#THE MUSIC?? THE SCORE?? THE REPURPOSED SONGS FROM THE GAMES???

[ladyfly]

Maintenance Day fluff

I really wanted to share this one. It’s based off of a dream I had. The song in this fic is 'I Want to Be Your Boyfriend' by Hot Freaks.

Maintenance day was always a nice day for you. No customers to deal with. Just you, your boys, and the hundreds of tiny Music men. You called them the Spiderlings. Today you found yourself giving the spiderlings a checkup. Sun was upstairs trying to beat Moon's score in one of the games. You could hear his frustrated growls as he failed. You were laying on your stomach. A tool kit with parts nest to you. Moon sat on you holding up his weight.

Currently he was brushing out your hair "What style do you want starling?"

You hummed "Something to keep my hair out of my face."

The spiderling you were looking at gave a happy dance at the new foot you gave it. DJ was happily playing playing whatever music he wanted. Some of it down right filthy, others saintly. He gave his best rendition of a chuckle as one of his spiderlings excitedly presented you with a large dead rat.

Once the higher ups figured out how many Tiny Music Men there actually were it was decided they would be repurposed into pest control. Often the little scrimblos would bring you the things they killed. Kind of like a cat going "Mommy! Look what I did for you!" It was almost like a game for them to bring you stuff. You had even been brought a live pigeon once.

Sun gave a cry of victory "Finally! Well Moonie. I doubt you can do better than that! I told you I was better at this game."

Moon shifted as he played with your hair adding some kind of sweet smelling product to it "We'll see about that. Just don't be a sore looser when I prove you wrong."

The heavy footfalls of someone entering the arcade made moon pause briefly. The sound of chatter echoing off the walls.

A gruff male voice firmly spoke "This is the west arcade."

The head of daytime security came into view. Beside him someone you didn't want to see. Your ex stood next to him taking the room in with a dull look on their face.

As their eyes landed on you they grinned "Well! Didn't think I'd see you again. What a pleasant surprise."

Your ex was someone who made your soul go 'Oh god not you!' with a little Sideshow Bob shudder added in. You had told Sun and Moon about them. Moon regarded them with disdain. The head of daytime security began to walk them around the arcade explaining things.

Moon abruptly stood up taking you with him "Break time Love."

Sun giggled from above "Yeah! Break time! If you work all the time you might burn out sunshine."

You watched as Sun jumped from the second floor of the arcade and land in a perfect handstand. The music playing shifted and got louder. 'I Want to Be Your Boyfriend' by Hot Freaks blared from the speakers around the arcade. Moon pulled you into a faux waltz twirling you to the first verse of the song. Now Sun and Moon are 9ft tall. Your feet could not reach the ground.

By the second verse Sun took you from him and began to dance as well. Verse by verse you were passed between the men. They left you a giggly mess. As the song came to an end Ex and the guard came back down. The guard gestured to each person in the room introducing you all.

When he got to you Ex grinned "I know them already. We were an item. I hope to be an item again. More long term though."

Moon maneuvered you into a piggy back ride "This was a thing but we have to go."

Sun nodded frantically "Yes yes! Much to do! We still need our checkup."

Your ex frowned "Should you really be letting them carry you like that? It's dangerous. It could drop you or crush you! You should stay with me. Much safer."

Sun stood up as tall as he could "We ARE safe. Very safe."

Moon nodded "We would never hurt them. Unless they asked."

You let out a gasp "Moonpie!"

Sun inched his way closer to Moon.

The guard let out a loud sigh "I don't have time for this weird ass shit. Your shift starts tomorrow Ex. Take today and get used to the building. I'm leaving."

Moon giggled followed by an indignant shriek. Sun pulled you from the back of Moon and bolted off with you in a princess carry.

Moon growled playfully "Sun! Give them back you rapscallion!"

He took off after you and sun. Ex watched annoyed as Moon took you from sun proclaiming victory. This continued all the way back to the daycare. Both men darting around the plex trying to keep you away from the other. Dodging staff, planters, and even Glamrocks on their way to the daycare. The three of you lost in raucous laughter.

[ghostbustershq]

Ghostbusters: Afterlife - Trailer 2 Full Breakdown

This is it, this is definitely it!

A meaty and goosebump-evoking trailer just dropped today for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

Much like the first trailer, the main focus of this is the family - forced to move to Oklahoma after falling on tough times. Janine, Terror Dogs, Mini Pufts, and Ghostbusting in motion as Jason Reitman has referred to it are all here. There’s a whole lot here to unpack, plus a whole lot that I’m sure we still haven’t seen. In fact, I would argue that we now have a pretty complete picture of what’s in store come November and are being shown just enough to tide us over until the fall.

This was a solid trailer. It hit all of the right notes. It invoked goosebumps on several occasions. And oh boy, does it demonstrate that Jason Reitman wasn’t kidding when he told us hardcore nerds that if we loved easter eggs, we were in for a treat.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

A GREAT MOM

The trailer begins with a very quiet and intimate bit of dialogue between Paul Rudd’s Mr. Grooberson and Carrie Coon’s Callie.

The two sit at a table, and while the trailer frames it to appear to be Spinners, a quick glimpse at the wall next to the two in a later shot shows they’re actually in a Chinese restaurant. In fact, I love that Grooberson has what looks to be one of the deluxe Benihana cocktails in a ceramic glass in front of him. Grooberson tells Callie that she’s a great mom, but she’s not so sure. Callie feels like she’s been a great mother to her oldest, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). But feels like her introverted daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace) keeps her at a distance. There’s a sense that Callie and Phoebe can’t find much common ground, and for this her mother is struggling.

I really love how the trailer gently brings us into the world, helps set the stage, and gives us several glimpses of some of the incredible cinematography in store from Eric Steelberg.

AN AWKWARD, NERDY KID

Grooberson’s dialogue reassures Callie that what Phoebe is going through is normal. He calls her an “awkward, nerdy kid” to imagery of her at school being teased. Ghostbusters: The Video Game fans concerned about if the story and events from the game will somehow be referenced or acknowledged in some way will probably quickly notice the Doritos product placement. Hours of gameplay has trained them well.

Anyway, not only is Phoebe failing to connect with her mother on a deeper level, but it appears that she’s an outsider at school as well. It makes the friendship we know she’s to have with Podcast (Logan Kim) that much sweeter. And you feel for her right out of the gate here, hoping that she’ll find that friend as soon as possible.

Callie and Grooberson’s conversation comes to a conclusion with Phoebe’s mother just wishing, “she’d get into some trouble.” As her mother laments about her daughter needing to be bold and a little more adventurous, we see a continuation of the scene from the first trailer in which Phoebe solves a puzzle built into the floor of the farmhouse in order to find a hidden ghost trap. Perhaps Ghostbusting is exactly the trouble the young and brainy kid needs?

As we, the audience, see the familiar ghost trap, there’s quite literally a drum roll added to the music scoring of the trailer. Perhaps Ghostbusting is exactly the trouble we need too.

JANINE, YOU HAVEN’T CHANGED

The trailer continues with the Trevor dialogue we heard in the first trailer as he explains to Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) that they’re broke and the only thing they have is a “creepy old farmhouse” left to them by their grandfather. But that is the lead in to our first major surprise of the trailer: a glimpse of Annie Potts’ return as Janine Melnitz!

Janine jokes to Callie that her father wasn’t much of a homemaker. “He could hardly keep the power on,” Janine says with a chuckle. If there was any question of the family lineage, this trailer solidifies that Callie and her family are Spengler through-and-through.

It should be noted at this point that the quiet music that accompanied the beginning of the trailer suddenly has these eerie choral notes added to it. Adding a little bit of that paranormal/otherworldly feeling but keeping the trailer light and playful. I’m not sure if this is Rob Simonsen’s score, but if I had to guess given the way the music builds and shifts, this is an original music bed for the trailer only.

It’s also interesting to see how we’ll be able to revisit the past in the film by use of footage from the original (as seen in the YouTube videos playing on various computers) but also the use of one of my favorite set photography moments framed and displayed in the farmhouse presented as a personal photograph. I know, given how some people reacted to seeing a headshot of Sean Connery used in an Indiana Jones film, these types of touches can take people out of a film. But I think the trailer gives us a great idea of how these moments will be integrated and I love it.

