Five & Five on Friday 6/23/2023
Asteroid City, Video Game Music, and more
Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations and then five micro reviews of albums from my high school CD collection. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!
Next Thursday, June 29th, I will be playing drums with Dan Rico at Rubulad in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY. This is the first of hopefully many shows playing Rico’s brand new solo material, which mixes dance music, garage rock, funk, and jazz harmony. The rehearsals have been a blast, and I suspect the live show will be even better. Tickets are available at the door!
The Human Instrumentality Podcast is back this week with the first of three episodes about Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy, whose crew had a significant overlap with the Neon Genesis Evangelion team. Our first episode covers the 1995 film Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. Fans of kaiju, great 90s fashion, and turtles in general would do well to check this out!
Normally I’d feel a bit embarrassed recommending a movie by such a famous director when there’s so much out there that might not be on your radar, but given how dire things have looked at the movies lately all my usual bets are off. You hear of this Wes Anderson guy? His new movie Asteroid City is really good! I’d worn myself out on Anderson’s whole “thing” a few movies ago, but I checked this one out because I’m a sucker for atomic age sci-fi/cold war paranoia stuff and I’m glad that I did. Anderson’s stuffy formalism finally feels like ‘the point’ instead of a de facto aesthetic surface. Might be the only movie I’ve seen to address the 2020 experience, obliquely in this case, without making my eyes roll out of my head.
I don’t pretend to be a fashionable guy, but I’m doing my best to close my knowledge gap and at least sorta sound/look like I know what I’m doing. To that end, I’ve enjoyed subscribing to Blackbird Spyplane. In particular I found these two essays about the effects of data-driven optimization on designers and consumers respectively quite thought-provoking.
A few weeks ago I went on a minor tirade in a subscriber exclusive letter about how a lot of people misunderstand video game music, often overlooking what it is (innovative electronic music) for what it could be if it were played on “real” instruments. You know who doesn’t misunderstand video game music? Ryland Kurshenoff. I don’t know who this person is, but their playlists of VGM electronica have been my go-to writing soundtracks for the last few weeks.
Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.
Octavarium by Dream Theater (2005) - Progressive Metal
My copy of this is signed by bassist John Myung, nice guy! There are some real heaters on this once you get past the ballads, which is admittedly evergreen when it comes to Dream Theater. The advice is doubly true here because the album is softer than the typical Dream Theater album on the whole. That aside, the title track might be the best thing the band has ever done.
Heliocentric by The Ocean (2010) - Progressive Metal
People thought this one was a bust at the time, but I think it’s pretty neat. Most complaints at the time were about the band’s decision to stick with a single singer instead of the guest vocal approach of previous albums. I think history, and The Ocean’s track record since has proven that gripe wrong. The other complaint was about the lyrics. Writing a concept album about Enlightenment thinkers is pretty corny, especially in light of how the whole New Atheism wave of the 00s that likely inspired this record turned out. But I think this album holds up better than you’d expect given its subject matter.
The Great Misdirect by Between the Buried and Me (2009) - Progressive Metal
After Colors I thought this band could do no wrong, so I grabbed this album first chance I could and spun the hell out of it in my sophomore year of college. Remember when Metalsucks called these guys “The LeBron James of Metal” when this album dropped? 2009! Listening to The Great Misdirect now, its clear that they were already moving away from what I dug about about their early material. There are still some great sequences, but as a whole it’s a bit exhausting.
The Monitor by Titus Andronicus (2010) - Punk Rock
This album snapped me out of a protracted “only prog rock and death metal are real” period, and helped me fall in love with actually fun music again. Over educated, overly anxious, highly referential, deeply paranoid, proudly east coast, too sincere for its own good, interested in historical narrative as metaphor… this was and remains my shit.
Road Salt One by Pain of Salvation (2010) - Hard Rock
Here’s another record that people really slagged on when it was released. As a big change of pace from Pain of Salvation’s previous albums this one was bound to illicit a strong reaction. I actually dig the band’s take on classic hard rock, but singer/guitarist Daniel Gildenlöw’s “prog guy that fucks” persona wears out its welcome on the album’s weaker tracks.