Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, referred to his most recent full length album as his “poppiest album yet.” I don’t know that I necessarily think anything here is more accessible or friendlier than “Alberto Balsam” or “Windowlicker,” but relistening to Syro, I’d forgotten just how melodic and beautiful the album tends to be. The earworm that’s been in my brain for a decade is “180db_[130]”, maybe the album’s most frantic dance cut, high drama that fits voguing or an evil movie nightclub more than an actual night out. When I spend time away from Syro, that harsh synth melody overtakes the more austere beauty of “XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix)” or “”syro u473t8+e” (piezoluminescence mix).”
You’ll also notice, if you’re unfamiliar with the album, that unless you’re listening to it so frequently you’ve got these titles memorized, that the album resists identifying individual tracks. According to James, the album consists of ideas written over six or seven years, none he considers forward-looking experimental music, all of which he considers ruminations on the past. The variation on this we might be more familiar with are letters and poem series, titled by date or sequence rather than by something more poetic and evocative. Most interpretations of the track titles here are descriptions of gear and technical detail – “minipops 67 [120.2]” refers to the MiniPops drum machine, likely take 67, set at 120.2 BPM, lord knows what a source field mix is. The album cover includes a record of the album’s production and promotional costs. Despite being a “pop album,” this is a documentation of a period of time more than a Concise Statement.
I’m as far from a scholar of electronic music as they come. I hear stuff, like what I like, integrate it into my playlists, and roll on. So when people say this is a culmination of thirty years of electronic music history, I believe them. I hear playful reverie, memories of holidays past, reflection on a quiet afternoon. I hear the soundtrack to a nightmare movie rave. I hear a feeling that the form has been mastered and now it’s simply about the pleasure of creation. These thoughts are abstract, and I’m not sure I could map them for you directly to a timestamp or even a track title. By disconnecting the music and its context, James has created a throughline from electronic instrumental music back toward the sort of classical roots. This album exists because the studio and equipment to create it existed and demanded to be played.
James has continued to make music, releasing EPs every few years rather than full length albums. He’s toured once in that time and played sporadic festivals as well. Based on the teaser timeline set last year leading to the EP “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/in a room7 760”, he’s due to disappear for another couple years before giving us another bite sized update. Between Syro and the previous full length album, Drukqs, James claimed he’d written six unreleased albums. It’s possible that like some classical composers before him, there are hundreds of recordings we won’t hear until a century has passed. I hope selfishly to get to hear some of his beautiful sounds sooner.
The short films David Lynch made in art school, as well as Eraserhead, contain his intense visual horror flair and his otherworldly treatment of sound and light, but they’re deeply angry films, a young man railing against societal failures and expectations. The Elephant Man and Dune are adaptations, Lynch putting his distinct style onto other people’s work. But they also soften his edges quite a lot – Dune marks what I think his first real mature work showcasing empathy and friendship, the relationships between Paul Atreides and his friends full of liveliness. It’s the first time watching a David Lynch project I feel like you can really fall in love with some of the characters.
It’s also the last time Lynch would ever work on something that massive in scale, even accounting for Twin Peaks: The Return. The degree to which Lynch poured his heart into the film, the time he spent with Frank Herbert (who largely liked the film) undermined in post-production by the De Laurentiis family, ended Lynch’s desire to work on big-budget films going forward. Creative control came with a lower asking price – according to producer and Lynch collaborator Sabrina Sutherland, that approach is still getting pitches into board rooms as long as they aren’t about mythical Snoots.
The lessons he learned making Dune are visible in Blue Velvet, not least of which through the return of Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, another precocious golden lion-boy quickly corrupted by exposure to a world where naivete can become egomania. While Blue Velvet was conceived in 1973 alongside Eraserhead, it lacks that film’s sour edge and general misanthropy. The film is still on the knife’s edge of thriller and horror, depending on how unsettling you find its darkness, but it comes to that darkness through a deep love of its characters. Jeffrey is presented from the start as a character more like one of the Hardy Boys than Jack Nance’s Eraserhead Henry Spencer, and while he does find some unseemly, voyeuristic desires and a penchant for manipulation in himself, his conscience also always seems aware that these things are wrong.
