Monthly Archives: June 2024

REIGN IN BLOOD

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REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer
1986

Any amount of distraction or sonic interference is enough to frankly destroy Reign in Blood. Slayer’s breakthrough album does not function as background music. Rick Rubin’s mix works when you’re locked in, but any amount of distraction drowns out every 220 bpm riff with Lombardo’s blast beat drums and Araya’s shouted vocal. It becomes noise. All the texture will drop away. When I started relistening to write this, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t very good anymore.” Then I put the laptop away for a minute and could hear it again.

I don’t actually like Rubin’s mix, but I’ve lived my whole life in its aftermath. Reign in Blood is credited as being the crossover moment between thrash and death metal, signaling the point at which metalheads could retreat into a deeper subculture while Metallica gravitated away toward more melodic hard rock. I’m not a person who cares too much about subgenres, to be honest – I follow them only to the extent the artists themselves discuss them, and music is usually more interesting at the borders anyway. What I can recognize is that this album was still deeply influential on the death metal and screamo I could never get into in high school, where drums and vocals drowned out the melodic instruments.

Every time I return to the source and give it my full attention, I can understand why. In a decade where the average metal song was between five and ten minutes long, Slayer doubled the tempo and still put twice as many musical ideas into two and a half minutes. The drum part is so forward in the mix because it creates continuity between all the very dramatic changes in riff and melody. Stop paying attention and it creates the effect of a twenty six minute song – keep your eye on the ball and the nine tracks become twenty.

The fact that some members of Slayer and Rick Rubin have turned out to be reactionary chuds over the years is only surprising to those in denial. While reading “Angel of Death’s” lyrics and controversy section on Wikipedia should be enough to convince you that they’re earnest about just depicting an evil man and not endorsing Joseph Mengele, it’s also revealing that they don’t really have anything to say about him. Throughout the album and its (excellent) cover art, the satanic imagery, the descriptions of brutal ways to die, the absolutely braindead “Criminally Insane” lyrics – this is trolling, meant to create a cumulative effect. It’s theater, grand guignol building toward an epic finale.

Everything builds to that tenth song, “Raining Blood,” which overwhelms the rest of the album in terms of groove, brilliant riff songwriting, portentous storytelling. The opening rain effect and tom drum with the siren guitar – I mean, this is just the coolest shit in the world. The solos are the album’s most discordant and insane, and they fly over the album’s chunkiest straight-ahead speed. The two ways to listen to the album, for me, are in its entirety, front to back, or just to listen to that last song.

KEY TRACKS: “Piece by Piece,” “Jesus Saves,” “Criminally Insane” “Raining Blood”
NEXT STOP: Arise, Sepultura
AFTER THAT: Dead Rituals, Swamp Witch

OUTER WILDS

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OUTER WILDS
Mobius Digital
2019
Xbox, Playstation, PC, Switch

Time loop games tend to operate in one of two models. There’s the time loop that serves as a justification for clockwork gameplay mechanisms, encouraging the player to master the sequence events and execute on the “perfect run.” In some cases, this functions about the same as a quick retry button, but the narrative justification allows for a little more exploration of alternate consequences. There’s also time loops that serve as branching path narratives – if you create one chance meeting on day one and pursue that story, what’s the butterfly effect to day three when everyone else is still on script?

Outer Wilds is not quite either, though there are certainly consequential events and precise timings rewarding attention to detail. You play as a space explorer who, on the day they’re to take their little ship into the solar system, gets locked into a time loop which ends each day with supernova and armageddon. You have 22 minutes to advance from your home of Timber Hearth into the alien landscapes and prehistoric ruins of planets settled by the ancient (?) Nomai civilization. Your primary goal is to investigate the mysteries of the supernova, the Nomai’s demise, and the current status of the other Hearthian explorers. The game tracks this in a convenient journal on your ship and pins questions to your idea map, but it never offers obvious waypoints or quest markers.

The time loop primarily controls the solar system’s simulation. Weather on the oceanic planet Giant’s Deep operates on a storm cycle you can learn and, eventually, use to explore the planet’s truth. A portion of the planet Brittle Hollow breaks off at the same time each cycle and falls into a black hole that has opened at its core – to see that part of the planet, you’ll either need to arrive quickly or figure out how to navigate to it within the black hole itself. The Interloper is an icy comet that travels on the same portion of its orbit with each time cycle – that orbit affects the temperature on the comet’s surface, altering the ice pattern and your ability to navigate the surface.