The trailer takes a hard turn with a great back and forth between Callie and Janine. Callie tells Janine that it sounds like her father has left her nothing. Janine playfully retorts, “Well, I wouldn’t say nothing.” This line is masterfully juxtaposed with Trevor opening the barn doors to find the Ectomobile housed under a tarp. The music comes to a crescendo as Trevor lifts the tarp and reveals the Ghostbusters Mooglie logo.

Let’s call this goosebumps moment number one.

THE ONLY ONE WITH AN ENGINE

It’s this part of the trailer where it does something that’s a rarity these days, and that I appreciate so much: the music takes a breath and completely drops off to give us a small vignette of a scene from the film. Phoebe enters the barn to find Trevor working on the Ecto. She ribs him that, of all the broken down cars on the farm, he’s chosen “the station wagon.” Trevor responds that his vehicle of choice was the only one with an engine.

The music and percussion come back in full force to score Trevor on a joy ride through the wheat fields of the farm. He seems to be having a good time.

So am I… this was definitely goosebumps moment number two.

A STORM COMING

Act Two of the trailer starts with a dark and ominous storm coming into Sumerville. There’s trouble in small town Oklahoma. Grooberson reiterates his line about a town with no faultlines shaking on a daily basis to Trevor and Phoebe. Only this time, he receives a response: “Maybe it’s the apocalypse.” Phoebe delivers the line to Grooberson with such amazing deadpan earnestness that you can tell she and grandpa might have a whole lot in common. Including their sense of humor.

The line gives us a good chuckle to break the tension but also sets the stage for what’s to come in the trailer: exactly what Phoebe has predicted.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

As Phoebe tells us that “Egon came here for a reason,” an archival piece of footage and dialogue from the first film plays on her laptop: the commercial playing on Dana Barrett’s television at 55 CPW. As the original Ghostbusters give you their sales pitch, this is where the trailer really kicks into modern trailer overdrive.

Flashes of imagery including the PKE meter, Mini Puft mayhem at Wal-Mart, and more quickly breathe in and out. In fact, if this trailer is our Christmas present in July, this is where we’re unwrapping and unpacking what’s inside the box.

But we also get glimpses of a creepy underground temple with some pretty intense architecture and even creepier statue work. Terror dog/human hybrid statues flanking what looks to be a pharaoh with wings. And gaunt peasants all reaching out to it all. Did Sumerians have pharaohs? Or is this something else? Certainly seems like if there were Gozer worshippers out there, this might be a stone tribute to them.

The kids discover the terrifying temple and Trevor gives us an “oh my god” to punctuate as they see what we see.

NICE DOGGY, CUTE LITTLE POOCH

Right about this part of the trailer is where my brain explodes and I’m not sure where to start. Imagery is rapid fire as the shit hits the fan.

Phoebe looks into a cauldron in the temple (where there’s numbers behind her that we’ll have to analyze further at some point). And the cork pops on the bottle. As she does so, there’s a terrifying growl in the background foreshadowing some familiar imagery we’re about to see.

But before we get to that, two incredible things are seen as well: familiar purple PKE trails that look a whole lot like those that explode from the firehouse and converge at Spook Central. And, as Grooberson’s line about New York City looking like “The Walking Dead” is repurposed to sound like he’s talking about Sumerville, there’s an incredible physical creature design sitting at a lunch counter. A half-decomposed cabbie maybe? Wearing a 1970’s collar and neckerchief. To my eye, I’d be willing to bet that’s the work of Arjen Tuiten and his team of creature designers. And it’d make Steve Johnson proud.

Plus it’s such a funny image of this corpse sitting at a lunch counter, and the waiter is pour him coffee like it ain’t no thing. I love it.

Back to man’s worst friend: the terror dogs make several appearances in the trailer. First as a cool half-manifested entity above Groobersen and again chasing the poor guy out of a Wal-Mart. Is Groobersen haunted by these things like Louis Tully? Or is something else going on here?

IN A SPIRITUAL SENSE, OF COURSE

If there was a moment that I expected Ray Parker Jr.’s iconic theme song to kick into full gear, this would have been it. The icing on the cake of the trailer, after we see the dead rising from the grave and all hell breaking loose, is Trevor, Phoebe and Podcast all in the Ecto chasing after what we now know is Muncher. The editorial of this is insanely cool. And we get to see the Remote Trap Vehicle (RTV) deployed from the Ecto and how it’s used in the pursuit of Muncher. We’ve seen the gunner seat, but the beats that this moment in the trailer hit, well…

Goosebumps moment number three.

VENKMAN, WE’RE NOT HOME

After all the debate among friends if there would be a “Chewie, We’re Home” moment in this trailer - where we’d see one of the original Ghostbusters live and in the flesh, we got the perfect tease. As Grooberson, Phoebe and Podcast watch the conclusion of the original 1984 ad, the trailer closes with a phone ringing inside a very familiar looking Occult Book shop.

Tattooed arms (I’ve tried with everything I can to see what the tattoo says) pick up the phone and the familiar voice of Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) curtly tells whomever is on the other end of that phone that, “We’re closed.” A perfect little tease if you ask me. Let’s save seeing Peter, Ray and Winston on-screen to the main event.

[sorceress-in-distress]

Social Distancing Online Entertainment Masterpost

Right, I’ve only been back from uni for 2 days and my mental health has already ✨ 𝓳𝓾𝓼𝓽 𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽 𝓾𝓹 𝓯𝓾𝓬𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓿𝓪𝓷𝓲𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓭 ✨. I’ve read all the articles so you don’t have to and I thought I’d just make a big-ass list. Keep it going in the comments!

Go On A Virtual Holiday

Google Arts and Culture has high quality 360° degree tours of many famous museums, galleries, landmarks, theatres and national parks as well as close up images of artworks and exhibitions from all around the world.

Using street view on google maps you can visit (almost) anywhere in the world, including Disneyland, Hollywood Studios, Kew Gardens, and many other attractions and landmarks. 

Interactive world history timeline from the British Museum

Virtual Tours are available of: The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, The Met, The Dali Museum, Blarney Castle in Cork, Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, The Louvre, The Picasso Museum, NASA Langley, NASA Glenn, The Vatican Museum, United States Airforce Museum, Buckinghan Palace, and a list of others here

Or go abroad via a live webcam feed 

Animals!

Monterey Bay Aquarium streams several live cameras on its website and social media

Live Cams are available of: San Diego Zoo,  Smithsonian National Zoo, Edinburgh Zoo, Folly Farm, and many others here, here, and here

Play with cats and dogs by remotely controlling a laser or treat dispenser using the Petcube app, it was made for people to check up on their pets while they’re away but anyone can use the live cameras

Play Online Games With Friends

Cards Against Humanity (make sure you’re all on the same server or you won’t be able to find eachother)

Kahoot

The Wikipedia Game (you can play this individually without this website but this is a great way of racing against someone else)

GeoGuessr

Monopoly

THOUSANDS of other games there are so many websites out there. It may seem a bit old school now but some of the Facebook games are actually pretty good in terms of playing against friends

Listen To Music

Keep an eye out on your favourite artists’ social media, many of them are arranging mini live concerts on facebook, instagram, youtube and twitch

Rave allows you to screen share youtube videos as well as other media so you can have a custom festival while video chatting or just chill and listen to the same thing

The Vienna State Opera is live streaming ballet and opera performances for free, as is the Met Opera

Watch Movies And TV With Friends

Netflix party is a chrome browser extension allows you and your friends to watch the same netflix show at the same time and includes a group chat sidebar so you don’t have to keep looking down at your phone

As mentioned above, Rave lets you screenshare netflix, youtube and vimeo

Misc.

Print some of these online colouring book pages or these colouring pages from various museum gift shops

Zooniverse is a personal fave of mine, it’s a really great citizen science website where you can contribute to different projects by looking at photos from safari camera traps and space telescopes as well as transcribing ancient documents. A really good way to do something positive in this situation

I think this really speaks for itself

Make topical personalised 20 second hand washing instructions using your loved ones’ favourite songs using https://washyourlyrics.com/ 

Visit some random websites using boredbutton, or the useless web 

You Can Do Things In  R  e  a  l    L  i  f  e  Too!

Marie Kondo your clothes and belongings, donate/sell/repurpose/throw away things that do not ‘spark joy’ any more.

Food shortages caused by idiots panic buying can be scary but use this as an opportunity to experiment with ingredients which are available and possibly a bit more out of your comfort zone if you have the time/money to spare.

If you’re with other people, have a huge game tournament spanning several days. play a different game each evening and keep score of whoe wins. when you’ve played all the games you can think of then find a way to reward the winner. If you’re living alone or in isolation, do the same thing with the online games above.