Lynch (center) and the boys (from left to right, Kyle MacLachlan, Brad Dourif, J. Michael Hunter, Lynch, Jack Nance, Dennis Hopper)
That melodramatic empathy with these characters is, to me, the real heart of the Lynchian ideal, as it combines tropes or familiar, mundane elements with intense tragedy or darkness. Some people take this to mean something as simple as “the radiator is menacing” – while I think that’s certainly true of Lynch, it’s also true of iconic images like the telephone on the stairs in Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon or the basement in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. I think what really makes the Lynchian whole is the juxtaposition of menace and love, and just about every Lynch work from Dune onward is embodied by that ideal.
It’s certainly the primary iconic juxtaposition of Blue Velvet, Bobby Vinton playing over a suburban lawn until the grass leads us back to a severed ear. Isabella Rosselini’s Dorothy Vallens is tragic but also erotic, and her trauma response cycles between despair and desire in the flash of a moment. Frank Booth is a terrifying villain, and that villainy never comes forward more uncannily than watching Dennis Hopper sob over the performance of the woman he brutalizes. Even Dean Stockwell’s terrifying pimp Ben is given the Roy Orbison “In Dreams” solo, creating a dynamic of traditional American beauty and violent blood running under the surface. The only person spared this conflict is Laura Dern’s Sandy, whose only exposure to the darkness is to see it crashing down upon her lawn in the film’s crushing climax of melodrama.
David Lynch’s work has meant a lot to me for the past ten years or so, since I first met Twin Peaks and Eraserhead. Annie and I originally bonded over talking about Twin Peaks, and his films have been a source of many beloved memories of mine. Last summer, when we moved back to Madison, the first film we saw at the UW Cinematheque was Blue Velvet, and there I reunited for the first time with friends I met maybe six months after my first time watching Twin Peaks. It’ll remain a special experience to me for a long time.
MINI METRO Dinosaur Polo Club 2015 PC, iOS/Android, Switch, PS4
Most games that get cited as “perfect” are either so purely gameplay that they can be modified to fit any aesthetic you want or require such a bizarre cocktail of ideas that they cannot be replicated in any other medium. Tetris is a beautiful game of mechanical perfection – the two best Tetris games of the 21st century, Tetris DS and Tetris Effect, transform the game in wildly different ways. The former, Tetris DS, is a celebration of Nintendo history with a Capsule Corporation menu aesthetic, borrowing sprites directly from NES classics including The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The latter, Tetris Effect, sends Tetris into the new age stratosphere, with a sea of stars and a pulsing electronic soundtrack, a vibe somewhere between Burning Man and cult imagery. Alternatively, you can have the Super Mario franchise, where you have to cohere overall plumbers, giant turtles, extreme anime pop visuals, and ragtime or big band soundtracks – there is no dramatic “genre” or “mode” that this fantasy obviously fits, no game we play in real life that this matches beyond “pretend.”
Mini Metro illuminates the gap in this contrast by combining its pure gameplay with an immediately identifiable aesthetic that instantly teaches the player how to play it. The game takes place on a topographical railway map. Different shapes appear over time representing stations – each station starts receiving customers, represented by the station shape they’re trying to travel to. You draw rail lines between these stations (with just a drag and drop, easy as can be) and immediately trains start trafficking them along your drawn railway. Your goal is to keep the system running as long as possible before a station’s capacity overflows.
Drawing an effective railway is not simulated purely by distance, but also by the order you’ve drawn your stops – rerouting a line may result in a cleaner pathway that allows the train to take a turn smoothly rather than having to stop at a 180 and build speed again. Each in-game week, the city invests a little more funding – this can take the form of tunnels and bridges for crossing water features, additional trains to travel your rail lines, or additional lines of travel, each represented by their own bright color. The game comes down to drawing smart, efficient lines, and managing your choices in investment to protect yourself from accidentally hitting a dead end.
Designers could complicate this system and add currency for each rail line, add structural concerns for bridges about how long a carriage can cross safely, include “quality evaluations” along the way for earning extra bonuses from investment. But every decision in Mini Metro stems from the core concept of the aesthetically minimal topographical railway map. These ideas are not those represented visually on the map, and so they’re never introduced. Even the game’s soundtrack (by It Follows/Fez composer Disasterpeace) exists only in the forms of tones which play when passengers arrive or depart from a station.
