Albums of 2015

Writing an end-of-year semi-summary-semi-navelgaze is harder than I thought it'd be. Unlike an actual website or a magazine or whatever, I haven't been able to pay someone to find and dissect hyped tunes for me all year. Plus totally new music is probably only 22% of the music I discover in the year or something. Still, it's been a pretty sick twelve months for music, all things considered, which is at least something good to come out of this otherwise miserable, soul-crushing year. Here's a quick and crude rundown of the stuff I've been totally into:

BioShock Infinite

The BioShock series is, essentially, a run-and-gun horror FPS where you fight off a variety of madcap enemies with antique guns and magic powers, while running through a steampunk version of the 20^th Century that’s both cartoonishly ludicrous and broodingly miserable. The very first BioShock was a surprise classic, taking the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of System Shock 2 and decorating it with a beautifully original setting – the decadent underwater metropolis of Rapture – and a unique story that threw bold new ideas at the concept of the faceless protagonist. I never played BioShock 2, which apparently had some new direction of its own that people took to with a mixed response, but I put the time into 2013’s BioShock Infinite, and it’s stayed with me as one of the finest shooters of recent memory, at least in terms of its batshit crazy, but enthralling, treatment of my most beloved of human inventions: narrative.

Infinite is a must for anyone who enjoys a good statue or two.

I was intrigued by Infinite before it was even released, just from looking at the concept. While BioShock 2 appeared to simply continue the story of Rapture, Infinite took the bold decision of moving its focus to an entirely new location – instead of a dark, dilapidated underwater city set in the 1960s, Infinite takes us to a gorgeously sunlit flying city set in the 1920s, complete with wide, open, brightly-lit spaces, in total contrast to its originator. It retained many of its core concepts, including its light RPG elements, its stylistic obsession with propaganda, and its unflinchingly brutal violence. I thought this was a fresh approach to creating a sequel, and by the time I reached Infinite’s grand, sensational climax, I realised that a significant chunk of the cerebral part of the game revolves around this very concept – constants and variables; what changes and what remains the same. Infinite is an extremely fun nuts-and-bolts shooter, which at times resembles a theme park thrill-ride, just like its forefather, but whereas the original BioShock was an exploration of a fantasy world inspired by lofty ideas and philosophies, Infinite brings those lofty ideas to the forefront, with greater emphasis placed on its story, its characters, and its brow-furrowing Wikipedia subheading of its Themes & Concepts.

In this game comparisons to the original Bioshock aren’t just expected, but necessary. Bioshock Infinite is set in Columbia, a city above the clouds, which, like Rapture, is an offshoot American settlement created as a haven for followers of the philosophy of its lunatic founder. In Rapture this was the laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism of Andrew Ryan, but in Columbia, the role of the city’s overbearing despot is the ‘prophet’ Comstock, a religious fanatic and oldschool white supremacist, which in the 1920s United States wasn’t perhaps such a radical position. You assume the role of Booker DeWitt, a former army man turned private detective, who is carrying out a mysterious assignment to go up into Columbia and ‘collect’ a girl from her incarceration inside a monumentally ginormous angel statute. At first this seems like a retread of the rescue-princess-from-tower trope used as the central plot in stories since the fucking Middle Ages, but from the offset, it’s made clear that Booker’s intentions in his rescue mission are to wipe away his unexplained ‘debts’ rather than out of a sense of chivalry. It also becomes apparent that Elizabeth, who appears to be as much of a Disney Princess as you can get away with without infringing copyright, has a wealth of space-and-time magic powers that push towards the godlike, and dwarf Booker’s gun-toting manliness quite substantially. Her powers are put to use in a clunky but interesting mechanic where you can summon helpful entities like ammo caches or defensive structures out of the ether, and these abilities eventually become the central mover of the storyline as you revisit the same levels in an alternate universe, which is when things really start getting crazy.

One of the game's most famous moments. The BioShock series often deals with the concept of choice.