Floating through the canyons on the Hourglass Twins, a pair of connected mini-planetoids which trade a desert’s worth of sand over the time loop.

You, too, exist as a part of this physics simulation. Gravity varies wildly based on your location, and your fragile little body is easy to send into the abyss and back through the loop if you’re not careful. The spaceship controls a little like the classic arcade game Lunar Lander – your body inverts the standard video game jump so that hitting the button bends your knees and releasing causes you to jump however high your body goes based on the gravitational forces near you. Learning this mobility is, for a lot of players, the brick wall that prevents interest in seeing this mystery through to its conclusion. For me, it took some practice but in the end felt natural – I was able to pick up these controls again quickly upon playing the DLC expansion Echoes of the Eye, a new mystery that builds nicely into the game’s story.

And it is that story which I think makes the game so special. The time loop, physics simulation of the game is delightful, but it is the natural science and archaeology that are so rewarding. Ultimately, Outer Wilds is a story about the end of the world – some Nomai predicted an eventual demise, others built into eternal denial. The eventual answers to the mysteries of the Outer Wilds both confront the player with futility and peace. The game’s true ending, without delving into spoilers, is a celebration of life and its ending. It’s a moving, emotional sequence that both offers outrageous spectacle and aesthetic quiet.

Special notice must be given to the game’s fantastic soundtrack. Composed by Andrew Prahlow, the score is a combination of campfire acoustica and synth majesty. It combines the Hearthian’s forest fire architecture with the unknowable mystery out in the stars. The “Main Title” and “Travelers” are songs I listen to frequently. The synth line that begins to play near the end of a loop is catchy and unmistakable without being trite or dreadful. I hope to hear more scores from him someday soon.

ROOM25

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ROOM25
Noname
2018

Fandom is hard in the online era, man. Noname is someone I so badly want to root for, who does so much cool shit, who also thinks J Cole is corny and who is vocal about injustice in America, whose raps are so funny and so thoughtful ninety percent of the time. Her Noname Book Club is a genuinely really cool project! That ten percent where she gives Jay Electronica a supremely antisemitic Black Isrealite verse on Sundial, though. Noname is a gaze into the mirror of being perpetually annoying online, and while I’m not sure I’d like her half as much if I didn’t follow her on Twitter before she deleted, I also know I wouldn’t sigh as hard at the fact that I love this album.

Room25 is the debut album, and it came from a place of transition into real adulthood. She’d moved from Chicago to L.A. – she’d started having sex – she needed to pay rent. That sense of obligation maybe helps birth its tossed-off introduction, a 1:35 song fragment that feels like it started halfway through. “Self” is maybe the best the album ever gets, though – the freeflow pleasure she has on “Mister money man, Mister every day he got me/Mister weather me down, Mister me love, Mister Miyagi,” is one of the greatest rap moments of the last decade. It has that same sticky teeth feeling of the best beats by The Neptunes, the best Big Willie Style hooks, the best playground songs.

But, then again, maybe the best moment is “Blaxploitation,” which combines jokes about bad feminism and exhaustion with trying to have good politics and darker outrage about the state of the world. In terms of the album’s mission statement, “Prayer Song” and “Montego Bae” are maybe the most representative combinations of sex and politics, some lines phenomenal (“If you wanna help me to put me inside the cuffs/Put the cigarette in my back/Keep the hospitals overrun-run-run-run, Chicken Little/How my city gonna run off shits and giggles?”) and others corny (“America the great, this grateful dead and life for me/Apple pie on Sunday morning, obesity and heart disease”.)

Not being able to put my finger down is kind of the appeal of Room25. At its best, it’s one of the absolute great rap albums of the 2010s and an all-time great rap debut. There’s nothing quite like it and I’m not sure you could regulate it on purpose. That 10%, though.