A London run at its conclusion.
What separates Mini Metro from other “perfect” video games in my mind is the fact that it so directly looks at a real world concept and adapts it into a compelling and legible game. For comparison, Tetris began as an imitation of a pentomino puzzle game – in a sense, that relates back to Tetris, but the game is also an imitation of other box filling games, not a real world phenomenon. It’s a signifier of a signifier, never quite reaching back to whatever the original meaning was. Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the concept of the Pikmin series because he’d gotten into the habit of gardening and liked imagining a little world in his garden – but the experience of commanding Pikmin as a small military and using them to perform a long-term scavenger hunt has almost nothing to do with gardening.
Development on this game started after a trip on London’s Underground – even if it hadn’t been London, it’s hard to imagine this game starting any other way. I’ve only encountered city train systems while traveling, and I still can so quickly understand what’s happening in the game because the gameplay is so well communicated by the iconic aesthetic. The railway map design allows the game to abstract more literal simulation without losing focus on the game’s actual intent, which is managing and designing an effective transit system. It’s a motivating game design philosophy, a reminder that play can be right in front of our noses rather than requiring the imagination to create a funny little plumber who shoots fireballs at kappa. Mini Metro is ingenious in the same way the George Dow and Harry Beck transit map model itself is ingenious, communicating where the trains go without literal geography, using easily recognized symbols to communicate importance, and using attractive bright colors that catch the eye and linger in memory.
I can’t remember if I found “How We Met, The Long Version” through Spotify’s recommendation algorithm or Pitchfork’s Best New Music – I read it regularly, having just started my tradition of making seasonal playlists and needing more new music than I ever had in my life prior. It’s an extremely catchy groove, but it’s heavily playing off the sample of Jackie Stoudemire’s “Don’t Stop Dancin’” with a Daft Punk style production (think “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and its relationship to “Cola Bottle Baby.”) What makes “How We Met, The Long Version” a Jens Lekman song is the lyrics, which tell the story of the start of a romantic relationship – dating back to the Big Bang. It comes across as a maybe tongue-in-cheek observation in isolation, to romanticize a love story that starts with borrowing a bass guitar by syncing about trilobites and crustaceans evolving to the point where love is possible – but, I think, to assume that it’s in anyway less than genuine is to misunderstand Lekman’s lyrical project.
Life Will See You Now is, by and large, a series of relatively mundane anecdotal story-songs set to disco and new wave pop. In “Our First Fight,” a song with a tripping samba rhythm, Lekman’s conversational baritone delivers “I love you” and “No, I haven’t finished Season 3” in the same beautiful, neutral vocal tone, though that doesn’t stop a playful “Woo-hoo!” from taking center stage in the song’s climax. On “To Know Your Mission,” Lekman tells a story of meeting a Mormon missionary and telling him that he knows his mission – that “in a world of mouths, I want to be an ear” – that writing these songs and sharing these stories is the highest purpose. I think, for that reason, Lekman generally removes drama from the music and his singing, instead allowing the lyrics to build narrative momentum over music that remains playful and agile.
That’s not to say there’s no musical build-up, though. The way “Evening Prayer” or “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” (in my book, the two best songs on the album) build from humbler sonic beginnings to their final harmonies overwhelms me to the point of tears. “Evening Prayer” tells the story of two men meeting for beers after a successful cancer treatment, melts me. It chooses the friend instead of the cancer survivor Babak as its perspective character, who sits in deep anxiety about whether or not he and Babak are actually close enough friends for it to not be weird how deeply he worried for his sick friend. The eventual resolution is a tearjerker, and Loulou Lamotte’s harmonies in the final chorus send it home swinging for the fences.
“Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” sounds, more than anything else, like the Wii Sports theme song, and tells the story of comforting a struggling friend by literally breaking into the carnival. It slowly builds up to the title, a chorus which soars as an anthem, and then reaches its real confessional. Feature singer Tracey Thorn comes in to beg Jens, “If you’re gonna write a song about this, please, don’t make it a sad song.” Whether or not this is entirely fictional or, to any degree autobiographical, I think Lekman is once again returning to the confessional of “To Know Your Mission” – whether the stories are true, the feeling of what it means to listen and share stories is intimate, at times uncomfortable.