One of the little things I thought was notable about BioShock Infinite (since there are a million things I could go into here) was how it puts great effort into portraying its violence in the most horrific way possible. Much of the fighting is blood-soaked and vicious, there are numerous scenes of abject cruelty, and defeated enemies let out cries of agonising pain. It’s a nice touch, however, that Elizabeth is originally horrified when she first experiences the murderous clusterfuck that is necessary to protect her. Criticisms against the game decried its violence is harsh and sadistic, a conclusion which I think is down to the fact that the violence is emphasised by its backdrop of a bright, cartoony landscape, and that it seems specifically heightened in order to instil the audience with deep revulsion. But the horror, which can be particularly spectacular even for the bloodstained world of videogames, is, I believe, justified by its juxtaposition against the setting of a idealistic, glorious utopia (for white people). If there’s any running theme in what BioShock is trying to ‘say’ (which is admittedly a flawed concept), it’s that idealism, and the promises of utopia that are fed to its subscribers, works to conceal the true brutality beneath its appealing surface. Propaganda, after all, is one of the BioShock series’ favourite staples, and you can’t move in Columbia for all its overbearing posters and borderline-communist statues. Even entire levels are dedicated to museums that proclaim the state-sponsored ideals of the floating city, while providing a little ham-fisted exposition in the process. All this propaganda is knowingly ironic, and emphasises the idea that its entire setting is built upon deceit, while also bringing to mind real-life parallels that give the game its softly anti-establishment credentials.

Infinite also met some criticism for its heavy-handed depictions of a thoroughly racist society, with the first sequence of combat in the game being preceded by a disgusting mob descent upon a mixed-race couple. The many uncomfortable scenes of racial nastiness have very little to do with the central plot, which is far more concerned with sci-fi ideas of multiple universe theory and concepts of choice and free will and all that airy-fairy, abstract sort of stuff, which led many people to question its purpose, aside from making the bad guys look particularly bad. Infinite actively bills itself as a distinctly American game, as you might’ve guessed from the torn American flag on the box art and the white Christian utopia-in-the-sky named Columbia. One of the first scenes in the game shows the founding fathers carved as neoclassical statues of divine significance, a clear piss-take at the reverential obsession America has with these figures in their history. One of its enemies is a robotic, minigun-wielding George Washington, for fuck’s sake. Keeping in mind that the game revolves around the idea of multiple worlds, and that Columbia is shown as being formerly part of the United States until it blasted off into the sky, I think that one way to look at Infinite’s sweetly nightmarish setting is as an exaggerated diorama of some of the grimmest aspects of the country’s history, a country where lofty idealism has held sway more than most. Even famous historical atrocities like the Boxer Rebellion and Wounded Knee are brought up and given a heroic spin by the city’s sinister elite. Just as certain characters are monstrous visions of the path unchosen, Columbia is a reflection of the dark parts of the United States, parts which are still to this day warped and concealed by manufactured attempts to distort the true narrative, of which institutional racism is one of the most significant examples, although exploitative capitalism and religious fervour are also absurdly satirised by Infinite.

Everything you need to know about the city of Columbia, as well as the BioShock series' approach to subtlety.

I’ll admit that despite all the things about it I think are genius, Infinite isn’t much for subtlety. Despite all its themes and its big ideas, which it manages to pull off effectively, this effectiveness isn’t attained by pussyfooting around. BioShock’s style, pehaps due to its stylistic adoration for propaganda, has always been about taking its story and shoving it right in your face, usually so you can be sickened by it, and all throughout Infinite are signs, literal and metaphorical, that spell out big sections of the backstory. The dialogue is also laid on pretty thick, suffering from a few bouts of appropriately American cheese, but while I’m a real sucker for subtle exposition, I’m still taken by BioShock’s bombastic way of doing things, maybe because it particularly works in the context of a bullet-flying videogame. BioShock Infinite is sensationalist, almost carnivalesque, which is probably why an early stage takes place at an actual funfair. It’s built a colossal and vibrant show that it wants to take you along by the hand and show you. And by christ do you notice what it’s trying to get you to think, or feel. It’s loaded with memorable moments and unforgettable sequences, and even when it’s trying excitedly to show you around, it never stops being fun. It’s so filled to the brim with ideas that it might take a wiki check or two to fully get your head around the ten million things happening in its ambitious final chapter. I think my favourite thing about Infinite is that it’s stuffed with such a high volume of creative flair, of ideas and visions and characters and concepts. In most media this might've been what would’ve killed it, but in a videogame, you’re free to take in the chronic thickness of stuff it throws your way at whatever pace you feel like.