Create an indoor scavenger hunt: write a series of clues linking to different locations around your house and ask your players to stay still for a bit while you hide them, then let them work their way through the clues until they reach the end. if you want to challenge yourself, try to make each clue rhyme.

If you have a pet, try to teach them a new trick

Train up your non dominant hand

Use the millions of home workout videos on youtube

Learn a new language on duolingo (or a similar app if you, like me, are highly suspicious of the green owl’s motives)

Read and watch everything on your list

Actually use some of those art supplies you’re hoarding (I am mostly talking to myself here...)

And so much other stuff!!! be kind to yourself, this is a horrible time for everyone but especially for those of us with crappy mental health. Remember that you are allowed to be stressed and upset, it is a perfectly reasonable response to the situation! keep in touch with friends and family and follow the instructions being given by your health services! we can and will get through this together 💖

[recentanimenews]

OPINION: My Favorite Anime of 2020 Are All Music Videos

Image via ZUTOMAYO

  Despite the enormous pressures of COVID-19, 2020 has had its share of anime classics. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is a stone-cold classic to the degree it now feels as if it’s always existed. Decadence channeled the creative spirit of 2000s-era Madhouse into an off-kilter riff on dystopian science fiction and Pixar movies. Akudama Drive, now in its second half, continues to translate the bonkers, heartfelt pulp style of Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka to TV anime. There have been big successes in film, as well — Demon Slayer Mugen Train scored the highest opening weekend box office in Japanese history, while folks I follow on Twitter are excited for the new Bones film Josee, the Tiger and the Fish.

  One of my favorite anime projects this year was something completely different. It’s "Gotcha!," a short Pokemon-themed music video directed by Rie Matsumoto and her friends at Bones. A sequence that takes all of Matsumoto’s strengths — her attention to detail, the way she depicts exciting and supernatural things bursting out of the walls of our ordinary world, and her obsession with cramming every layer of the screen with stuff — and turns them with the precision of a laser toward celebrating the series’s near 25-year history. As encyclopedic as a Pokedex despite being only three minutes long, it’s a glorious celebration of a series loved and made by passionate fans. 

  Image via Pokemon Official YouTube Channel

  But "Gotcha!" wasn’t even the only fantastic music video made by former employees from the historic studio Toei. Earlier this year, animator Koudai Watanabe collaborated with the talented Naoki Yoshibe — director of the opening sequences for Gatchaman Crowds — to create a music video for ZUTOMAYO titled “STUDY ME.” It’s a rich purple-and-green media landscape of TV screens, glitches, Undertale references, and desperately reaching hands, packed with enough wild ideas and visual iconography to fuel an entire season of anime. But it wraps up in just under five minutes.  You’re left watching the video over and over again in a daze, trying in vain to catch every little detail.

  The animated music videos being made right now represent the most slept-on creative success in modern anime production among English language fans. (That’s music videos that are animated, not AMVs! You could write an entirely separate article on those.) I need to qualify “slept on,” since hardcore animation nerds like Yuyucow and Catsuka have been stumping for these works over the past several years. There are viral successes like "Gotcha!" and the inevitable crossover that happens when an artist doing the theme song for an anime leads others to check out their back catalog of past videos. But on websites and in magazines, I see stories about Netflix’s aggressive production of new TV series, the renaissance of Japanese anime films after Your Name, and bemused reactions to the shocking popularity of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. Talk about the newest music videos online is a lot rarer. Not to mention older videos. "Gotcha!" may have broken out as a celebration of a popular game series, but its predecessor — a Lotte chocolate commercial produced by much of the same staff — is just as good!

  Image via ZUTOMAYO

  "Gotcha!" isn’t 2020’s only spiritual successor to excellent early work, either. In 2013, Yoko Kuno produced the video "Airy Me" as part of a graduate assignment. Set to a song by Cuushe, it’s a hallucinatory epic that’s both starkly horrifying and bittersweet. In the years since, Yoko Kuno’s made a name for herself across several mediums — winning the New Face Award for her manga work at Japan Media Arts Festival, serving as a pinch hitter on Orange’s production of Land of the Lustrous and contributing a memorable sequence to Beastars. She returned this year with filmmaker Tao Tajima to produce another sequence scored to Cuushe’s music, Magic. Riffing on Airy Me's themes of bodily transformation and human ennui, it sets the action against real photographic landscapes. It's another haunting masterwork by one of anime’s most multitalented young artists and has been on repeat for me since it came up on my Twitter feed.  

  Image via FLAU

  Meanwhile, the Japanese vocalist Eve continues to commission new and excellent animated work based on his songs. This May saw the release of "How to Eat Life," a video by indie animator Mariyasu which repurposes Eve’s unique symbology of surly adolescents and freaky puppet monsters into a stylish and spooky carnival of carnivorism. It’s an excellent piece that stands tall among the work collected under Eve’s banner, many of which are stone-cold classics themselves. But "Promise," released at the end of this October, threatens to outdo them all. Directed by Ken Yamamoto and produced at Cloverworks, it plays as another greatest hits compilation of Eve’s works — broken promises, collapsing cityscapes, creatures powered by feeling that shake the earth with their footsteps. There’s a real visceral punch to it that beats out even its excellent predecessors. When the protagonist folds over himself in anguish, you feel it in your gut. When he steps deep into the water and the entire world around him is shredded into pieces, anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows exactly how that feels. When his friend reaches in and pulls him out of that water, that’s real joy rising like bubbles through your veins.

  Image via Eve

  Ken Yamamoto’s a bit more mainstream than Mariyasu — just last year he contributed some face-melting action sequences to Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia. But it says something to me that "Promise" — maybe his best work yet — was released as a music video rather than a new TV series. He’s not alone, either.  This August, the animator China (storyboarder for Encouragement of Climb’s third season) together with character designer Mooang (storyboarder for Sarazanmai) produced the music video "Sore wo Ai to Yobu dake." Like the reverse of Yamamoto’s "Promise," it’s the story not of a pair of teenage boys and their separation that devastates a cityscape — but of a pair of teenage girls who reach across time to recover the bond they shared in their high school days. A potent combination of FLCL-style faded nostalgia, careful attention to body language, and pure patented kids-falling-through-the-sky-while-frantically-reaching-for-each-other anime magic, it’s one of the best-animated sequences of this year. I’ve linked it to friends just to plead “Watch this thing!” And it ends in less than four minutes long.

  Image via Mafumafu

  I can’t help but think: Where is China and Moaang’s movie project? Where is Ken Yamamoto’s TV series? Why is it that Rie Matsumoto has produced two excellent music videos over the past two years that commemorate big franchises, but her rumored film project has yet to lift off? Perhaps the truth is that there isn’t room anymore in the TV anime industry for work like this. Many original projects seem to be tied to cellphone games or stage productions. Projects like Decadence are few and far between, and even those that exist play within a space already laid out by past successes. It’s not all bad, of course — Eizouken this year was a great example of an adaptation working in harmony with its source material. And we’ve seen studios like Orange employ weirder anime creators like Yoko Kuno or the stop-motion team dwarf to great effect in their projects. But perhaps animated music videos represent the future for artists like Matsumoto — a medium that pays well, rewards experimentation, and lets strong artists play around without having to dilute their style. A bite-sized format just outside of the soul-draining churn that defines the industry.

  Maybe this is fine, though. Short-form work is just as worthy of admiration as long-form work. I’d love feature-length projects from Ken Yamamoto or China, and I’d love for the world to see another Rie Matsumoto story told on a grand scale. But I can’t deny that Matsumoto rocks at putting together fantastic music videos and that I might even prefer the concise flow of "Gotcha!" to her TV series output. Either way, in this historically difficult year, I’m grateful to these folks for turning in career-best work and giving me hope for the future.

  Do you have a favorite animated music video? At the risk of getting off track, do you have a favorite anime music video? Do you still watch different fan edits of Hatsune Miku and wowaka's "Rolling Girl" on rotation, like I do? Let me know in the comments!

      Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't rewatching his favorite anime OPs over and over, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

[avoutput]

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Remake Review

This is the 2nd out of 3 articles. Find the first here.