One of my other favorite moments on the album comes in “Wedding in Finistère” (I should mention, Lekman is Swedish, occasionally apparent from pronunciation more than from the lyrics.) The song tells the story of a somewhat sardonic exchange at a wedding, joking that it feels like getting married is where life ends when it’s supposed to be where it begins. But, then, suddenly, in the chorus, the sense of perspective zooms out, to generations watching the generation prior disappear into reverie.
Five-year-old watching the ten-year-olds shoplifting Ten-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds French kissing Fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds chain-smoking Twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing
This section is sung at almost double-tempo of the rest of the song (hell, the rest of the album,) flying into a propulsive hand clap game. Lekman claims he wrote this the day after a longtime friend told him she was pregnant, which made him feel the weight of time and his own sense of immaturity compared to where she was at in life. This moment reminds me so much of a moment in Genzaburo Yashino’s “How Do You Live?” in which our protagonist, a boy named Copper, realizes for the first time that the hundreds of cars driving back into Tokyo are, in fact, people, who all have their own lives and their own families and their own uncles. That when he and his uncle drove to the building he’s watching from, they may have been watched by someone from that very building, and this sudden sense that he is a part of the world and not its center makes him feel like a droplet in the tide. In the world of drama, the world of music, these are small revelations.
KEY TRACKS: “Evening Prayer,” “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” “Our First Fight,” “Wedding in Finistère”
CELESTE Maddy Makes Games PC, Switch, Playstation, Xbox
I Was Born For This.
“It was her dying wish.”
“I have to do this.”
The mountain is joining the pantheon of quests in games, alongside a princess in another castle, an alien outsider threatening planetary destruction, and, yes, revenge. There is a mountain; we go to the mountain to climb it. In Journey and God of War, much of that journey is just in getting to the mountain. It is always visible in the horizon; sweeping vistas after long climbs show us that we have “gotten closer,” but not close enough to tell how far the mountain really sits. After a time underground, both games find the base entry point, the snow falling to our character’s face, tassels and scarves flowing in wind.
Celestetoo is a game about a mountain. Like the prior year’s Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it is a game that starts at the bottom of that mountain from the beginning, teaches you the base mechanics of its precision platforming, and sends you on your merry way. And I think Celeste uses that mountain as a similar concept to Foddy’s as a reflection of the player’s own potential depression, insecurity, and need for a hard fought victory. These are, I think, perhaps the two best platformers of the decade in that they introduce new platforming mechanics while using expert intentional level geometry to communicate themes and an idea.
“Introduce” is, in some ways, a tough verb for Celeste, which to an outsider familiar with Matt Thorson’s prior game Towerfall might look like an actual ROM hack of that game. Its movement and airdash were immediately familiar to me, as I’d spent hundreds of hours playing what I’ve (obnoxiously) called “the Best Smash game, bro.” (Towerfall will get one of these columns someday soon, too, when I have a chance to get everyone together and play it for an afternoon.)
Celeste then does something better, that thing our favorite platformers do. Each chapter of Madeline’s story introduces new mechanics. Elevators that move on touch, blocks of starstuff that shoot Madeline forth like she’s cutting through jelly, feathers for Dragon Ball’s nimbus flight; each is quickly explained, quickly understood, and a project to master. These mechanics are then still remixed into later stages, but carefully and thoughtfully and not “because we were afraid it would be disappointing if we left it behind.”
And then it does something even better. It tells Madeline’s story of depression and isolation, and of her willfulness to climb this mountain. It meets Theo, who is kind, aloof, and feels like a real friend, whose musical theme is cozy as James Taylor. It introduces Madeline directly to her other self, who injects the game with as much humor as she does pain. And it does this all with the lightest of touches…except for the brilliant score by Lena Raine (plus credited remixers for the truly difficult B-Sides) which is a natural, exhilarating fit for the game.
Celeste also has no trouble breaking out of its “mountain” theme to play with color.
Lastly – Celeste’s Assist Mode is a hallmark for accessibility in games. That a game so openly confident in its difficulty, so inviting to be compared to “masocore” games and ripe for speedrunning, also is so kind to its player and wants to avail itself to disabled gamers who might gain something from Madeline’s story? It’s just the whole package. They made what they wanted, and made everything they wanted.