KEY TRACKS: “Self,” “Prayer Song,” “Montego Bae”
CATALOG CHOICE: Telefone, “Song 32,” “Song 33”
NEXT STOP: Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris
AFTER THAT: Ho, Why Is You Here?, Flo Milli

EYES WIDE SHUT

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Eyes Wide Shut
Dir. Stanley Kubrick
1999

Eyes Wide Shut, a widely misrepresented movie, is about a prude herb narcissist turning into a corncob at the idea that his wife might possibly have her own life and desires, who then becomes so fixated on it that even after witnessing CSA and the Fidelio party he still just keeps replaying an imagined tryst. Kubrick’s swan song is an extremely funny movie that keenly observes the violence of men and the degree to which conservative mores are just wholly removed from reality.

A quick synopsis for those who haven’t seen it – Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) flirt with friends of friends at a colleague’s holiday party. Bill gets in a fight with Alice over her dreaming of cheating on him on vacation some years back, and he walks out into the night. There, he embarks on a psychosexual journey into not getting laid and getting freaked out by a lot of people who are less repressed in their sexual desires than he. Things come to a head when he comes into contact with a secret society named Fidelio, and he realizes he might not be able to go back home safely again after his walk through the night.

Because the film is about the direction of sexual provocation at Bill and Alice Harford, you don’t actually get a ton of insight into real sexual desire, and certainly very little genuine eroticism (though the way Alice carries herself, Bill with Alan Cumming as the hotel clerk, and the encounter between Bill and Sally, these have some release to them.) Rather, it’s more of a collection of how these value systems interact with the bombardment of desire. Alice seems pretty healthy about how she enjoys attention and quickly recognizes Bill’s dehumanization. Bill certainly compartmentalizes a lot, and that can be healthy, but he’s also totally obsessed with himself and his own presentation to the point that he doesn’t even entertain what other people want anymore.

Victor (Sydney Pollack) tries to reassure Bill (Tom Cruise.)

The most erotic figure in the film, though, is probably the self-secure dynamism of Sydney Pollack. It’s your choice whether or not to believe his story in his big scene, but the fact is the way he talks about and treats women makes him pretty horrific either way. But that evil isn’t repellant or odious – it’s ingratiating, welcoming, maybe intoxicating. Compared to the harsh lighting of the film’s street scenes (infamously taking place on a studio recreation of New York streets, Larry Smith’s cinematography captures neon signs with all the threat of Taxi Driver), the Pollack scenes are shot with the comforting light and color of the glitziest 90s prestige drama – he’s shot with enough distance to look like a friend, shot from high enough that he doesn’t go full John Huston.

Without much doubt for me, this is right up there with Barry Lyndon for the best Kubrick. Nothing else really comes close. Cruise the corncob, Kidman the familiar housewife. She’s funny, she’s sexy, she’s made a little insane by her inattentive husband, and it’s hard not to take her side even when she’s twisting his words. Or maybe it’s just hard to take the side of Cuck Supreme even before he fails to get laid for ~72 hours.

RHYTHM HEAVEN FEVER

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RHYTHM HEAVEN FEVER
Nintendo SPD
2012
Wii

I love rhythm games, and I think it’s fascinating the way they create challenging gameplay. For most listeners, music is not inherently interesting because it’s hard to perform. Yngwie Malmsteen is not a more popular guitarist than Jack White – Art Tatum isn’t inherently more beloved than Dave Brubeck. Games based on pop music run into this problem pretty fast, with the highest difficulties basically always being occupied by blast beat metal or hardcore techno. The ceiling is a combination of speed and variable notes that make for a pretty niche listening experience. At some point, it represents difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Guitar rhythm games require being able to powerslide and fingerpick through borderline illegible solos – dance rhythm games have so many notes flying at the screen their order has to be memorized in slow motion.

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise is pretty notoriously difficult despite stripping out a lot of that complexity. In Rhythm Heaven Fever, the franchise’s best game before the pivot to “greatest hits” collections from the first three games, there are only two commands. You either press the A button, or you press the A and B button at the same time. The speed also never gets especially high, either, largely set around 130 BPM. Where Rhythm Heaven Fever derives its difficulty is precision – the game requires on-beat hits without the sloppiness of some more forgiving rhythm games, and its pass/fail criteria can create brick walls if you’re really struggling to get the rhythm down.