Enough with the flowery language. No more ancient memories of times passed. No more wasted passages on the origin of Final Fantasy VII. I am not some little kid sitting crossed-legged in front of a 13-inch tube TV, but a man sitting in a lightly used office chair he found by the apartment dumpster several years ago. I have grown. The gaming world has grown. And Final Fantasy has grown. But is it the kind of growth you imagined? Does this game shed the dead weight of its numbered younger siblings? Does it recreate an experience from your childhood? Is it an innovative gaming experience that redefines the RPG like its genesis? Is breathing life into one of the most provocative modern gaming death’s worth the exhumation? These are the questions swimming in my head while I waited for the release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, a deeply marked touchstone in my life. And after having completed my run through the game, I had some thoughts I needed to organize and share. I need to decide: Is this a proper run, a proper update, a proper remake? Or is it just a repurposed chair found by the dumpster?

Let me clarify a few things. First, this is going to be a straight review of the game with little-to-no spoilers. Second, this is the 2nd in a series of 3 articles I decided to write, with the final article being a no-holds-barred, spoiler frenzy discussing the outcomes of this game and many other Final Fantasy’s. In this article, we are going to be looking at what the game did well, what it was mediocre at, and lastly, what was downright disappointing. Each section will bleed into each other a bit because the games components bleed into each other a bit, which feels a little odd for a JRPG, but this isn’t ye-old JRPG. Let’s get right to it.

RE-KWARK!-ABLE! I MEAN REMARKABLE.

Before we tear this game down, let’s spend some time building it up. The standout component of this game was very clearly the battle system. The transition is seamless and the frenzy begins almost immediately. What surprised me right off the bat is how easy it was to not only switch between characters, but how simply it was to tell them what to do. I thought slowing down the battle to issue commands was going to be a nuisance, but it really helped balance out the pace of the battle. You can assign 4 hotkeys that let you keep the battle going without slowing down to strike at an enemies weakness. I did find that it felt a little useless to assign anything other than your weapon skills, because spells take a little time to cast and most of the time you are going to want to pick a specific spell based on the enemies weakness, but that is totally up to your playstyle. 

In the vein of the battle system, boss fights were engrossing and detailed. It felt like they spent a lot of time thinking about which moments in the Midgar timeline would make the best boss battles and how exactly they would design the bosses moveset and structure based not only on what the boss was, but where the boss was. In one chapter, you fight a boss that is nearby some train tracks. At a certain point in the battle, it will electrify the track, and if you are standing on it, you get major damage. Enemy types also had a pretty consistent set of weaknesses, so you didn’t have to go into the bestiary menu to determine what spell would most likely take it down. But on the other hand, the Assess ability is crucial in understanding some of the more minute methods to hitting the enemy weakness. It was actually a delight to try and fight both with and without it. Like everything else in the battle, the menu comes up with a single button press and no load time. It gives you time to read and strategize your attacks.

In some other reviews I had been reading, people had complained about a feature I loved. Using spells and abilities requires you to have your ATB gauge filled, which will fill with time, but fills much faster if you are attacking. The complaint was that the AI isn’t particularly good at attacking when you aren’t using them, and not only that, they don’t receive the ATB fill bonus from attacking, it simply takes them time. However, because transition between characters is instantaneous, I believe that the designers did this as an incentive to use each character as often as possible. This isn’t the only incentive for this either. Every weapon for each character has a single skill that can be learned from it. To learn it, you have to use a skill. Again, to use the skill the ATB gauge has to be filled. Most battles in the game go by quickly, especially once you know the enemies weakness, so you need to build ATB fast and activate the skill. Without telling you, the game basically created an environment where it's not only necessary to switch between characters and learn their playstyles, but almost necessary. What’s more, every character is somewhat unique, especially Barret and Aerith, and certain types of enemies (flying or distance based, ect) are much easier to handle with the right character. All around, the battle system is an absolute standout and easily the best part of the game.

Without giving anything away, another strong part of the game is the scenario design. I was driven to hear more, see more, and do more in this game. The characters a crisp and vibrant, even when they lack depth. They are undeniably “cool” or “cute” or whatever their main adjective should be for the given scenario. The voice acting in both the Japanese and English versions are great, though the Japanese version from time to time has a different take on some of the characters than the English, it's still a blast. Every moment that leads into a battle with a signature villain is thoroughly enjoyable. I don’t think you absolutely need to have played the original to enjoy these moments, but more on that later. What it really comes down to is this game has some pretty great pacing because even when it fumbles, it doesn’t stop you from wanting to play more. The battle system element just propels you forward and hearing what crazy thing is going to happen next is more than enough to make up for follies.

This is sad to say, but there really is only one more exceptional item to mention. The return of Nobuo Uematsu. The soundtrack of this game was already pretty well designed in the original. Coming back to it was more than just a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It was like coming home and realizing your parent’s upgraded your house to a mansion with room service, a full staff, and a kitchen that's open 24 hours a day stocked with everything you desire. And it isn’t just that the music was remastered, it flows in and out of the game with masterful timing. Multiple versions of each song were recorded so that movements in the song crescendo at the exact moment your Cloud lands a hit or Reno and Rude jump from a helicopter. It made every moment of the game feel like so much more than just an average confrontation. There are a few moments that even made me laugh. There is a hip-hop inspired Chocobo theme that made me smile both for how odd it was and how awful it should have been received, but somehow it just slaps. If you pay attention you might notice some of the music is more reminiscent of other entries in the series with two standouts in particular, one sounding like Final Fantasy XII and another like Final Fantasy XIII, two very different scores. But it felt right at home in this modernized version of Final Fantasy VII. There is also a music collection sidequest that is mostly made up of jazzy remakes of classic Final Fantasy VII songs. These are less remarkable, but still good for the most part. Part of the issue with these songs is it is played through some kind of fuzzy record player speaker overlay, which I found annoying and distorting.

MISSED THE KWARK! I MEAN MARK.

I would say that almost everything else in this game missed the mark in some way or another. Some are just shy of a home run, others are baseline grounders, and some are just straight fouls. Either way, they could have used more attention or a different direction in my opinion. And I want to start with something I almost never complain about in video games: the graphics. Talking about graphics is usually pointless. People who are after ridiculous levels of fidelity always seem to believe this either makes or breaks the game. In Remake, that might actually be true for once. I am not a graphics designer, but one thing I noticed and couldn’t stop noticing is that there were so many different levels of graphical fidelity all smashed into one place. In some scenes, there were gorgeous details, like the entirety of Aerith’s house area, but then you get to the flowers, it's like 1997 again. In other moments, like when looking down at the Midgar Slums from the upper plate, it is clearly a very flat and stretched image meant to look three-dimensional like the other things around you, but the image was just off. Doors on buildings would look like garbage compared to the floor or walls in the room. It was just very clear that a once over on all the different assets would have helped out quite a bit. The problem wasn’t that the graphics were good or bad, but that they were inconsistent. It was like looking at photo-realistic drawing with some Picasso in the middle. The character models were so well done, when the interacted with this space, it was just jarring. Again, not awful, just missed the mark.

With such a well maintained battle system, you would think the menu system would be equally flawless, but it wasn’t. The main UI where you would outfit your party was a bit of a mess. For one, there was no way to go from upgrading your weapon to equipping it or vice-versa. They had completely separate menus for both that didn’t lead to each other. Then there is the upgrade menu itself, wherein you select upgrades in a similar way to FFXIII crystal upgrade menu. When you choose the weapon, it takes you to a completely different screen and makes this loud noise and transition effect. It's annoying to read and to navigate. You can bypass this by having the computer choose your upgrades for you, but that really felt like I was missing out. It would have been a huge improvement just to list the abilities and have me choose from the same menu I chose everything else. It was unnecessarily fancy and kind of an eyesore. Equipping materia got a small upgrade from the original game, wherein you can press a button to see and switch out materia with everyone, but this should have just been THE menu, not an extra button press. They also should have categorized the materia, letting you choose which type you wanted to look at instead of having to scroll through line after line. The menu also doesn’t give you simple information in places where you could use it, like what chapter you are in. To know, you have to go to the save menu. It could have simply been listed next to the playtime in the bottom corner.