Celeste is maybe most iconic for its creator, Maddy Thorson, using the game to come out and transition, to mild outrage from anti-woke chuds and celebration among queer gamers desperate for icons in a dude-heavy landscape. It is not the first queer game by a trans developer, nor is it the most outwardly queer game. However, prior landmark queer games are largely dialogue-heavy adventure games or visual novels, or the comedy short-form experiments of developers like Robert Yang or Nina Freeman. Celeste takes advantage of a gap in the market – a game aimed directly at the heart of the speedrunning hardcore gamer community. Anyone who’s ever watched Games Done Quick knows just how overwhelmingly queer the speedrunner demographic seems to be – Celeste manages to combine queer aesthetics with a gameplay-first design, executing a precise shot at a previously unfulfilled niche. It’s become a landmark “most important” game for that reason – thankfully, it’s a great example of where “most important” and “most fun” meet.
After an opening credits set to archival photos of pre-WWI urban Americans, one of the first images we see is of glowing, hot fire. Bill (Richard Gere) works in a steel mill, and we see molten molding as our first major elemental power. This film luxuriates in vast expanses of the classic elements, on fields of wheat and riverbeds, on major storms and hair in whirling wind. Days of Heaven is most famous for its golden hour sunlight, fought for in protracted production to get twenty minutes of shooting done to get the rich colors captured in this film’s photography. But Days of Heaven never comes alive quite like it does in front of fire, which we see as the opportunity both to give life (such as at the final workers’ hoedown bonfire, sparks shooting off the central flame around the fiddler and the dancing) and to create hell.
I’m maybe lucky that my first Terrence Malick film was To The Wonder, the beginning of his autobiographical sequence I’ve seen people call “The Twirling Trilogy,” films extremely light on plot or consequence, heavy on reflective, poetic narration and beautiful people shot in beautiful lighting. After enjoying that introduction, I take any amount of conflict, plot, or Big Cinematic Beauty as its own reward. Knowing the hellfire that’s coming at the end certainly gives the preceding hour incomparable tension.
A good thirty minutes of Days of Heaven is mostly spent watching labor. After Bill gets in a fight and kills his steel mill boss, he takes his sister Linda (Linda Manz, who narrates the film) and his “sister” Abby (Brooke Adams, in an incredible double-header year where she also dominates Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to work on a wheat farm in the Texas panhandle and hide out from the law. The work of shucking wheat and collecting hay is shown in detail, repeatedly, broken mostly by moments where Linda is able to play with an unnamed friend. Annie referred to the pace as “a glacial 94 minutes” – I prefer the term “meditative,” but I’m a sicko for this stuff.
It helps that the golden hour photography makes the panhandle look like paradise. There are funny, storybook-like shots in the montage of the arrival to the farm. One shot of a train crossing a bridge in front of a bright blue sky immediately brought to mind Wes Anderson – a later scene at a river dock brought to mind Martin McDonagh. The definitive look of Malick’s modern films is shaped entirely by his collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski, and together they create deeply personal images which make me understand the appeal of sacred geometry. They are largely shot in immersive, close-up long takes, the camera’s sweep lively documentarian when people are in frame and methodical when shooting still images. His first two films, shot by (among others) Tak Fujimoto, Nestor Almendros, and Haskell Wexler, are no less gorgeous, but they present images in a more classical manner. The flashes of the future are here in shots of wildlife, from the rabbits and pheasants around the farm to the dread-inducing shots of locusts which threaten Texan Eden. And they are here in one riverbed conversation between Bill and Abby, an uncomfortable proposition that uses montage to show reconciliation.
The farmer (Sam Shepard) falls in love with Abby, and the drama progresses. In the latter part of the film, we see traditional dramatic acting in the triangle, and all three are so great at communicating their characters through body language and their facial expressions rather than through extended dialogue. But in the early part of their relationship, almost all interiority is only understood through Linda’s narration. Manz is somewhere between a real street urchin and a trained actor, having attended at least some classes but having run away for most of them. Because the film was largely shot in improvisation, Malick made a wonderful decision to let Manz narrate in post-production, apparently just a stream of consciousness improvised by Manz watching the movie herself. Her observations are so funny and so sincere – it truly creates the impression that they plucked this character out of a Faulkner novel and started rolling.
