home and blues influence, though it is rarely found in mainstream country. Hubbard is as likely to sing about drugs and wayward women as everyday country life, and these two sides to his persona keep the songs varied and interesting. Bridging the gap are the occasional songs celebrating the music itself (“Down Home Country Blues”) and religious tracks that go beyond the lazy cliches of the genre (“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”).

Hubbard maybe gets a little too slow when he channels the quiet country life (“Tornado Ripe” goes nowhere, and “Wasp’s Nest” is frankly boring), but that’s as close as the album comes to a misstep. It’s an easy one to forgive when he’s willing to go just as far in the opposite direction, with a couple experiments (such as a guest vocalist groaning “Cada día es la Día de los Muertos” over halting drums and electric guitar) that only work due to his laid-back attitude and the wide ground he covers.

Among the most notable songs: The title track’s dreamlike lyrics fit its name and set the tone for the album. “Loose” is an upbeat story reminiscent of John Prine that examines the word “loose” and turns it into an empowering description for a woman. “Black Wings” is a mournful dirge that hints at how important music is to Hubbard when he mixes references to specific instruments and songs in with the emotional lyrics.

A. Enlightenment shows Hubbard arguably at his peak, and makes his lifetime out of the spotlight seem like a crime. Music, life, religion and sin coexist in a string of honest songs that celebrate what country music should be.

Grade: A-


2011
10/14
CATEGORY
Country
Music
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Morning Glories (Comic Review)

(This is a review of issues 1-12 of the Image comic Morning Glories. These can also be found in the first two collected volumes of the series.)

Morning Glories issue #1 cover

Morning Glories

Students usually feel like they are fighting against their school, but what if that school really were trying to kill them? That is the central hook of Morning Glories, a comic about six students newly recruited to a prestigious, but sinister, private academy.

It’s a silly idea even on its face, because any school with the body count shown here would end quickly. It might make for a fun miniseries, but Morning Glories is intended to be a long-running series. Amazingly, author Nick Spencer seems poised to make it work by not only examining the “what if?” question, but also considering why a school would want to kill its students. Twelve issues in, we don’t have a lot of answers, but there are quite a few hints about a centuries-old movement (possibly religious, possibly looking for an answer to a legitimate threat) testing children to find ones with some sort of special power. With enough suspension of disbelief to assume that their secret society could cover up the deaths and maintain their school’s prestigious reputation, this actually makes a twisted sort of sense.

Artist Joe Eisma does a passable job portraying the often dialogue-heavy story, with distinct characters and expressive faces and postures (even if he does favor a few generic body types).His linework features the occasional jarring angle and could definitely use a strong inker to give it depth, but it’s better than many DC and Marvel artists. Best of all, he is one of the few Image artists who can keep anything close to a monthly schedule .

But the art is really just a delivery mechanism for the story that dominates this comic. It’s defined by the many mysteries and constant twists, with each new issue providing a good chunk of plot and new information. Though the story is not unfolding in any hurry, it certainly can’t be accused of decompression or padding. Reading it as a serialized work, it delivers something new every month.

The plot points offer a lot of variety, from tweaking everyday aspects of school life (teachers, cheerleading squads, and guidance counselors) to completely unexpected surprises (ghosts, underground prisoners, and a strange device that intrigues cutting-edge physicists). Spencer almost seems scared to go a single issue without defying expectations, and the tone of each issue varies widely, too, from horror to graphic violence to understated suspense.

The characters started as a typical Breakfast Club-style collection of cliches. Though they haven’t gotten much deeper (this comic’s strength is in unexpected twists, not character development), they have defied expectations. In these first twelve issues, every one has either turned out to have a shocking history or faced things within the school that played off their basic archetype in surprising ways. There are also varying allegiances among the school staff and at least one organization seeking to destroy them from the outside.

It’s a lot to take in, and if anything, the concern is that Morning Glories will turn out to be one of those stories that piles the mysteries on but doesn’t know how to resolve them. That was my initial impression of this, but fortunately I re-read the series so far in preparation for this review. Taking in every issue at once, a lot of the pieces fit together better than I had expected, and the total number of open mysteries was not as large as it had seemed. (Most importantly, and a little embarrassingly, I hadn’t noticed before that one person had played a role in at least three characters’ life stories. What I’d thought to be three unrelated pieces of information all tied together neatly.) It’s strange, because this had seemed to be the perfect series to read for the monthly surprises, but now I can see a strong argument for following it in larger collected chunks. Either way, though, the mysteries seem well fleshed out, and the few explanations to date have been satisfying, so it seems that Spencer does know what he’s doing. He says that he has this planned out until an ending around issue 100, and the build-up so far seems fair given that schedule.