There are even certain materia that are hard to understand, specifically the Enemy Skill materia. In the old game it would list which skills you had obtained. This one didn’t give you any idea what you had obtained and what exactly was obtainable. After a while I figured out that in the bestiary, although it would tell you which monster had a skill you could get, it wouldn’t exactly say if you had it. Turns out that if the skill was highlighted green on the enemy skills screen (another button press away), you didn’t have it, if it was blue, you did. Then, to see which skills you had in total, you had to go to the party screen and it would be listed under your abilities if they were wearing the materia. Not only that, the skill would have a different name than the skill the enemy used, the naming convention wasn’t 1-to-1. Add to this, materia sometimes have very obscure instructions or descriptions. The battles can go by so fast, it's hard to even notice the effect of them if something isn’t exploding or outwardly obvious. In fact, many of the instructions are weird in the game. If you die in a series of fights where they are linked, it will ask if you want to go back to the first fight or the last fight. Choosing the first actually sends you back to before you started the series and you can adjust your equipment, which is fine, but in a normal fight, if you die, you can only go back to the fight and it doesn’t let you modify your equipment. It's a simple inconsistency but the text and cursor placement also make it hard to understand exactly what is going to happen.

Finally, all the smaller issues. There are too many places where the game has you “walk” for no particular reason. You just slow down. I thought it might be due to loading, but it happens in places where no story or anything appears to be happening next. Summon materia is already maxed and it doesn’t feel like it helps all that much, even when the enemy is weak to them. The game design is set up so that whichever character you are currently playing as the only thing enemies are interested in attacking, especially if someone isn’t using provoke. So, your summon simply attacks, and to do it's better attacks, you have to sacrifice ATB. Mostly this is fine, it creates balance, but i’d prefer they came and left like in the original. In fact, I have hated all summon mechanics since FFX. They need to come, do damage, and be gone. But I have to admit, this is the best marriage of the two versions. Next, the choices you make that alter certain outcomes in the game are so far away from the thing you are altering, and at times not clear. This could have been more fun had they given you a bit more of control or some kind of gauge to show you what was going on, but in a way, it was true to its roots, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Lastly, having to aim the camera to interact with items that are just outside of its view is just annoying. That coupled with the random moments you have to hold “triangle” for a series of switches always rubbed me the wrong way.

DOWNRIGHT DISAPPOINTING… uh.. kwark.

Final Fantasy VII Remake obviously has a great foundation and pretty great framework. The music is great, it's a blast to play, and the characters really resonate. But there are still some aspects of this game that make it feel a little less than game of the year. These complaints might be less of an issue than I am making it. The game is what it is, and I am easily going to clock in at about 90 hours for both regular and hard modes. Still. STILL. There are just a few things that were completely disappointing, and not just from an old fan, but as a current gen gamer.

My biggest complaint is married together and baked into the design of the game, namely Midgar and Chapters. Final Fantasy has always felt like it was about exploring not just a story, but the world it exists in. In the first 9 entries to the series, this was done by giving the player a chance to get lost on its world map, looking for towns, roaming through forests. You had to use your imagination to fill the gaps, but that wasn’t a bad thing. As the entries iterated, the worlds got bigger, and so did their stories. They had lore and depth. With the release of 10, this all changed. In the 10th game, the story was suddenly on rails, the only direction you could move in was forward. It took all of the exploration away in favor of level design and pacing. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the end for a series I loved. With the release of 12, it felt a little better, but mostly it was just an offline version of the massively popular MMORPG formula. It felt more rote and less like exploration. With the 13th entry, it was back to the rails. It began to feel like the creators sought only to make an experience where the characters and story where the vehicle, and the world was just the background. In 15, this would change somewhat, but it was also an experiment for them that ended in failure. They tried to give us an open world governed by a chapter system. But, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t breathe life into the world of 15. They tried to spread the world and its characters across too many dimensions. There was an anime series, a full length movie prequel, missing chapters introduced as DLC, and even a mobile game. A broken chimera. I think the success of 10 and their failure to create a modern, open world game is what ended up making 7 Remake what it is. A game on rails.

Before the games release, the game designers touted that Midgar was now a place that could be fully experienced. For me, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was just a series of narrow hallways masquerading as a city. The people in the background make noise and act like they live there, but they don’t move, goto work on a schedule, ride the trains, or even run stores. You can’t interact with them. They are just mouthpieces. Because the game runs by chapters, you have almost no ability to explore anything that doesn’t have to do with the immediate story. The characters will chide you for going the “wrong direction” and the game will outright stop you from wandering too far. “No no, you fool, the GAME is over HERE”. In the original game, Midgar is partially just an introduction to the world, characters, and battle system. But really, it was the beating heart of the entire game world and story just as much as the characters that live in it and run Shinra. The remake seems to have forsaken that in favor of story beats. Outside of a few distinct places, most of Midgar just feels like window dressing. Wall Market is obviously a delight, but the entirety of Midgar should have been like Wall Market. You should be able to get lost in the back streets or take the wrong train. Shinra headquarters gives you little glimpse into the way people on the upper plates live and work, but yet again they are just mannequins. 

Games today give you vibrant open worlds to explore. You can jump on rooftops and glide over large swaths of land. The way in which Midgar was designed leaves little to the imaginationa as compared to the original. The graphics are crisp and every pipe and air conditioner feels like they might actually do something, but you can’t follow that pipe anywhere or walk down alleyways and talk to vagrants. Old games got a pass on size and depth because their limitations were obvious, often baked into whatever the genre was. If it was a brawler, you walk down streets beating people up. In racer, you play the track. But RPG’s were one of the few where you would be expected to explore the edges of its world. With new generation games, the choice to stop exploration in a RPG feel less like a limitation of raw power and more like a  design decision. I would have preferred a game in which Midgar was a place to see and explore and interact with. Where I could haggle with one vendor over something found in another. Where I could watch the day cycle send people back and forth work. But Midgar wasn’t their focus. Telling you a story was. And as fun as that was, it was so disappointing to find that the original game gave you more by letting your mind wander past its graphical limitations than the remake did do by making the decision to limit your ability to physically explore visible areas. Instead of letting a visible wall stop you from going somewhere, an invisible force just puts a stop to your antics and tells you to get back to work. Maybe it's just psychological, but it is maddening. The physical world of 7 was just as important as its story and characters, but the story got to lead the show, and to me this feels off balance and off brand.

THE TAKEAWAY

This is a good game. A well made game for the most part. It's rough in places, but not so rough that it really hurts the end result. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is actually a showcase of talent that comes out of Square-Enix and despite the fact that I feel like they either bite off more than they can chew or completely misunderstand their core fanbase, they are still great artists. I often question whether game designers at big companies are customer service machines that should give us the product we demand or artists that deserve to create in a space that we support. Remake reminds me why I am both supportive but vocal. They may never hear me, but I want to know I said something. Still, it ends up being more than the sum of its parts. The game hums along like a well made machine. It takes time to remind fans of key moments, interjects tons of surprises that don’t entirely offend its base, and ultimately is never boring. What more could you ask from a game? Well, as it turns out, a lot. And I have so much more to say about the actual story content of this game and of Final Fantasy as a whole. If I didn’t mention some aspect here, it's probably because I want to discuss it in a way that may ruin the story, so look for the 3rd and final entry next week.

[lanternburning19]

My (Romantic) Interpretation of Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince

First, we should introduce the characters of the story.

Miss Americana: Taylor. From the very beginning of her career, Taylor was dubbed America's Sweetheart and was branded to be a role model. She avoided talking about sex, showing off her body, and was not shown drinking or partying. She loved (and still loves) being a role model. She is kind, polite, charismatic and has an air of dignity about her. She also is not shy about her love for her country. Her 4th of July parties were highly publicized and has been a big advocate for exercising the right to vote ever since 2008. She is Miss Americana.

But then 2016 happened. And her reputation did a 180. She went from the friendly girl next door to the calculative mean girl. People were routing for her career to die. She went from America's Sweetheart to America's Most Hated.

The Heartbreak Prince: Joe. Rumors say that Joe used to be a huge playboy and never had a serious relationship until Taylor. This is echoed in Taylor's lyrics.

"Maybe you ran with the wolves and refused to settle down"

"Do the girls back home touch you like I do?"

"I don't want to be just another ex-love you don't want to see"

It's interesting to me that Joe gets the royal title of "Prince" but Taylor is just "Miss". This alludes to Joe being British and being under a representative monarchy government, where America is not.

Now into the story:

You know I adore you

The song starts out with a declaration of Taylor's love. This ties in with the theme of the Lover album.

Crazier for you

Than I was at sixteen

Lost in a film scene

I believe this is referring to when Taylor first started her career. She was 16 when her first single dropped. While she wasn't in the acting business, she was still in the world of celebrity. Realizing her dreams with her first single and album doing well, she must've felt as if she was walking a cloud, or "lost in a film scene".