I’ve rambled on way too long about this already, because you could go on for days about BioShock Infinite, and there’s so many really big things I haven’t even touched upon. It’s as if the discussion never ends, and for a game where you shoot fireballs from your hand and fight robot Abraham Lincolns, I find it pretty impressive how ambitious it is in forcing you to think and theorise about just what the hell’s going on. As an obsessive analyser, this is one of my favourite aspects of anything, and if you agree with me on that, or if you’re a fan of stuff like vicious social commentary and mind-warping science fiction, then I urge you to buy BioShock Infinite, or better yet, play the original BioShock first, as it’s a showstopping piece of work on its own, and the latter revelations of Infinite will be all the sweeter and more satisfying for doing so.

Evanescence, My Guiltiest Pleasure

Ever since the eighties reached its zenith of straight-faced lameness and, in reaction, cynicism became the new fashion of youth culture, irony has become a tool we use to protect ourselves with. When we like something that’s considered overly sincere, unsophisticated or unfasionable in any way, we can’t help but feel the invisible aura of judgement diffusing from the souls of our closest companions, and sometimes we disguise our beloved unpopulars as ‘guilty pleasures’ or things that we only like ‘ironically’. This was the sort of thing I did for years when it came to things like Rhinestone Cowboy, or Carry On films, or Sailor Moon. But as I’ve gotten a lot older, I’ve taken aboard the now-obvious philosophy of people like heroic demigod Grimes, who openly eschews the idea of guilty pleasures and liking things ‘ironically’, and simply likes whatever she dares to like without fear of reproach, whether it’s Dolly Parton, Beyoncé, Insane Clown Posse, or anything else that insecure music nerds are destined to hate.

Evanescence are a band that falls gracelessly into this category, and they're probably one of the few bands I really, honestly am still super into that I feel a decent degree of shame for liking. Now a long-forgotten relic of the 2000s nu-metal dark age, Evanescence leapt on the pop-metal bandwagon with a combination of overproduced, chart-friendly grooves and occasional death riffs with weepy gothic melodies, and I was a huge fan of theirs back in my early teens, when I was an archetypal member of their core demographic. As I grew up, I couldn’t help but notice that my love for Evanescence didn’t shed away and die like most of the things I blindly adored before I grew stronger critical faculties, and now I can’t help but feel like I’m admitting to having a serious psychological condition when I tell people that I think they’re awesome. I mean, I can understand the aversion that people have towards them; most people who like metal with any modicum of sincerity will be sickened by the castrated, plasto-pop version of the genre that the band encapsulate, and people who require their music to be deeply meaningful will be put off by the mawkish, adolescent, I-want-to-die (quote) attitude of their lyrics and image.

However, as a genuine fan of decently-made pop music, which will forever attract the derision of the music lovers I choose to associate with, I can see the appeal of a band which are pure pop, as in verse-chorus-verse, catchy-but-shallow pop, with a soft-metal centre and quasi-gothic lyrics as told through the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl. It’s a winning formula, as far as I’m concerned. There were a gazillion bands at the time who were also chart-hitting nu-metal with female vocals, such as Flyleaf, Lacuna Coil, Nightwish, Within Temptation, etc, etc – all of which share a place in my heart – but, for some reason, Evanescence outshone all of them and creeps the closest towards the abstract threshold of genuinely ‘good’ music, at least in my opinion. The biggest reason for this is probably Amy Lee, the frontwoman who won the hearts of a million mopey virginal teenagers about a decade ago. Her emotive, Elfmanesque piano melodies, her voice like a cascade of steaming hot tears, and her believably genuine weird-girl-at-high-school presence all gave Evanescence an indescribable completeness that I happily bought into.