The music itself is just delightful, veering wildly in genre from city pop to bossa nova to hard rock. Because the difficulty is only tied to the rhythm itself, the game’s later stages are able to vary far more in terms of genre, with the game’s later levels including hip-hop, 80s power pop, video game chiptunes, hard rock – it’s much more feasible to play with an interesting rhythmic challenge in a typical genre than to introduce difficult notation.

The game pairs every minigame with a unique, fantastical cartoon that the music is soundtracking. The mascot monkeys that appear here and there throughout the game might be playing golf or operating a watch – Karate Joe needs to land his punches on beat to keep in shape – a cat and dog are keeping a badminton volley going while piloting biplanes. The visuals are absurd, full of jokes and color, and are themselves such an aesthetic treat for playing well. Sometimes they can be so engaging that it’s actually better to just close your eyes and feel the music, but learning the visual cues can also help mark your place in the song itself.

At a time when the odd side of Nintendo’s magic has somewhat waned in favor of iterative sequels and huge, complex games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a game as simple as Rhythm Heaven Fever seems especially far away. Nintendo has chosen to grow alongside its players, creating experiences that are deeply appealing to people who either already intimately know how deep video games can be or who have a child’s time to learn. Even getting into a game of Mario Kart 8 requires building a vehicle, one that has stats, and engaging with that system without attention can result in creating a kart that’s no fun to play. I admire Rhythm Heaven Fever because it takes only two or three sentences to explain the controls you’ll use throughout, and each individual rhythm game contains tutorials to ensure the player knows how to interact before beginning. And yet, without any fear, Rhythm Heaven Fever also throws those players directly into the deep end, demanding that internal metronome be more precise than a lot of the rock legends of the 60s and 70s. It’s a wonderful dynamic that creates a sense of humor in play, matched by the cartooning you see on screen. It’s Nintendo embracing absurdity, and I hope it’s not the last we see of those funky monkeys.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON

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DOG DAY AFTERNOON
Dir. Sidney Lumet
1975

Watching Dog Day Afternoon again last summer, I’d genuinely forgotten how it ended. I sat in total suspense for the last twenty minutes, trying to rack my brain and remind myself where it was going. I didn’t figure it out, and the film broke my heart all over again. Of course, Dog Day Afternoon is based on the true story of Sonny Wojtowicz’s hostage-fraternization bank robbery, so knowing the ending can hardly be considered a spoiler, but I really sat there pinching myself and hoping it was gonna turn out all right for Sonny and Sal.

In the first street scenes, where Pacino’s Sonny loses the oversized suitcoat and starts feeling himself, he’s as hot as anyone has ever been on screen. The film is filled to the brim with great performances (Cazale and Sarandon, obviously, but also Durning, Allen, Kane) but it all must rest on Pacino’s shoulders, and it’s perfection. It is, to be clear, a busy ass performance – the theatrics are extremely heightened, and largely the world has risen to match those theatrics. But it is also a sensitive one, where he really takes seriously the mania and the affection Sonny has for the people in his life.

We never see Sonny’s worst side. Leon and Grace both allude to a dangerous, violent darkness (one Grace sees as impossibly as we do, one Leon knows all too well.) Instead we see the charismatic people pleaser compromising constantly. Acquiescence is Sonny’s fatal flaw – as he repeatedly says, he’s “under so many pressures,” and he can’t begin to know who to disappoint until his mother shows up.

The sweatiest, hottest Pacino has ever been.

All this is drenched in Lumet’s golden cinema. Incredible crowd work, hysterical sight gags (the fifth time a police bus arrived, people were howling. The pizzas!) So many great moments for all the women in the bank to shine in a panning shot or background work. Cazale’s deadpan is so fun. The fact that this is all built around such a wonderful character study – it’s something that makes perfect sense from the director of 12 Angry Men, creating this ecosystem of strong characters around one cult of personality.

Dog Day Afternoon is one of the most famous and beloved films I’m writing about this month, considered both a landmark of anti-authoritarianism and of on-screen queer representation. Reading quotes about its production, you can sense quite a bit of consternation on the behalf of the cast and their representation about the queer aspect of the film, some thoughtful and effective and some retrograde and offensive. The result of those tensions is a film that feels more like it’s judging no one too harshly and giving no one a total pass. That tension feeds directly back into the film, a hot summer’s day boiling over, no “cooler heads” to prevail in sight.