Waving homecoming queens

Marching band playing

These lines do two things at once for me. First, they remind me of the You Belong With Me music video in which Taylor plays a high schooler in marching band. Second, these lines evoke a feeling of victory. Homecoming queens usually wave to the student body after being crowned. Marching bands strike up when their team scores. YBWM was a huge hit for Taylor early in her career, and continuing from the previous lines, her early successes probably made her feel victorious.

I'm lost in the lights

The very last line of the first verse takes a sudden turn. The way Taylor sings this is very different from how she sings "lost in a film scene". When she sings "I'm lost in the lights" she sounds breathless and scared. She is no longer feeling the joy of being crowned homecoming queen or the excitement of your team earning a touchdown. She's not lost in the wonderment of it all, she's lost and scared. She got lost in the fame.

American glory

Faded before me

In this verse, we learn that Taylor is scared because her shining moments, her victories, her happiness is slipping away from her. She did not purposely push it away. It faded like a ghost, slipped out of her grasp.

It is interesting that Taylor links homecoming and football games to "American glory". While homecoming may seem like a tradition, it is distinctly an American high school thing.

Now I'm feeling hopeless

Ripped up my prom dress

Running through rose thorns

This is imagery of Taylor wearing a prom dress, and this immediately takes me back to earlier in her career when she used to wear princess-y dresses on tour. She also wore a prom dress in the YBWM music video. And that very same dress was repurposed for the Fearless Tour's performance of Love Story (calling back to the Lover theme).

Taylor ripped up her prom dress. How is unclear to me, because of the lack of punctuation in song lyrics. Is it "Ripped up my prom dress. Running through rose thorns..." Or is it "Ripped up my prom dress running through rose thorns". Did she purposely rip it herself or did it get accidentally torn by the roses?

If she ripped it up herself, it could be symbolic of her wanting to distance herself from the music business, from the fame, from the plastic Party-City homecoming queen crowns. But I don't think that's the case.

It is more likely the dress was ripped unintentionally. The rose thorns seems to be a call back to the line "Rose garden filled with thorns" in Blank Space. This line means that nothing is as it seems. What looks nice and pretty can actually hurt you. The life of celebrity looked pretty to Taylor at first. She wanted to be "lost in the film scene" with all the glory that a homecoming football game brings. But the industry ended up hurting her.

I am, of course, talking about 2016 when Taylor's reputation went from America's Sweetheart to a "snake". She was on top of the world with a hugely successful album and world tour, but became overexposed because of that success. Suddenly, people who posed as her "squad" on the red carpet started turning against her. Ex-friends and ex-lovers who usually kept to themselves started bashing Taylor all over social media. Longtime fans who had bought every album couldn't stop saying bad things about her. Her social media accounts were flooded with hate comments. The media thrived off of using her downfall as a headline.

I saw the score board

And ran for my life

Shortly after this chaos started, Taylor took a step back from the spotlight. She stopped posting of social media, releasing new music, doing interviews, attending award shows. She disappeared.

No cameras catch my pageant smile

With her avoiding the media, the paparazzi couldn't take new pictures of her "pageant" or fake smile.

I counted days

I counted miles

To see you there

To see you there

It's been a long time coming but

It's you and me

That's my whole world

The "you" here is the Heartbreak Prince, or her love. Taylor went through many hard days before she was able to find love.

They whisper in the hallway "she's a bad, bad girl"

This line evokes an image of teenagers gossiping in a high school hallway. So we're back to the high school theme.

The "bad girl" is referencing Taylor's bad reputation that was mentioned earlier. But it also could be referencing her dating life. Taylor was mocked for years for having a rocky dating life. People would joke that men should stay away from Taylor. Taylor is comparing people who spread rumors to immature teenagers.

The whole school is rolling fake dice

The "school" is Hollywood. People obsessed with fame are fake.

You play stupid games

You win stupid prizes

The students at this metaphorical school are focused on the wrong thing. They risk cheating (fake dice) to win a game that in the end, doesn't yield you a fulfilling prize.

It's you and me

There's nothing like this

Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince

But Taylor isn't focused on those "little games" (Look What You Made Me Do) anymore. She's focused on someone that really matters to her.

It's so sad

We paint the town blue

Instead of painting the town red in celebration, they paint the town blue. This line reminds me of how Taylor and Joe painted Patrick's room blue together.

Voted most likely to run away with you

To me, this line is referring to how Taylor has jetted off to different parts of the world to be with Joe.

My team is losing

Battered and bruising

I see the high fives

Between the bad guys

Again, we get another visual of a high school football game. Taylor's team is down and others are celebrating her defeat. This reminds me of the Taylor Swift is Over Party, where people were celebrating the end of her career.

Leave with my head hung

You are the only one

Who seems to care

With the whole world seemingly against Taylor, it must've been a relief to meet someone who actually cared about her feelings.

American stories

Burning before me

This feels to me like a reference to Fahrenheit 451, which is about a dystopian society and the effects of mass media. Miss Americana has crumbled. Her glory days have been burned to the ground without any hope of recovery. Mass media and social media played a part in this.

Instead of just repeating "American glory" Taylor chooses to use "American stories" instead. Perhaps it's because no one wanted to believe her side of the story of things. Her truth was ignored.

I'm feeling helpless

The damsels are distressed

If boys will be boys

Then where are the wise men

Darling, I'm scared

The "damsels in distress" reference flows nicely after the mention of stories. Taylor is feeling like a damsel in distress, but no one is coming to save her.

"Boys will be boys" is an expression often said when a young boy acts reckless to excuse their behavior. Perhaps Taylor is waiting for her knight in shining armor, but he has abandoned her to go do something else. Everyone is excusing his behavior but blaming Taylor.

"If boys will be boys, then where are the wise men?" Is one of my favorite lines Taylor's ever written. If men are all off doing stupid shit, then who's the smart one around here? Where are all the men when it's their time to save the damsel in distress?

No cameras catch

My muffled cries

I counted days

I counted miles

To see you there

This could be referring to a long distance relationship. Miss Americana is going through some hard times, as described in the last 2 verses. But her Prince is not there to comfort her. So she has to hold out for a while.

And now the storm is coming but

It's you and me...

There are much more difficulties that lie ahead of the couple. I love how the last word of the verse is "but". and then it leads in to the romantic chorus. It's going to be hard, BUT, we have each other.

And I don't want you to go

I don't really wanna fight

Because nobody's gonna win

The last words of these lines are a standard cheer for high school football teams. The cheerleaders will yell "Go! Fight! Win!" to encourage the team.

Fighting is mentioned a few times in Lover, in songs like Afterglow, ME!, and The Archer. But in each song, Taylor sings about fighting with remorse. She doesn't want to fight with her loved ones or turn against them. Nobody's going to win in the end of the fight because they'll both be without each other.

And I'll never let you go

Because I know this is a fight

That someday we're gonna win

The last part of the bridge keeps the "Go! Fight! Win!" motif but changed the lyrics so that instead of fighting against each other, it's about fighting for each other. They might face some hardships but they'll be alright if they stick together. This song is an encouragement of their relationship.

In the end, Miss Americana became America's Most Hated and The Heartbreak Prince settled down with someone to love.

[caveatauditor]

Best albums of 2018

A marvelous year! Just because Drake albums are long and boring doesn’t mean the album is dead, you know.

1. Bali Baby, Baylor Swift

This 8-song EP, a fusion of SoundCloud rap, emo confessional, and glitzy synthpop, rocks harder and weirder than anything I heard all year. The spiky synthesizers, bent guitars, drum crunches, scratchy screeches, Bali’s garbled wails, and plastic bubblegum surface combine several modes of abrasion, as the Atlanta rapper hides a harrowing breakup saga beneath bucketloads of noise and the crackling electricity sets her bleeding heart ablaze. “Candy” and “Electrical” are neon new wave ballads distorted into fragility through harshness. Whenever she gets a handle on something, the beat goes squelch and sends her reeling. Oh, to be loud, obnoxious, and heartbroken. She’s been putting out fire with gasoline.