It’s always hard to know whether to trust a title whose main draw is mysteries and plot twists. Many high-profile works that took that approach fizzled out disappointingly (look at X-Files or Lost), but a low-stakes creator-owned comic like this arguably has a better chance of holding true to a vision. Whatever the final result is, Morning Glories has at least turned out to be a worthwhile read so far. The memorable hooks and new questions keep this interesting month after month.

Grade: B


2011
10/11
CATEGORY
Comics
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Quarriors! (Game Review)

Quarriors! Box

Quarriors!

The more games fail to live up to expectations as “the next Dominion“, the more people seem to want to make one. It’s not necessarily a fair way to judge a game, though; Can’t it succeed or fail by its own merits? Quarriors! owes a very obvious debt to Dominion, but its most notable strengths and flaws are unique to this game.

In short, Quarriors! takes the idea of a deck-building game and turns it into “dice-building”. Many elements translate from cards to dice pretty naturally: Players draw their “hand” of dice from a bag rather than a deck (making shuffling much faster!) and discard them on the table. Each turn, the player can buy one more die from the common pool and add it to their discard pile, and when the bag runs empty, all the discarded dice are mixed back in.

Quarriors! Setup with dice and cards in the middle of the table.

The game mechanics are elegantly built around the strengths and weaknesses of dice. For example, powers that let players manipulate the draw pile won’t work, but the discard pile is available for interaction. Also, since dice can’t hold as much information as cards, so each type has a reference card sitting in the middle of the table with a full description. The dice that go along with each card have a distinct color, making them easy to identify quickly. Cleverly, each color of dice has three corresponding cards (only one of which will be available per game) with different costs or special powers, meaning that the game can provide a good deal of variety without needing thousands of costly dice. In fact, publisher WizKids has done a great job of providing quality components (including a cool die-shaped tin for a box) at the price of a normal game. My only complaint, and it is a serious one, is that all three cards for a given die have exactly the same art, making it difficult to identify a given game’s setup quickly.

Being a dice game, Quarriors! obviously has a lot more randomness in it than Dominion. The game is designed around this, with a shorter play time and a theme of summoning creatures to do battle. Surprisingly, the rules for working with these creatures feel to be in the spirit of Dominion. After being played, they immediately attack the other creatures in front of all opponents equally. Any creatures that survive for one round around the table are scored and then discarded, eventually being shuffled back in to the bag. It’s the first balanced fighting system I’ve seen in a deck-building game, and I really appreciate the fact that creatures automatically attack all opponents equally, since deck-builders seem to do better without directed attacks. I also like the way that this game’s resource (“quiddity”, which is basically a quantity of magic) is used both for the “action” and “buy” phases of a turn. It requires quiddity to deploy monsters for battle, but that reduces the amount of buying power left afterwards. It’s as elegant, and potentially as tense, as Dominion’s “one action then one buy” rule.

Some of the dice in Quarriors!For all the clever ideas though, it feels like a lot of the gameplay was not fully thought through. There is potential interaction between the different types of dice, but the powers have a lot less subtlety than Dominion. Most abilities just increase the stats of a creature, which means that the exact combination of dice a player acquires isn’t as important as it should be. There is some strategy in deciding which and how many spells to mix with the creatures, but for the most part, a player won’t go wrong in simply buying the strongest creature possible. Since the more expensive creatures are generally higher on all stats and score more points, if one player gets an early chance to buy something like a Quake Dragon, the rest of the game feels more like a formality than a real competition. And since the rolls determine the strength of the dice, there is no card that can’t potentially be bought on the first turn, even though the average player won’t get it until past the halfway point. Quarriors! officially ends at a very low point score, apparently so that games won’t last long enough for the randomness to become frustrating, but the result of that is that players have almost no chance to catch up to the person who got a lucky start. There is an endgame mentality almost from the first roll. I generally play to a slightly higher point total. It’s still a fast game with a lot of luck, but at least then there is some chance that a player who spends time building a strategic set of dice will be rewarded. Even so, Quarriors! would require major revisions to change the fact that the first player to buy a Dragon usually wins.

All in all, Quarriors! offers a strange mix of strategy and randomness that is a little unsatisfying. Clever play is possible, but rarely matters more than luck. The game is light and fast, but it can take some focus to evaluate the multiple powers of each card and refer back to the middle of the table for information not on the dice themselves. Basically, to truly appreciate it you need to be able to follow somewhat complex timing rules, but prefer theme and randomness over heavy games. It is a very clever design, and everyone should enjoy playing it a few times. Long-term, though, the variety of setup options don’t keep the game from feeling somewhat repetitive and arbitrary.