Well, that and the fact that they had some decent bangers, as well, since nothing speaks volumes for a band’s credibility than a selection of well-made tunes. ‘Bring Me to Life’ was the barnstorming post-90s-edgy anthem that put them on the map, but there’s also the irresistible groove of ‘Sweet Sacrifice’, the angsty anti-superficiality of ‘Everybody’s Fool’, the orchestral grandeur of ‘Call Me When You’re Sober’, or just ‘Going Under’, for fuck’s sake. But if there’s any Evanescence song that actually reaches the glorious achievement of being something that I consider objectively good, even if you haven’t the tolerance for the dubious quality of the rest of their stuff, it’s got to be ‘My Immortal’. My Immortal is an actually, seriously, no-joke excellent song. Written entirely by long-gone band member Ben Moody (although Lee wrote the bridge, which is also pretty great), it’s a straight-up, heart-clutching piano ballad about a complete inability to come to terms with loss, being swallowed entirely by overwhelming grief, losing the frail remnants of your sanity, and never, ever, ever being able to get over it. I love My Immortal because it was a smash hit, a bona fide chart-topper, about a sadness with no redemption, without any possibility of hope – just unremitting, ceaseless grief. Some people might find it sentimental, but I think it’s absolutely beautiful – beautiful melodies, tenderly sang, and produced with surprisingly subtle perfection. It’s also the least nu-metal Evanescence song, which probably helps its case, although there’s an unnecessary but still kinda-great ‘band version’ to remedy that, if you really want.

Despite their commercialised, cheese-bloated place in the grand history of the American pop industry, and the fact that they’re often thrown, unfairly I’d say, into the same classification as genuine shite like Nickelback, Evanescence definitely have something about them, at least compared to the other bands of the time who found success with similar sorts of melodic, feminised metal. Whether their songs are authentically written with feeling, or simply coldly churned out to pay the bills, most of what I hear on the first two albums (there was another in 2011 but I haven’t surrendered the effort to check it out) at least sounds honestly composed, almost as if they’re about things. And I have a real affinity (for the most part) for mainstream, easily-digestible metal, which aims for all the heave and the atmosphere of my beloved ‘real’ metal but with severe cutbacks on the doom and the aggression, making way for things like catchy pop melodies and song structures which are shamelessly easy to find an innocent satisfaction in. I guess that if there’s any overall message to this blog post, aside from being a neurotic defence of my love for a band many consider to be little more than an irrelevant joke, it’s that things like commercial pop music and overly sentimental gothic metal aren’t necessarily devoid of their own merit, just because people who listen to Four Tet will probably try to make you feel bad for liking it. There’s a goodness to be found in all types of music, except like Nazi punk or something, and you shouldn’t let something’s inherent lameness get in the way of your enjoyment of it. Your life will be all the more awesome for doing so.

MØ

Formed from the dualistic philosophies of the punk-rock squats of Copenhagen and the commercial charisma-pop of the Spice Girls, MØ, real name Karen Marie Ørsted, is a singer-songwriter hit machine who you may know best during the course of this year’s summer for lending her talents in badassery to the smash hit Major Lazer/DJ Snake collaboration ‘Lean On’, which is currently drilling itself into the skulls of retail workers all across the globe. ‘Lean On’ is a work of earth-shaking pop genius, and her first true mainstream breakthrough, which, to anyone who’s dived into her sensationally infectious album of last year, No Mythologies to Follow, will come as no surprise, and in fact her chart-topping destiny may have seemed almost inevitable. MØ is the freshest face of the purest enjoyment of music – melodic pop tunes with a razor-sharp bite, and her collection of endlessly gratifying songs are definitely worth your attention.

Although there’s still plenty of time for her envelopment into mainstream America to corrupt her and squeeze out the pure youthful attitude which makes her such an inspiration, MØ (pronounced something like ‘Mooh’, although native English speakers are doomed to massacre it) is probably one of the best pop priestesses around at the moment. ‘Mø’ is old Nordic for ‘maiden’, described by Ørsted herself as about ‘trying to maintain the child within you, even though you go out in the world and... grease yourself up’, and this concept of seeing things from a youthful, innocent perspective is clear as day in the persona that Ørsted creates on her album and in her collabs, combining an optimistic surety of oneself with a sirenlike vocal beauty and purity of purpose. On the soaring chorus of ‘Glass’, she bemoans the transience of life with her cry of ‘oh, why do everyone have to grow old?’, and on the life-affirming ‘Walk This Way’, she talks nostalgically of ‘longing for the sweet sound of my mama’ and her mum’s affirmation to her that ‘there’s a light for you, burning for you’, giving her, and the vicarious listener, a lightning strike of real go-get-'em inspiration.