RUBBER SOUL

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RUBBER SOUL
The Beatles
1965

Every kind of Beatles fan is annoying. Sgt. Pepper’s fans are annoying and can’t fathom thinking “She’s Leaving Home” repetitive and saccharine. Fans of McCartney’s solo work are annoying in that they’ll do everything in their power to avoid talking about “Eleanor Rigby” again so they’ll fill your feed with “Monkberry Moon Delight” and “Temporary Secretary.” Fans of the early years will pretend that the covers of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” aren’t fucking awful. Hearing “Imagine” in a public space is grounds for tribunal against whoever put it on the playlist.

I’m all of these fans. I’ve been all of these fans all my life. When The Beatles would come up when I was in high school, eyes would turn to me. I was neurotic about them – they meant a lot to me. I’d stay up on school nights reading the Wikipedia page on every track from The White Album. I’d teach myself to sing every word of Please Please Me and Abbey Road. I wrote an entire scene for my dramatic show choir in Beatles song titles. I’d send lyrics to girls I’d never be brave enough to ask out. I was, to put it kindly, insufferable to the point of meriting euthanasia.

The album that’s always been right toward the top of my list is Rubber Soul, the first album they made without already having tour gigs lined up. The willingness to imagine music that might be hard to recreate live sets them on their pop art odyssey throughout the rest of the decade. This is the first of their albums where I’d argue the arrangements and harmonies occupy such a full sonic range that they feel swaddling. The quilted maximalism sounds so different from the jangly rock band they’d been in the studio for the three years prior, an arms race kicked off by The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and amped up by Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.

The Beatles members (from left) John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison on the terrace of the Hotel Duomo. Milan, 24 June 1965.

Many of Paul’s best basslines can be found on Rubber Soul, from his forward melodic contribution to “Michelle” to the perfect harmonic underpinning of “Nowhere Man.” Ringo’s drumming is as keyed in and unshowy as he always manages to be. In general, the album offers few of the showier instrumental interludes of their cited highlights – there’s no “Taxman” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” guitar solo, no “The End” or “A Day in the Life” drum fill extravaganza. Rubber Soul is led by its vocal harmonies, dominated by the interplay between voices.

I’d argue that’s largely because the majority of the lyrics continue in Help!’s trajectory, getting more and more anecdotal and folksy, touching on more mature themes than the silly love songs they came up singing. I’m not going to pretend that these lyrics are especially intricate – the storytelling on “Girl” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” are major steps forward for The Beatles’ discography, but this is the year after Nina Simone has released “Mississippi Goddam,” the year Bob Dylan launches stratospheric between Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home, the year Otis Redding releases the original version of “Respect.” But there are some evocative images that match the musicality – “Nowhere Man” is evocative and sad without identifying a clear subject, and its soaring guitar part captures that ennui. “I’m Looking Through You” identifies the nothing that it takes for people to grow apart more directly, turning this complex feeling into a lovely pop song. 

Rubber Soul is the firing gun for album oriented rock. Rubber Soul is begot by listening to Bob Dylan and The Byrds, and incorporating that folk approach begets The Velvet Underground and Pet Sounds and Aftermath, which beget Queen and Led Zeppelin, which etc. etc. I’d argue album oriented rock simultaneously represents many of the most important advancements in recording equipment, pop cultural taste for artful arrangement, and the replacement of jazz as America’s dominant musical form, and I’d also argue it’s a morose trap for white scolds of all ages.

There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know I’ve grown out of rockism as The One Way. This album’s given me gifts beyond my taste. “In My Life” is not a complex sentiment – just a beautiful, sincere, evocative one. “I know I’ll often stop and think about them/In my life, I love you more.” A kindness that seems so admirable – to love and honor the people you’ve loved and lost, the people you’ve been and outgrown (even if they were insufferable,) while still choosing the future.

KEY TRACKS: “You Won’t See Me,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life”
CATALOG CHOICE: Abbey Road
NEXT STOP: Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan
AFTER THAT: Odessey and Oracle, The Zombies

COLTER WALL

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COLTER WALL
Colter Wall
2017

If I can point to any moment that walked me back to country and folk music this past several years, it was the first time I heard Colter Wall’s “Thirteen Silver Dollars.” The confidence of writing this humorous, self-effacing little anecdote as your lead single for your debut album, with the remove and referential pop culture of a Stephen King short story – it reinvigorated my feeling that telling little stories was something I hungered to find again.