The great conflagration at the film’s climax feels like it could be where the film ends. It continues on another fifteen or twenty minutes, laying track for our “heroes’” fates, drawing some fairly clear delineation on what will or will not change. This decision feels mildly uncinematic, closer to the way a Great Novel ends, and filmmakers inspired by Malick (first thought in mind is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, but also Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant or Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter) often cut to credits right at that moment of Great Emotion. But that landing runway takes suit after his beautiful, surprising ending to Badlands, and predicts the iconic beach sequence that concludes The Tree of Life. Denouement is an essential part of Malick’s storytelling – it gives the story space to exist in context, to merely be where the curtain closes rather than where meaning dies.
Of all the Hayao Miyazaki classics, Kiki’s Delivery Service is the one where I hear criticism and find myself becoming defensive. My favorite, The Wind Rises, is a challenging film about a morally ambiguous, naive romantic – I have a hard time blaming people for bouncing off a film dwelling on World War II that finds the nature of war itself abominable. But with Kiki’s Delivery Service, I feel the frown start to set in as it slips down the rankings below Porco Rosso, Castle in the Sky, or Howl’s Moving Castle, which are all films I love.
I think it’s because Kiki feels central to Miyazaki’s protagonists. In his book Turning Point, Miyazaki describes Chihiro of Spirited Away as “a brat, frankly,” and the purpose of the film is watching her grow up. By the end of the film, Chihiro’s kindness, independence, and sense of empathy in her relationships comes close to where Kiki starts Kiki’s Delivery Service. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, we watch Kiki grow from a kind, independent, but naive and somewhat insecure girl into a self-motivated hero like the titular Nausicaa. These stories of maturation are intended to encourage those on the precipice between dependence and independence, and Miyazaki gives a bit of the game away that Kiki’s Delivery Service was partly made to encourage Studio Ghibli’s own younger staffers who were trying to find their place in adult society.
Kiki and Ursula, looking at Ursula’s art.
So we begin Kiki with her moving out from her parents’ home and moving to the city, getting a job, and finding fulfillment in that job. These are the rhythms Kiki has been taught how to do – to ply her trade, in a maybe unconventional way, and put down roots. She adores the old lady who makes artisan pies for her ungrateful granddaughter. She admires the artist who has achieved the self-motivation Kiki lacks. And the film’s primary drama arrives only when she experiences her first setbacks – she catches a mild pneumonia, and after she recovers, she becomes deeply depressed after an awkward social encounter with her friend Tombo.
The depressive episode, like the peril in My Neighbor Totoro, is unconventional for a children’s fantasy film. Both films explore the encroaching of real adult concerns in a direct and nonsymbolic way – I’d contrast with the extreme abstraction of The Boy and the Heron’s fantasy world or the slime Howl gag in Howl’s Moving Castle. Kiki’s depression means she can’t fly, that she can’t talk to her cat. The magic doesn’t create the drama – the magic disappearing creates the drama.
Not one of the eight Flaming Lips albums before The Soft Bulletin is a bad album. They’re all very solid indie rock. The base pleasures of Wayne’s singing and their riff-writing maintain a solid development period. But the best Flaming Lips songs prior to The Soft Bulletin are fun diversions, often intentionally so. “She Don’t Use Jelly,”“This Here Giraffe,”“Turn It On,” these are fun songs (and in fact, I miss some of that Primus-adjacent spirit of “Turn It On” in their later years!) but they aren’t anthems.
The Flaming Lips ascend to the mainstream with The Soft Bulletin, its more complex musicality rivaling the intricacy of Radiohead’s OK Computer in a format more accessible than the four-LP experiment of Zaireeka. But, really, I think it’s less the complexity that attracted the mass attention that would allow them to blossom into one of America’s great rock bands with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and instead the escalation of stakes in their music. This happens lyrically, but it also happens sonically – the melodies are soar, and those new instrumental layers and drum machines arrive in sequence across each track’s runtime. This is not the maximalism of the 70s brought back directly – it’s repeatedly stripped back across the album down to the sound they mastered as indies.