This innocent character, combined with her ferocious confidence and the intelligence of her songs’ lyrics, is probably what makes MØ such an irresistible and likeable personality, which shines from the music like the sound of a human soul. While Ørsted writes and performs all of its songs, No Mythologies to Follow was produced in its near-entirety by Ronni Vindahl, and it’s an astounding piece of track construction, dense with all the things you’ll recognise from a million songs available in the last five years, but created with verve and feeling. Despite the criticism for its comparative unoriginality, its awareness of the pop swamp from where it originated is what makes it so readily accessible, plus it’s loaded with killer hooks, and pretty much everything on the tracklist is a winner and will grab you firmly by the proverbial bollocks. But as Pitchfork’s review of the album decreed, ‘it works because a likable persona is something you just can’t teach’, and there’s never any doubt that the magic behind the album’s gorgeousness is in MØ’s powerful voice and domineering presence, tearing up the sleeper hits of ‘Slow Love’, ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Maiden’ and ensuring that the album’s plethora of bangers will be bubbling back into your subconscious for many years to come.

No Mythologies to Follow is kind of a masterwork in my opinion, both emotionally resonant in its girlish tirades over boredom and heartbreak, and enthrallingly vibrant with an unshakeable confidence. I’ve fallen in love with it, and MØ is one of my favourite artists from the new wave of female singer-songwriters who've learned their tricks from studying a childhood of ultra-commercial, hook-laden 90s-00s pop music. I’m not exactly sure of the direction MØ intends to head now that it’s been more than a year since her debut album with a perfect match of a producer, and her recent fare has come from collaborating with members of the pop establishment like Iggy Azalea, and as much as ‘Lean On’ is an unstoppable hit and a sweltering summer anthem (as well as, fuck it, a great song), I can’t help but be cynical as to where MØ’s journey from indie-pop to ultra-pop will take her next. But whatever the next single that she decides to lend her beautiful vocal cords to, it’ll still be highly likely that she’s the best thing on it. As for the possibility of another album, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it holds the same wealth of hits that her first LP has, but I’m nonetheless excited. In the meantime, turn up the volume and let ‘Walk This Way’ gift you with a reason to live.

Bad Mojo

Bad Mojo may be nineteen years old, but in terms of gaming, it’s a one-of-a-kind; a freakish, absurd, Kafkaesque, high-concept rough diamond of a PC adventure. The story, which is set up for you through a gloriously weird and hammily overacted FMV cutscene, is thus: you are Roger Samms (a play on Metamorphosis’s Gregor Samsa), a gobby young bloke who is moments away from running away with a suitcase of ill-gotten cash and leaving his shitty, run-down flat for good, when his soul is inexplicably transmogrified with one of the many cockroaches which infest his dilapidated building. When I first played it, I wasn’t quite sure what'd happened as I explored my new cockroach-sized world, but gradually it becomes clear that the entire game is set around your now-massive flat, and a few adjacent rooms, in search of a way back to your original body.

In the process, a story is told. The game makes heavy employment of those now-nostalgic live-action cutscenes in a number of ways, mainly in telling you what’s going on at human height, but also in flashbacks of the characters' backstories, and particularly in the assistance of a mystical oracle, who appears in the form of other thumb-sized floor-dwellers to aid you in your quest. But the game also makes good use of my favourite gaming-specific narrative technique – that of environmental storytelling. By scuttling along through bins and gutters and the nasty, hidden bits of you and your landlord’s home, little details come together to paint a fascinating and grim portrait of the few characters that populate the game. The game’s art design, and its ingenious puzzles that rely mostly on nudging things with your little insect snout rather than the traditional point-and-click mechanic, are unlike anything else I’ve ever played. Sometimes they can be a little finicky, but what adventure game isn’t? Mostly I love the world that this game presents – the environment of the disgusting apartment, with cig butts and vicious rats and spilt chemicals all over the place, is engaging and oddly charming, in a hideous sort of way.