2. Ariana Grande, Sweetener

“Snuggle jams,” tweeted Austin Brown. We all needed snuggles this year! Although “Thank U, Next” and Thank U, Next have somewhat eclipsed the confectionary sugarbomb Instagram’s newly crowned Most Followed Woman released six months earlier, said sugarbomb continues to sparkle. Tired of flaunting her multioctave voice, Ariana leans into her breathy lower register and discovers her capacity for play. Tired of secondhand funk pastiche, Pharrell invents a sunny electrobouncy sound that abounds with pattering percussion, thwocks, squiggles, splashes of electronic color. Contextualized by the devastating, mournful grace of “Breathin” and “No Tears Left to Cry”, her joy feels urgent, beautiful, earned. Behold an album of exquisitely honeyed lightness. I love Sweetener because it’s the musical equivalent of booping someone on the nose.

3. BTS, Love Yourself: Tear

Because they both flatter and subvert even the most boring aspects of contemporary American pop, they broke through in America where countless Korean stars couldn’t, although that didn’t stop BoA and Girls Generation from trying. (I hope we haven’t forgotten BoA’s excellent self-titled English-language album, which includes the funniest Britney impersonations ever recorded.) Slow, moody, blank--these adjectives don’t quite describe BTS, thankfully, but they have reclaimed a rather empty pop style as a site for cognitively dissonant structural innovations, and thus offer hope that said pop style needn’t be so empty. Dense and streamlined simultaneously, stuffing all sorts of wacky noises into what Anglophone hitmakers have defined as a spare, echoey sonic template, these tracks are hard to wrap your ear around at first, but what noises! I could listen to the plinky little drumclicks in “Anpanman” forever.

4. Jonghyun, Poet Artist

“Take the Dive” and “Only One You Need” should play like standard romantic invitations and instead break a cold sweat in sheer terror. On “Hashtag” he’s content to whisper as long as the electric piano matches the beat in his head. “I’m So Curious” coaxes him into a sublimely cozy erotic space. The lightest and most delicate of pop-R&B exercises, shivering beneath an immaculately chilly surface, Jonghyun’s second and final album is beautiful and makes me sad. Rest in peace. 

5. J Balvin, Vibras

The year’s solidest and bounciest Latin trap album is more sweetly melodic than the genre’s norm, but also harsher, which is disorienting. These beats, assembling lumbering, mechanical tanks out of looped vocal samples, clinky xylophones, keyboard scramble, and Balvin’s dreamy drone, are impossible to play in the background; I’ve tried. Maybe those blessed souls who can multitask with music on would feel differently, but every time I play this album I get sucked in, paralyzed by the chopped-up airhorns in “Ambiente”, the guitar strummed through a wind tunnel in “Brillo” (a duet with Rosalia!), the drums beeping in “Ahora”, the angel of death moaning inarticulately throughout “Cuando Tu Quieras”. If I also don’t understand how the hell clubgoers can dance to this music, please understand my bewilderment as admiration.

6. Playboi Carti, Die Lit

The debut was sufficiently spare to retain a semblance of pop functionality; this one’s a shoegaze record, the sound of rap abstracted into a gorgeous blur. The average Carti song is a single giant, repeated, woozy keyboard hook, glitching and jittering around the edges, a transmission from the hazy corner of the subconscious where bliss keels over into numbness and the senses conflate. The rapping is minimal; he chooses his sounds phonetically, not semantically, and gladly disappears beneath the relentless aqueous whoosh. Lyrics, guest features, tempo changes, coherent thoughts--if these things exist, they get swept up too. After years of hearing people moan on the radio about washing pain away with stimulants and such, here’s what it means to be insensate. Although the album wanders a little toward the end, who cares when it’s all one hypnotic song?

7. US Girls, In a Poem Unlimited

The music on this remarkable art-pop document assembles a creepy rubberoid disco groove from shards of glass, sleek rhythm guitar, controlled blasts of distortion, sordid saxophone; Meghan Remy treats white funk as industrial noise. The lyrics compile situation after situation in which women are abused, including a song where St. Peter rapes the narrator before letting her into heaven. Is this what “dialectic” means?

8. Haru Nemuri, Harutosyura

So raucous in the way it arranges sugary keyboard splashes, so catchy in the way it explodes with carefully timed bursts of electric noise, Haru Nemuri’s debut confounds categories. The Japanese noise-pop eccentric crams all the sounds she loves--raw guitars, bubbly synthesizers, anguished screams, conspicuous digital edits--into a glitchy hall of mirrors. For fans of certain video game soundtracks and experimental classical compositions, this is the music you’ve been imagining your whole life; for ordinary pop fans it’s merely the wackiest of syntheses. Either way, Harutosyura is gloriously loud, burning with a fierce rock grandiosity that’s unexpected, hence awesome. When “Harutosyura” gets artificially sped up into a chipmunked vacuum, pauses a moment, and comes back rocking harder than ever, she spirals ever closer to infinite refraction.

9. Erin Lee, Love Song

This strange album comprises ten instrumental pieces for unaccompanied acoustic guitar, plucking out pastoral melodies with a vaguely Mediterranean flavor, like music that might appear in a historical romantic drama featuring sailors, grapes, wine, and such. One could reasonably dismiss this music, but I can’t stop playing it--as with film scores and Snail’s House albums, there are certain qualities that make an instrumental melody intrinsically sentimental, and I’d love to know what they are. In the calmly strummed “My Hometown Harbor”, the sun sets over the water, the boats dock, shouts ring out from the pub several blocks down, and there’s danger in the air. 

10. Ashley Monroe, Sparrow

“I’m good at leaving,” Ashley Monroe once sang, and these restless songs about departure and existential longing translate the impulse behind Joni Mitchell’s Hejira into country music, where it belongs. Country is the ideal genre for confessions of solitude and rootlessness because it’s supposed to imply rootedness, tradition, community; the juxtaposition conveys a sense of profound rupture. Monroe’s velvet moan and Dave Cobb’s theatrical string arrangements are exemplary bedmates. Hidden beneath a soft, warm glow lies the year’s loneliest album.

11. Gazelle Twin, Pastoral

When I first heard this crunchy slab of avant-dance music, the shrieks and chalkboard scratches and keyboards used as percussive elements jarred; it took several listens to notice that some of the scratches are digitally altered harpsichords, that flutes and sleigh bells adorn the otherwise turbulent tracks, and that Elizabeth Bernholz’s artificially growled lyrics repurpose quotes from Blake and English folk songs into angry social commentary. The segue between “Dance of the Peddlers” and “Hobby Horse” still terrifies me. If the idea of an ironic, politically-minded fusion of electronic dissonance, English folk, and classical music sounds mannered and absurd, you’re not wrong, but that idea’s musical realization is a whirlwind of rage and menace.

12. Amnesia Scanner, Another Life

This Finnish, Berlin-based pair of electronica producers have scored gallery openings and reportedly have many thoughts about technology and modern life, so I don’t doubt they have their avant-credentials in order. What I’m certain of is that these are the funniest EDM squelches I’ve heard in ages--distorted drops, vocoded shrieks, percussive jackhammers, digitally mediated farts and belches, not to mention outrageously catchy hooks. If the hyperactive musical splatter is intended to convey the sensory overload of our modern dystopian age, it also satisfies my own longing for music that bristles with noises, kitsch, stimulus.

13. Ski Mask the Slump God, Stokeley

In 2009, the Albuquerque emo-rap group Brokencyde combined maximalist crunk with bloodcurdling screamo choruses, and were widely panned as a record low point in pop music history. “Even if I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother’s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment,” claimed one NME review. A decade later, the same exact music is now considered the surreal, groundbreaking, SoundCloud-warped future. Be careful who you mock, lest their ghost come back to haunt you.

14. Rosalia, El Mal Querer

Rosalia’s flamenco-R&B uses cool, exact technological control, sparse electrobeats and syncopated handclaps, to modulate a ferocious natural force, i.e. her singing. A modern adaptation of the anonymous 13th-century novel Flamenca, El Mal Querer is a wild exercise in vocal melodrama, especially because she’s always messing with her voice electronically. Layering her sighs over each other in the endless echo chamber that is “Pienso En Tu Mira”, looping a single note into an isolated stutter in “De Aqui No Sales”, showing off her melisma in “Reniego”, she understands how expression must be filtered through media and is inevitably distorted.

15. Noname, Room 25

The Chicago rapper’s fluttery jazz beats, wispy strings, woodwinds, and hushed rhymes are so calm and thoughtful the music sounds more like slam poetry with accompaniment than any conventional style of rap. By describing love, sadness, police violence, and the banality of daily life in the same cautiously awestruck tone, she depicts an internal resilience that comes into being through the act of aspiration. I love how slight this album is--her modest quietude is a splash of cold water in the face.