I get that some people will never enjoy Wayne Coyne’s voice. It’s almost impossible to express how inescapable “Do You Realize??” was when I was a teenager. In the time right after Limp Bizkit and alongside James Blunt and Mika, I got very used to his thin, often pitchy lead vocals. I think it never sounds better than on The Soft Bulletin, where on a song like “The Spiderbite Song,” it disarms the Queen-like piano and drum arrangement and keeps a sense of humor around the lyrics. It makes him sound small enough that these near-misses with death could have destroyed him. That his final verse avoids talking about his own father’s death feels like he understands the character he’s built on The Soft Bulletin.
It’s this juxtaposition of soft-and-strong that makes The Flaming Lips a perfect anthem band for 1999. It lends a sincerity that the adult contemporary bands of the early 2000s like Coldplay and Train never bridged. Stripping back to the quietude of “What is The Light?”’s piano and bass drum intro or allowing nearly two full minutes of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” to pass before allowing any percussion to re-enter lends indie cred that kept The Flaming Lips cool. Well – sure, critics and audiences thought they were cool, but I just mean that I think they’re cool too.
IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING King Crimson 1969
I’ve been trying to be cool enough to enjoy King Crimson since hearing the iconic “21st Century Schizoid Man” sample in Kanye West’s “Power.” As a teenager, I wasn’t ever able to access the split between that track and the remaining four. The instrumental groove on “Moonchild (The Illusion)” is the kind of thing I used to get impatient with – now, I appreciate being peppered with small, fragmentary sounds. I’m more attracted to songs like “I Talk To The Wind” and “Epitaph,” adoring their sweet sadness. In the Court of the Crimson King’s loose, relaxed songs primarily anchor themselves on Greg Lake’s plaintive vocals and gorgeous, low-key instrumentals.
You can hear in “21st Century Schizoid Man” and “In The Court of the Crimson King” the germ of progressive rock’s experimentation with major tempo shifts and extended jazz instrumental breakdowns. But the titles there betray a semi-mythical status the songs don’t necessarily employ – the lyrics throughout the album are closer to the poetics of folk music than the arcane mythology of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s later “Karn Evil 9” or the rock opera of Rush’s 2112. The “21st Century Schizoid Man” is a survivor of war. The title track has medieval themes, but is in line with Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.”
The later evolution of the Tolkienesque and science fiction in progressive rock is what I anticipated hearing that future blast through that opening riff, that vocal distortion effect, the absolute chaotic ramp into high tempo chaos. I was really into Stephen King, Mass Effect, and Dungeons & Dragons at the time. I don’t blame that kid for not enjoying the pleasures of Ian MacDonald’s woodwind solos – now, I really adore them. This being the inaugural album for this birthday project, it feels apropos that it’s one that had to grow on me over thirteen years.
KEY TRACKS: “21st Century Schizoid Man,” “I Talk to the Wind”
PENTIMENT Obsidian Entertainment PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
Describing the process of pitching Pentiment to the executives at Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer stated, “I never would have proposed Pentiment if it weren’t for Game Pass,” the Xbox subscription service which offers a Netflix-like model for playing new games. Indie game development creates brilliant games, but Pentiment is the sort of achievement that can only be made with the decades of expertise leveraged by its development team and the resources afforded by studio development. One look at its art in motion reveals the nature of this staggering accomplishment – they have married the medieval art of liturgical Dutch masters with a game Sawyer described in the linked interview above as “Night in the Woods meets The Name of the Rose.” The presentation of this game is clever and full of the kind of ideas smaller teams cut for scope.
You play primarily as Andreas Maler, an apprentice artist working on his masterwork (think master’s thesis in a grad program) in a monastery outside the small Bavarian village of Tassing. You characterize Andreas through dialogue choices which offer you great freedom, but his voice and sense of humor largely remains the same wherever you place his values. Andreas, meanwhile, characterizes his peers, with different fonts reflecting different levels of literacy – when he realizes he had somebody wrongly pegged, their next line will play out, change font, and then be presented again to reflect their class and education. It’s the sort of judgment you get used to Andreas making.
Andreas defending friend and mentor Piero from the snobby Brother Guy.