I love the environment in this game mostly because of its originality – sure, there are a million stories where people get shrunk down and have to navigate a world where everything is now astonishingly gigantic, but there was a lot less booze and porn in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. As I said before, the entire game takes place in maybe a couple of rooms, but from this new perspective, the moulded food and the ashtrays and the monolithic furniture are all creatively put to good to use to make an engaging world full of puzzles and pitfalls, with the bodies of your dead kin indicating where you perhaps shouldn’t tread. One memorable sequence includes roaching across a sleeping character’s face, and others involve disposing of the deadly ‘rat king’ and avoiding the landlord’s now-behemothic cat. All of this is tied together with an ominous, Lynchian soundtrack by Xorcist that makes for a fitting background to the game’s gritty and dingy aesthetic, as well as adding to the game’s off-kilter and joyously weird vibe.

It’s also surprisingly well-written, or at least shows a level of interest in its story, character development, and eye for detail that countless games in our spoilt-rotten present day couldn’t hold a candle to. It’s also unafraid to mix its grimy sense of realism with straight-up magical elements and a revelry in its own ridiculousness, as with the oracle’s many cryptic clues delivered in knowingly audacious rhymes. It’s not a very long game, depending on how quickly you can figure it out, and of course it shouldn’t be, but it’s nonetheless packed with so much thought and artistry that it’s worth replaying just to immerse yourself in its bonkers little universe once again – that and the fact that it has four separate endings. But most of all, I adore just how 1990s it is. The ‘edgy’ vibe, the crazy semi-CG full motion video, the dark synthesiser soundtrack, the datedness of it all; to me, it’s beautiful, and even today it remains a breath of fresh air in one of the most derivative industries imaginable, even if that fresh air is tinged with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and rotten meat.

WATCH THE AMAZING INTRO CUTSCENE HERE

Pharmakon

Margaret Chardiet, A.K.A. Pharmakon, makes some exceptionally dark music. Stripped-down, sparse, and angrily, burningly raw, her music, a personal and minimalistic form of industrial, sounds as oppressive as the creeping horror of a medieval plague, or the mechanical operation of a death camp. It’s punishing to listen to, and carries with it the power to heavily traumatise. Chardiet is not fucking around here. Her music is a conveyor belt of stained, steely terror, and it’s an immeasurably badass collection of work.

There are two albums floating around at the moment, at least two that I know of, which are the ones that have made it into the crowded, stagnant river of the mainstream. Low in track number but loaded with thick, gloopy misery, Abandon came thundering into my life in 2013, while Bestial Burden came out last year, and in between Pharmakon herself suffered a cyst so large that it nearly killed her, and had to undergo some nasty surgery that undoubtedly added a bitter new philosophy to her already vicious style of sound. The two albums are similar in their technique, but are by no means less individual, and I find it impossible to imagine either of them becoming, y'know, stale and 'samey', even after maybe a thousand listens. Pharmakon's tracks have a recognisable formula of a bludgeoning percussive base, with a layer of unearthly atmospherics, all brought together with her maniacal vocal cords bleeding profusely over the top. She wails, she laughs, she hisses, she mutters, but she mostly screams, with the throat-splitting intensity of a believable despair that sends shivers down the spines of your ancestors. Her versatility is her greatest asset. On ‘Crawling on Bruised Knees’, for instance, she uses electronic wizardry to turn her voice into a desperate and vulnerable wobble, an absolute stroke of genius that gives her voice a jarring inhuman quality.