Grade: B-

(Note: The images in this article come from Board Game Geek. For more information about each one, including the photographer, they all link back to the original.)

2011
10/09
CATEGORY
Games
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Obits – Moody, Standard and Poor (Music Review)

Moody, Standard and Poor cover

Obits - Moody, Standard and Poor

When the Obits’ first album I Blame You appeared in 2009, it was a breath of fresh air. Two years later, their follow-up Moody, Standard and Poor is much like a second breath of that exact same fresh air. It’s as good as the first one in many ways, but just doesn’t feel nearly as vital.

It’s kind of strange to complain about the album sounding too similar to anything, given how unique the band’s sound is. A bass-heavy, blues-informed garage band, they have a punk energy but the clean sound and slightly abstract lyrics of an indie blues band. Singer Rick Froberg has an intense scream that demands attention, but the taut, frequently-evolving music is what sticks in the listener’s mind. The Obits deserve comparisons to Boston in their accomplishment of creating a distinctive, immediately recognizable sound on their debut.

If anything, Moody, Standard and Poor dials down the musical intensity slightly and explores slightly wider ground lyrically, but this is so subtle that it’s hard to tell if it was intentional. That may be a fertile direction for future Obits albums, but in this one, it just sounds like a collection of second-best songs from the same session as I Blame You. It’s even shorter than that album, at a slim 35 minutes.

The similarities mean that the sound is still great, at least. There isn’t a single minute of filler, and the new songs are welcome. They range from the introspective and (slightly) slow-paced “New August”, which takes time to build a groove, to the angry “No Fly List”, which proves that the band can incorporate punk rock intensity when they want. The mostly instrumental “Spot the Pikey”, with surf riffs leading up to an almost-bored group reciting the song title, has a sense of humor not previously shown.

There are definitely multiple possibilities for evolution in the group’s future. Obviously, it will still sound reminiscent of these past albums, and in some ways it’s unfair to punish them for having developed such an original sound already. But it will be necessary for the Obits to recapture the thrill of discovery and claim the excitement that their style deserves.

Grade: B-


2011
10/01
CATEGORY
Music
Rock
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Rebecca Skloot – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Book Review)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks cover

Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who died of an unusually aggressive cancer in 1951. So aggressive, in fact, that a sample taken from her became the first line of “immortal” cells scientists were able to curate, still growing and being used in research today. This cell line, known as “HeLa”, has been grown so extensively that the statistics sound impossible to believe, and they’ve been vital to many of the major medical advances over the past half century. For all their importance, though, the cells were taken without Henrietta’s knowledge, and the Lacks family didn’t even learn about this for more than twenty years after Henrietta’s death. The story of HeLa is well-known throughout the medical world, but author Rebecca Skloot brings this to the common reader by recognizing that the personal stories and ethical quandaries are just as rich a topic as the scientific marvels.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is written in a deceptively simple style, with an accessibility and sometimes glibness that makes it feel like a very long magazine article. Beneath this simple appearance, though, Skloot manages to take the reader in many unexpected directions and humanize an abstract concept. This is a rare, and much-needed, style of science writing.

The biggest contribution to “HeLa literature” is the unprecedented access Skloot got to the woman’s family and friends. Opening with a vibrant portrayal of Henrietta’s life (and a surprisingly disturbing account of her death), the book quickly establishes its sympathies and draws the reader in. After that, it’s free to jump around between a wide array of topics and times: The progress of the HeLa line through the scientific community contrasts with the unchanging state of the poor Lacks family, while Skloot’s present-day interest in the story brings her in touch with both groups. Skloot herself is a character in the book, her white, scientific, atheistic perspective being completely at odds with these people who still don’t understand what a “cell” is and are afraid to trust doctors even when they desperately need care. Don’t expect this to be just a dry, clinical book. Though there are chapters devoted to the scientific side, by the end, it is clear that the main story is that of the Lacks’ family’s journey towards closure with their mother’s legacy and recognition from the scientific community.

It’s a fascinating story, especially with all the factors intertwined. Debates and scandals within the medical community come up regularly, side-by-side with advances that sound like science fiction and the daily concerns of normal people. Harvesting Henrietta’s cells without her knowledge was only the first of many ethical lapses that appear in the story of HeLa, and they couldn’t have been better paced if this were a work of fiction. In fact, the revelations about what researchers may be doing with your tissue samples at this very moment will shock and outrage many readers. There are no easy answers to these still-unresolved questions, but this book does a great service by bringing them to popular attention.