But, really, it’s that damn voice. When I played him for Austin for the first time and told him Wall was only 22 when this album was recorded, he called me a liar, belting, “That man is divorced!” It’s a pretty gorgeous raspy vocal tone, deep and soulful, low and smooth. It’s allowed Wall to have incredibly successful covers of classics from “Big Iron” to “Diamond Joe” to “Do Re Mi”, but I’m not sure he’s ever used its ache as beautifully as on this self-titled album.

“Codeine Dream” and “Me and Big Dave” have this fantastic melancholy to them – his voice just sounds exhausted, and he understands the way to use the guitar to harmonize that baritone just right. These are haunted songs that see death and desolation around those who still draw breath. Then there’s the righteous fury of “Kate McCannon,” a gunslinger ballad that draws the line directly to Marty Robbins, with that undeniable percussive buildup and sinister guitar lick. That’s probably the “best” song of the album, this wonderfully poetic story told with musical brilliance. 

He doesn’t let the fun songs slack, either. “Thirteen Silver Dollars” ends with that jaunty tone, but “Motorcycle,” “You Look To Yours,” “Fraulein,” these are delightful without becoming the syrup of modern pop country. He’s turned toward that a little more on his last couple albums, falling in love with some studio tricks and his band. While you’d never pretend this album is a one man operation or a low-budget production, it certainly lacks the gloss that Nashville money can bring. I’ve enjoyed the journey into popularity of Colter Wall (the lead single of his next album, “Plain to See Plainsman,” is easily one of his best songs,) and hope I get to hear him play live someday soon. But it’s a lightning bolt moment to hear this guy’s voice for the first time and know this young songwriter is already fully formed.

KEY TRACKS: “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” “Me and Big Dave,” “Kate McCannon,” “You Look To Yours”
CATALOG CHOICE: Songs of the Plains, Imaginary Appalachia, “Big Iron”
NEXT STOP: Purgatory, Tyler Childers
AFTER THAT: A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Sturgill Simpson

NORCO

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Norco 
Geography of Robots
PC, Xbox, Playstation

Norco is a rare achievement, balancing the legacy of adventure games and multiple movements of American literature. There are pops of Pynchon in product names and comical nobodies, broken by a culture that has no gods, visions of Vonnegut and P.K. Dick in science fiction absurdity, and yet still the lineage of material reality borrowed from Faulkner and Wright. These pair as neighbors to Kojima’s Snatcher and the backrooms of Wadjeteye’s modern adventures games like Unavowed and The Shivah.

The city of Norco is doomed. The cyberdystopian capitalists at Shield have failed to protect the people who work their oil refineries from floods, drugs, and gangs that have started to resemble cults. Your first player character, Kay, knows this before the game begins, and it’s why she left town. However, she’s returned after the passing of her mother, Catherine, and quickly wanders into a mystery. Kay’s brother has gone missing, and Catherine was investigating something Shield representatives took from the house without asking. When you play as Catherine, you quickly see that the client she’s working for, an online app contractor known as “Superduck,” is far, far more than she ever meant to meet.

We live in an age of “the narrative banger,” and Norco is pretty well read as these things go. Largely, it’s written in genuinely funny, conversational dialogue with people like your local scuzzy private detective or Pawpaw the Ditch Man, who believes Catherine and Kay to be direct descendants of Christ’s bloodline. In Catherine’s storyline, she meets the Garretts, a gang of pseudofascists who crack a lot of jokes about social media, porn, drugs, and the like who are being made to share a name by their leader John. This stuff is balanced against the introspective narration of a game like Disco Elysium, with extended (though infrequent) passages of beautiful prose. One great moment early on involves Kay remembering the three floods that have washed through the family’s home in Norco over the years, ending with a projection into the future of a fourth flood that will be the end of the homestead for good.

All this is joined with a strong pixel-art design, full of expressive faces, painterly horizons, and funny, simple animation. It’s really thoughtfully handled and sets the tone for a place that feels lived in, only for the horrors of technology to make mystic overbearance. Norco is a pretty darn good adventure game, with fun environments to explore, fun puzzles, great pacing. It makes this favorites list on the strength of its composition. Its understanding that black comedic satire and thoughtful poetic spirituality can be married, its purposeful use of moody chiptune grooves and pixel art that feels genuinely grimy, its considered politics and political incorrectness.