Occasionally her sound will descend into whirring clouds of sheer madness, as with the ghostly utterances that end the otherwise white-knuckle ‘Ache’ on the first LP, but my personal favourite is the end of ‘Bestial Burden’ itself, an already maddeningly pensive track with a ‘bass line’ that sounds like the shadow of a swinging meat pendulum, which gets thicker and thicker with ominous fear, Pharmakon’s echoing voice dithering between little-girl-lost and frustrated, roaring monstrosity, laughing and laughing until the track builds to a whirlwind of laughter, screams, white noise and distorted hellish lunacy that closes a brilliantly brutal album. Bestial Burden, the album, is a masterwork. Pharmakon herself described it as her ‘desire to show the body as 'a lump of flesh and cells that mutate and betray you’, with one of the tracks even being named ‘Body Betrays Itself’, and sounds like the inevitable approach of an invisible enemy. In many ways, this shows how Bestial Burden is a piece of autobiography as well as an ambient horrorshow. There are less attempts at witchy darkness on this LP, as there were with ‘Pitted’, for instance, and instead the album is more concerned with being grounded in the material reality where the human body can spontaneously murder itself, as shown by adding the suffocating sounds of panic-attack breathing and a long section of someone coughing up something disgusting. It’s stunning, in the sense of the final moments of an ill-fated cow in a sheet-metal slaughterhouse.

Pharmakon’s music is terrifying, electrifying, powerful, vulnerable, heartfelt and cruel. She may be the result of a long line of horrifying factory-music predecessors, but it’s undeniable that in her thus-far brief body of inspiringly abominable work, Chardiet has built herself a recognisable and immense style whereby both her body and soul are hung from sharpened staves and hoisted over a throbbing landscape of genuine and palpable human misery. If that sounds like the sort of listening experience that would fascinate you beyond belief, as it does me, then I highly recommend you check her out. But beware: if there’s any music that truly isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s these two magnificent albums.

Serial Experiments: Lain

Peerless, prophetic, and almost totally impenetrable, Serial Experiments: Lain is a bizarrely idiosyncratic anime which shines a flickering spotlight on the consequences of our modern-day interconnectedness, and may or may not be ‘about’ a number of complex topics, including technology, identity, religion, isolation, reality and death. It’s also an immensely satisfying thrill ride of disturbing imagery and unabashed weirdness, famed for being bafflingly incomprehensible and deeply unsettling. Lain makes no attempts to allow its story reach you in any form that isn’t the subtlest, most chilling kind of quiet exposition. There is absolutely zero spoon-feeding. Because of this, Lain is often chastised for being so barmy that it raises the question of whether its supposed storyline or inherent ‘meaning’ can truly be said to exist, which I can’t stomach for two reasons: one, to assume that such a dense piece of ball-gripping art was made without any intent or purpose is pretty unfair on the kinds of people who make things as mentally challenging as Lain, and two, it’s hard to believe that the developers would’ve put so much effort into making this series look and feel so awe-strikingly beautiful if they hadn’t had a specific soul and purpose in mind, whether it’s one that can be easily put into words or not.

Lain is an anime series that has no other direction in which to categorise itself in than the broad but brilliant ‘psychological’ genre of anime, which also houses other popular mindfucks such as Death Note, Ergo Proxy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. But unlike those other examples, Lain is way further out in the stratosphere of intellectually demanding strangeness. The initial setup is thus: Lain is a quiet and introverted schoolgirl who is contacted one day via text message by her classmate Chisa, who not long ago committed suicide. Chisa explains that she is not actually dead, but has simply left her material body to become part of the ‘Wired’, the series’ name for its wacked-out version of our modern internet, where she claims that God exists. Chisa appears to Lain again in terrifying visions, and eventually Lain decides to buy herself a PC (known in the series as a ‘Navi’) and become a part of this strange new electronic frontier. The rest of the story is up for debate – a lot happens, but in terms of what exactly happens, none of us can be too sure. But, like the best David Lynch movies, although you might not have wrapped your head around the exact nature of what’s going on in front of you, it’s made with such a deft and assured confidence that you’re enthralled nonetheless, and can also enjoy the unique pleasure of picking it apart in your mind months after you first watch it. The atmosphere that the show creates is deep and dark and emotionally arresting, and even without going into the arguably less interesting intellectual side of the series, it’s the relentless menace of the show’s feel which makes it completely unforgettable.