16. Sunmi, Warning

The former Wonder Girl refashions herself as a defiant siren-heroine, insisting “Get away out of my face” over electrobeats that crest and surge with military efficiency. Although the singles from this 7-song EP got the attention, her most exquisitely sheathed stiletto is “Curve”, whose bent jazz piano complements a chorus of staccato whispers that should sound inviting and instead exude menace. 

17. Hailu Mergia, Lala Belu

After several reissues of his ‘80s music by Awesome Tapes From Africa, here’s the Ethiopian jazz keyboardist’s first album in forever, looking back on a genre of retro-futurist cocktail music whose benevolent visions of a utopian clubland didn’t come to pass, for how could they, but are ready to be reclaimed. Over relaxed drum shuffles, friendly plinky piano, billowing organ, Mergia coaxes weird noises from skewed, accordionesque synthesizers and dreams about parties where such music could play.

18. Haruru Inu Love Dog Tenshi, Lost Lost Dust Dream

The next time you hear someone complain about SoundCloud rap, please direct them to this eerie, plaintive, whispered exercise in polished incongruence. “I’m Dreaming” captures the moment when you’re still asleep but trying to wake up, straining to clear the clouds from your brain.

19. Camp Cope, How to Socialise and Make Friends

With hundreds of lo-fi Bandcamp mixtapes bouncing around out there, I can’t explain why one guitar band moves me rather than another, but there’s an emotional rawness to this album that rivets. Partially it’s the rhythm guitar sound, which skips along with syncopated flatness and resilience. Partially it’s the sharpness of Georgia Maq’s voice, and the way she uses drawn-out vowels to focus and redirect her sustained roars. Partially it’s the songwriting, which finds an antidote to the world’s grossness in friendship, community, quiet moments of kindness. If you’re exhausted and fed up after a lifetime of taking shit, venting your feelings to the simple clunk of loud guitar music is a pleasure precisely because it’s simple and clunky. “Get it all out/put it in a song,” she insists, endorsing and providing a cathartic fury.

20. Bhad Bhabie, 15

Danielle Bregoli’s ebullient chirps are joyfully defiant only insofar as defiance is a front for insecurity. Aggressive trap beats turned covertly melancholy long ago, but in this context the sadness is unmistakable. Everyone is a public figure in the age of social media, so her anxiety over existing in the public sphere is at once quotidian and heightened. This album is scarier than anyone expected.

[alhorner]

How Aphex Twin’s piano lullaby ‘Avril 14th’ became a runaway pop culture hit

Here’s a twisted bit of irony for you. Arguably the most important electronic artist of our time is, statistically at least, best known for two minutes and five seconds of music seemingly devoid of electronics. ‘Avril 14th’, with its 38 million Spotify streams to date (32 million more than ‘Windowlicker’), is just one man and his Yamaha Disklavier: a butterfly-fragile float of Erik Satie-inspired piano calm that emerged in 2002 on Aphex Twin’s divisive Drukqs, nestled quietly between two slabs of more familiar frantic IDM.

The track has since blossomed into something bigger, needling its way into the public imagination via high profile film and TV spots: Sofia Coppolla’s Marie Antoinette, Chris Morris’ Four Lions, Spike Jonze’s Her to name a few. And that’s before we get to Kanye West sampling the song on My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy‘s ‘Blame Game’.

 In 2017, after more skittering rhythms and synaesthesic synth sounds on 2014 comeback album Syro, the defining public image of Richard D. James is still one of the hyena-grinned architect of digital chaos. The sweet, simple ‘Avril 14th’ continues to quietly transcend that image, spilling out into the mainstream in a way that was pretty much unimaginable in the Warp man’s 1990s peak. Yeah, he’s a festival headliner and something approaching a household name nowadays, but Aphex’s obtuse fringe music still feels like it was never meant to ring out on SNL, never meant to accompany Chris Rock skits, never meant to score celebrated movie stars in lavish period dramas.

‘Avril 14th’ accomplished all of that and more. If that song and other stripped melodic moments on Drukqs (shouts to ‘Kesson Dalek’ and sorrowful music box lament ‘Hy A Scullyas Lyf Dahagrow’) came as a surprise to some fans, they didn’t to his label. “It was like a lightning bolt had come crashing through both my work life and my record collection,” says then Warp marketing co-ordinator Phil Canning. “We knew the album was special and of course ‘Avril 14th’ made us sit up. But his previous albums had their tender moments, so we knew his tower of melodies, if you like, wasn’t just restricted to the banging stuff.” By the time James delivered Drukqs, “there was less A&R-ing Aphex,” recalls Canning. “He was sort of left to his own devices. So all we knew was to expect the unexpected.”

Driving his move into piano composition was, depending on what interview you read, either the purchase of a new piano (the same one as “that bloke from Take That”), a “low boredom threshold” or the result of going deaf from too many loud live shows (“I can’t listen to any music at all. I’m totally gutted, have learnt how to lip read and I can still mix records by smelling the grooves,” he teased on Drukqs’ release). He had loved playing piano “since I was little. The one I used to have as a child got woodworm and my mum had to sell it because the worms were eating all the wood in the house and I was really upset,” he told one interviewer.

The album’s combination of romantic classical interludes punctuating brutal blasts of scorched jungle and acid house was a little too unexpected for most critics. Rolling Stone called it “indecipherable” and “gratuitously weird.” Billboard more diplomatically deemed it “an ambitious but ultimately failed experiment.” Q meanwhile scratched its head in puzzled despair, asking: “what is it for?” as Pitchfork damned its piano experiments as “languid noodling”, writing the whole thing off as “crude.” Rumors flared that James was trying to get to the end of his contract with Warp to release more on Rephlex (James admitted as much, putting the blame on Rephlex collaborator Squarepusher: “[He’s] got a real problem being on a label where there’s other artists he hates. He hates everything on Warp. He doesn’t like Autechre.”)

That didn’t stop fans obsessing over its biggest track, ‘Avril 14th’,  and understandably so. In a lot of ways, despite not being representative of James’ main, more kinetic output over the years, it felt like a perfect embodiment of Aphex and the line he constantly treads between the mechanical and the human. ‘Avril 14th’ was recorded on a Yamaha Disklavier: a standard Yamaha acoustic piano rigged to accept MIDI data, meaning you can write on computer and have an acoustic piano perform it. As Scott Wilson writes in his guide to Aphex Twin gear, “the result is something that sounds human but not quite” – a tussle that’s long been at the heart of James’ music, where melody and technology-fuelled cacophony constantly interweave.

By 2010, that weave had wound its way to the ears of Kanye West. Not that Kanye would admit that at first, according to James. “He tried to fucking rip me off and claim that he’d written it, and they tried to get away with not paying,” claimed the producer, after ‘Blame Game’ repurposed the closing section of the song for Ye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. James insists he was “really helpful” after learning of Kanye’s interest, offering to send a polished, re-recorded version of the part he was attempting to sample. “They just replied with, ‘It’s not yours, it’s ours, and we’re not even asking you any more,’” James alleged, though the situation seemed to end amicably: Aphex Twin is credited in the album liner notes, suggesting the rapper’s strong-arm approach didn’t last long.

That same year, syncs continued to roll in, including maybe the the most fitting use of ‘Avril 14th’ on screen of them all: Chris Morris’ 2010 terrorist farce Four Lions. “Richard was pretty into it straight away, as I recall,” says Canning, who worked on the movie as music supervisor (he now works full-time in music supervision for film). James was reported to have composed music for Morris’ spoof news programme Brass Eye years earlier, and the pair shared a connection to Warp, so the producer didn’t take much convincing to lend the track to a climatic scene that, like ‘Avril 14th’ itself, balanced many emotions: melancholy, optimism, simplicity and something more profound. “Richard knew about Chris and his excellent work of course, and so agreed with more intrigue than questions,” remembers Canning. “There was a minor re-edit needed, and Chris was absolutely knocked out when Richard re-recorded it especially for us. There was definitely some mutual appreciation as you could imagine.”

“I feel the track compliments the bittersweet feeling the viewer feels after laughing so hard but seeing the surreal tragedy of it all,” Canning continues. “As with most of Chris’s work, the film is hilarious satire, but at the same time confusingly, completely believable in this bizarre age we live in. And as such, it’s terrifying. Thank God Aphex is there to make us all feel better at the end.” ‘Avril 14th’ has been making everything feel better for 16 years now, and will continue for many years to come: no twisted irony involved.

FACT, April 2017