The game’s story spans twenty five years in Tassing’s history where the town is thrown into uproar by a series of murders, all seemingly disconnected…save for one mysterious link. Andreas takes it upon himself to solve these murders and protect the falsely accused, partly because he is an educated outsider but also because he is somewhat arrogant and selfish. These murder investigations take place over the course of a handful of days. Andreas will visit with different townsfolk to ask questions, potentially lure them into exposing secrets, and collect evidence. At the end, whether he has enough evidence or not, he will nominate someone for execution, and depending on his case, his accusation will succeed or fail.
Unlike classic LucasArts games, it is impossible to collect all of the evidence and information you need in one playthrough. Convicting the wrong person for a crime won’t stop the game in its tracks. It’s a storytelling game, and part of that story involves finding your own values as you explore impossible situations. As a result, navigating the game’s choices becomes a series of very intentional decisions, and exploring Tassing’s world merits eagle-eyed attention. As a roleplaying game, it gives you so much space to play, to solve problems and find new ones based on choices you made hours ago, that it compares favorably with Sawyer’s prior landmark quest design in New Vegas.
Pentiment’s story is told with expert writing which neither becomes self-serious and dry or the Monty Python skit the art evokes for many modern players. The game is very funny without being condescending to its characters – it respects them as people, not so different from us, but also respects the difference a world of rotted food and Catholic governments would have on its characters’ worldviews. There are moments in this game where a less expert hand might make this a diatribe, but Sawyer and his narrative design team manage to largely keep Pentiment in the voice of the manuscripts which have survived from the era – albeit in plain English rather than unnecessary Middle dialect.
Andreas, dreaming of Saint Grobian and his revelers.
On that Middle dialect – I don’t want to scare people away who might enjoy this game but may not have the Medieval European history education to enjoy it. Whenever a proper noun or historical movement is invoked, you can hit the view button and it will zoom you out to view definitions of each of those terms. Adding in-line footnotes to a game based in history is so outrageously smart that it should become a standard in almost any narrative game. The UI itself is presented as a medieval text, clear maps and quest logs laid in an artful tome.
The joys of Pentiment come in unraveling its mystery and coming to love its characters. Its core mystery weaves in and out and comes to a satisfying conclusion. In the meantime, meals, knitting competitions, local festivals, gossip and play give you opportunities to care for the people you might be sending to conviction. One of my favorite characters is Klaus Bruckner, a block printer and family man whose sense of friendship and loyalty are spoken in sometimes blunt but fair clarity. There are ten other characters I might’ve selected.
One highlight is optional. An Ethopian priest, Brother Sebhat, has come to visit Tassing’s monastery to present his manuscripts for study and documentation. However, he hasn’t gotten a chance to meet the townspeople. He asks you to organize supper. When you arrive, more people than he ever imagined have joined to meet him. Sebhat takes the opportunity to learn about life in town and share his experiences as an outsider, before reading a passage from his own bible. The game’s art style changes at this moment – he presents the story of Lazarus in the art of Ethopian Orthodox Catholicism, with the townsfolk joining this story. The children ask why everyone in his bible is brown. Sebhat’s storytelling gets the chance to express a deeply felt, reassuring sermon about death and salvation, a welcome balm during this murder investigation. As he’s telling his story, one of the little girls steals Andreas’s hat – she then mad dogs you, like, “are you going to interrupt Brother Sebhat to get your hat back?” If you let her keep the hat, twenty years later, her child will be wearing it as a family heirloom.
Brother Sebhat’s Bible, at the moment Andreas’s hat is stolen.
That sequence, I think, highlights the deftness with which Pentiment expresses its narrative. Pentiment is not afraid of the scripture in its world, willing to embrace religion as a powerful force in the lives of its characters, but remains skeptical of the institution which governs that religion. It celebrates the difference between different churches, the churchless, the pagan, the European and African, between men and women. It tells this serious story with a sense of humor, the recognition that sometimes kids are just little shits, without becoming a farce. Sebhat’s supper is one of many scenes that moved me deeply.
I’m a geek for this kind of stuff – medieval literature meets murder mystery is a fanfiction my dreams wrote up while I was writing D&D campaigns in high school. I never thought it would be realized in a video game. It is chock-a-block full of magic, empathy and history. Pentiment marries a celebration of life alongside a recognition of the hardship and violence of a time where most leave no monument. From graves marked for “Two innocents” to the ruins of Roman aqueducts littered throughout Tassing, Pentiment works to preserve a history many never learned.
All My Friends 