The series is also years ahead of its time, either a testament to the genius of its inventors, or of technology’s place in contemporary Japanese culture. Or, y’know, both. Lain was first broadcast in 1998, but the way in which the ‘Wired’ is portrayed throughout the series is eerily reminiscent of a mindset well into the age of Web 2.0 and our now-ubiquitous social media. The scenes that are set ‘within’ the Wired are intensely surreal, a virtual phantasmagoria with disembodied human parts and weird dreamlike personifications. It’s never entirely clear whether the Wired is a vast virtual-reality-type space, or whether this is all animated symbolism of the bog-standard online communication we know and love today. References are also made to how much the Wired is beginning to creep out from the world of ones and zeroes and is into our own reality, which, if taking the Wired to be synonymous with the internet, is unquestionably the state we find ourselves in nowadays, where the internet has come to affect almost everything in the so-called ‘real’ world. Exactly what the point is that Lain is making about the dawn of information age is, of course, unclear. Most of the time, though, it feels as if it’s suggesting that all of this is a bad thing – such as with the inconsistency of Lain’s identity, for instance, whereby she can no longer keep track of her online personality anymore, nor where reality ends and the Wired begins. Also, as the series progresses, Lain’s obsession with the Wired develops to insane heights, as embodied in the progression of her beautifully-designed supercomputer, which grows from a simple desktop PC into a monstrous, room-sized organism. The series imagines a world where humankind transcends itself through technological means, but provides no obvious moral message, which is undoubtedly one of its main strengths.

It’s also worth giving a mention to Lain herself, a protagonist who has little to say compared to most other exposition-spewing anime central characters, and yet she never feels too distant, and the mystery behind her overall objective in the series becomes yet another corridor of interest, rather than a narrative weakness. Her personality is split between her shy and lonely offline personality, and the newfound confidence that she finds – or may have been there all along? – through the vast channels of the Wired, and most of the time she seems as confused as the audience as to what exactly is going on with herself. Her identity as an unhappy loner is made perfectly clear, with her empty, soulless bedroom and her mistake of failing to ‘dress like a grownup’ when her airheaded semi-friends take her out clubbing (to the awesomely-named ‘Cyberia’). It’s clear that there is something special about Lain with regards to her role in the story, although I’m not exactly sure how, as shady agencies, hackers and other underworld figures all take a particular interest in her. However, as much as the show hints that there might be some Neo-esque chosen-one nonsense going on, it’s the scenes of Lain as an ordinary girl navigating a new and unusual world, both in the Wired and in the real world, that work the best. Lain’s relationship with her something’s-not-quite-right family also makes for some of the most unnerving scenes and subplots in the entire series.

I’m head-over-heels in love with this show. Every aspect of it shines with a dark and murky brilliance. The gloriously nuanced artwork, and the production, particularly the sound engineering, which sets every mood with unsettling precision, are all immaculate. It’s cryptic, and yet it’s still utterly engaging. It’s alien, and yet if you strain your ears, you can hear the distant echoes of exactly what it’s trying to say. It has moment after moment of masterfully chilling and eerie scenes and set-pieces. There are so many depths to it, and it’s the first anime I’d point to if you’re looking for something that’s weird, but never stupid. Serial Experiments: Lain is a one-of-a-kind, and though there are a few things you can try and compare it to, it has the distinct honour of being a true original. If you’re like me, and nothing gets you off like the feeling of having your mind rummaged about in and being left pleasantly disturbed, then watching Lain is a particularly special and memorable experience. Others may be turned off by the lack of being able to understand what the fuck’s going on, but I reckon that even if you’re left feeling as confused as a demented rabbit, you’ll still be gripped and entertained by the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. It’s one of my favourite things ever, ever, ever, and if anything I’ve said in the past five paragraphs has piqued your interest, then I suggest you find the means to watch it right this minute, preferably at night and completely alone.

WATCH THE TRAILER (dubbed)

Dawn of a New Blog

So here's another blog, where I'll be dumping any articles I feel like writing, probably mostly reviews of things I already know I'm in love with - I reckon Serial Experiments: Lain is gonna be the first one, then who knows? Expect big, chunky paragraphs and meandering sentences. If you're wondering what the 'old' blogs were to constitute my declaring this a 'new' blog, have a look at drinkaloneradio.blogspot.com. I think the even older ones were deactivated. Be critical if you want, most of this is practice anyway. Praise be to Yevon.