SKATETOWN U.S.A.

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SKATETOWN U.S.A.
Dir. William A. Levey
1979

Skatetown U.S.A., released in 1979 as the marketing juggernaut for a real-life chain of disco skate rinks (three months after Disco Demolition Night,) was almost impossible to see for decades. It played a few times on TV broadcast in the 80s, but due to music licensing costs, it was absolutely untenable to bother releasing it on home video. I first saw the film at UW Cinematheque’s Marquee Monday screening in 2014, and spent the next five years watching a terrible quality VHS recording on YouTube when I’d show it to friends.

Maybe ten minutes into the first screening, I remember turning to look at the three boys I was seeing the film with and all of us had a wide smile plastered onto our faces. Loosely anchoring an Airplane! tier of scattered gags is the plot of two siblings who crash the Skatetown U.S.A. skate competition dominated by a roller gang, led by the sinister Ace (Patrick Swayze, in his film debut.) Our protagonist, Harvey (Flip Wilson, who is styled as a proto He-Man) falls in love with a roller girl (Katherine Kelly Lang) – and would you believe it, she’s Ace’s sister! Ace will do anything to win the contest, so we see his gang cheat and ruin some “really great” choreographed roller skating.

Harvey and Ace stand off surrounded by Ace’s gang.

But you’re not really here for Ace and Harvey, though Ace’s dance to The Hounds cover of “Under My Thumb” (which sounds like it was blasted in from a Daft Punk influenced future) is hysterical, as he plays up his bad boy cred by whipping his leather belt around. You’re here for Judy Landers as Teri, the ticket girl who can’t keep straight how to take tickets because she’s too busy learning feminist theory. You’re here for the nerdy couple who arrive to Skatetown U.S.A. to celebrate their honeymoon despite not being able to skate as they fall into the sexual provocations of their fellow skaters. You’re here for the drug smuggling concession stand guys who won’t stop doing Three Stooges routines, giving the cold shoulder to poor Dorothy Stratten as she asks for the fourth time, “Can I have my pizza, please?” She’s being hounded by Leonard Barr, a 1930s comedian who basically just keeps rattling off faux-Groucho zingers.

Then there’s the Skatetown wizard, who summons everyone at the start of the film with a zap of his fingers. He drops in a couple of times, including to introduce Traffic’s Dave Mason, a musician nobody under the age of 45 has any opinions about unless they’ve seen this film. There’s the Skatetown doctor, who is a PTSD vet despite never leaving basic training. Scott Baio plays our hero Harvey’s coach, who mostly is here to make out with random women and take bets on whether or not Harvey can beat Ace. The other skaters in the competition are named Pistol Pete (a white guy in a racist pistolero costume,) Uncle Sam, and two extended performances by skating bands. Maureen McCormick plays Harvey’s sister, and she’s doing so much cocaine offstage that the drug deserves a producer credit. I’m trying to communicate chaos to you because blissful chaos is what Skatetown, U.S.A. has to offer.

Maybe the most emblematic oddity of Skatetown is the moment where it cuts to the changing room and a cop is walking by. Suddenly, a hot lady in her skates and a unitard rides out. The cop looks goggle-eyed at her. It cuts back to her, and she bends over, wiggles her ass like a rabbit’s tail, and skates off. He zips up his open fly and runs after her like a cartoon chasing a donut. These characters are never seen again.

This film suddenly arrived on Blu-Ray in 2019, put out directly by Sony, with no real explanation for what changed. The new transfer looks incredible, really allowing the decadent color scheme of the film’s cheap neon and costuming to shine through. It’s getting funnier every time I watch it. The one thing I’d warn somebody trying to watch at home is that there’s a lot of dancing and a lot of extended musical sequences, because whoever edited this movie was told “You’ve got the rights to Shake Your Body Down To The Ground and you’re gonna play the whole damn song!” In my book, you’ve gotta watch with friends who are down to experience something magical. When it’s not dancing, it’s firing off gags a mile a minute. And when the music’s playing, if you’re like me, you’ll be feelin’ alright.