The Lacks’ family is poor, uneducated, and most modern readers will be surprised by how close they still are to their subsistence farming roots. (In fact, the details it reveals about their lives feel like awkward breaches of privacy at times. Skloot is quick to reassure us that they asked her to bring the whole story to light, and I haven’t found anything on the internet to dispute that.) It is no small task making them come across as relatable characters to even privileged readers, but this book even makes conspiracy stories (Johns Hopkins kidnaps black children for experiments!) understandable from their point of view. That family would normally not belong in a book that also focuses on the elite scientists doing cutting-edge work, but the story of HeLa connects them both. In fact, all science can be tied to real life. This is something that we often forget, but Skloot’s writing brings the everyday relevance of science into focus.

Grade: B+


2011
09/30
CATEGORY
Books
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The DC Re-launch, Month One

September is coming to an end, which means that all 52 comics in DC’s relaunched line have now been released. They’ve sold incredibly well, proving my more cautious ideas wrong. Of course, now that they’re out, the thing that matters for the future is quality. How many readers will stick around for issues #2, #3, or #25?

I’ve read 20 of these, along with online news and commentary about pretty much all of them. My opinion can be split into two contrasting views:

  • DC had the opportunity to fix any problem that they could think of and re-focus their line in a way to stay relevant to 21st-century readers. Given that, it’s incredibly disappointing that they just shuffled their heroes around among their existing creators, with the truly awful ones keeping their jobs. Most of the titles feel like generic superhero stories, with no ambitious ideas. When they did take chances, they were as likely to just make them more violent or unbelievably sexy as they were to actually try something to make the comic better. There is no line-wide ideal driving this reboot, either. Justice League and Action both take place “five years ago”, when superheroes first appeared to an untrusting populace. But all the others take place today, and they make no attempt to reconcile that brief five-year timeframe with the extensive continuity that they’re keeping for the fans. (As one of many examples, how has Batman had four Robins in this time, even ignoring the fact that the most recent one was born after he began his hero career?) Looking beyond the hype, it appears that DC’s grand plan to invigorate itself is “more of the usual, but with a big ‘#1’ on each comic!”
  • On the other hand, coming up with 52 new titles did force DC to cast its net a bit wider than usual. Most of these may be the same characters and creators that have been presiding over the company’s slow decline, but there is now room for several new ones as well. And even if most people squandered their opportunities, some of them did jump at the chance to try something new. The result is that out of 52 books, there will probably be at least 10 good ones. A few of them could even be great. Maybe this sounds cynical, but I don’t expect every comic to be good, and this is an improvement over their line-up before. Even better, the high profile of the launch and the huge number of people buying the comics means that the good ones have a chance to pick up a following. Even if DC’s overall creative direction is as lackluster as ever, I’m a lot more excited about my specific choices than I was before.

It’s always been true that the quality of superhero comics depended on how you looked at it. Just like books, music, and everything else, there’s a lot of crap. Since the comics industry is so small and depends on interrelated titles, it’s a lot harder to ignore the bad stuff. But if you do, you’ll find some great stories. This new direction for DC seems to have emphasized both the good and bad extremes.

One thing that surprised me was how dark many of the good titles were. In recent years, there has been a pretty strong correlation between how violent and gory a comic was with how lazy and poorly-written it was. There are always exceptions, but among this month’s titles, it seemed that the best ones incorporated horror elements, while the ones that stuck to (relatively) clean superhero action felt like just more of the same. I don’t know if this dark turn is intentional or not, but I expect that it’s here to stay.

If you are thinking about trying out some of these comics, there are definite right and wrong choices. Fortunately, reviews of these are all over the internet. You should be able to find out which ones sound right for you. As usual, I’m going to wait until there are a few months’ worth of releases before I start doing official reviews. If you want some quick recommendations, though, here are the first issues that I would recommend:

2011
09/28
CATEGORY
Comics
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Hank3’s Four September Releases (Music Review)

Though Hank Williams III, or Hank3, revitalized the country music scene with his metal-influenced outlaw approach, he’s seemed to be on a slow decline ever since the seminal Straight To Hell. Though even his lesser output was still notable, everyone has been wondering what would happen once his contract with Curb Records finally ended and their legal and creative feuds would finally be done. As 2011 began and Hank3 was free, though, there were several months of no news at all. When news finally did come, it made up for the long silence: Hank3 released four new albums on the same day in early September, showcasing the variety of directions he was now free to go in.

The albums are out now, and they definitely do have an impressive variety and dedication. They sometimes make an argument that his corporate controllers had kept him from embarrassing mistakes, but they also have some pretty amazing moments that could never have been accomplished as long as he was forced to play it safe and worry about commercial concerns. These may not be the best albums of 2011, but it is the biggest musical event of the year.

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2011
09/25
CATEGORY
Country
Music
Rock
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