PERSONAL GEMS: Pink Floyd - Animals

It’s about time for another classic Will Bamber navel-gaze as I wax fanatical about the albums that I adore, specifically albums that I’ve always adored, over the greater part of my music-worshipping life, particularly those I fell in love with as a dreamy-eyed teenager, and what better place to start than with the most underrated album from the first band I ever truly loved – the band that revealed to me how music could be so much more than pop hooks and catchy choruses. Whether I do any more of these is up in the air, but talking about this particular album has been a long time coming. It’s the dark, the ambitious, the inimitable, the wild, the soaring, the tragically cathartic masterpiece that is Pink Floyd’s Animals.

I’m dropping my usual charade of acting like a music journalist – this blog post is gonna be fast and loose, straight from the heart, of how and why this album captivated me, continues to floor me with every listen, and why you shouldn’t risk going your entire life without at least allowing it a chance to burrow into your soul. It may be cringe, but it’s nothing but the truth.

A Gentle Reminder That Free Speech Doesn't Absolve You

Ricky Gervais has been pissing me off recently, which is disheartening, as I’ve always been a huge fan of the fruits of his now long-historic golden age. The Office is a near-masterpiece in my opinion, and Extras was, if a little mawkish, a self-aware and timely satire. This makes it even more perplexing that the very societal problems that Ricky Gervais mocked and used as the basis of Extras's morality seem to have rotted from his own memory. Remember how Andy Millman’s character was transformed by his sudden fame into a thoughtless, self-centred arsehole and the series closed with him rediscovering his humility? I wonder if the Ricky Gervais I bear witness to on Twitter nowadays, who spends most of his time reminding everyone how clearly enlightened and subversive he is, would be capable of reaching the same moment of clarity.

Made in Abyss and Other Anime Bullshit

I haven’t talked about anime much in a while, but I found a good one this year and therefore I thought hey, why not just do a barely-filtered blog post on all the anime I’ve been watching in general lately? So here we are.

Some Thoughts About Rick and Morty

When the first series of Rick and Morty came out, I was completely smitten. It hit all the right notes: dark humour, cosmic horror, interesting speculative ideas. I liked how it was creative with its position as an animated sitcom, like with its absurd multiple universes and segments built around improvised nonsense. I liked how sharp and merciless the comedy was, and how its episode ideas had this Twilight Zone science-fiction ethos to them. It was like all our weird Christmases had come at once.

Word spread, with me doing lots of the spreading, and when the long-awaited second series arrived, the show was the hottest new thing, riding a hype it well deserved. I was duly excited – after all, in my experience, the first series of any show, particularly sitcoms, often suffers from its position as the starting point, and it’s usually by the second or third series that a show truly finds its footing, and has greater confidence in what it needs to be. Therefore, I figured that the next few series of Rick and Morty would be even better than its impressive beginning.

My Personal Favourite Movie Scenes

Hi, I got bored and started making a list (I'm a bit like Liam Neeson that way), so here it is. It's not gonna be a regular blog post in that I'm gonna go into any sort of loquacious detail about why any of these scenes are amazing or anything, I'm just simply throwing them out there so people can watch (some) of them and see if they agree. There's plenty of films I think are great that didn't make the cut, as these are the best singular scenes that I just adore for whatever fucked-up reason.

Also these are mostly off the top of my head and the order's pretty arbitrary until about the top four. And I'm only gonna give them a little bit of a comment, as really, they all mostly speak for themselves. So anyway, here are my TEN favourite scenes from all the movies I've seen so far.

10. Carrie's First Dance



I was thinking putting the completely insane split-screen denouement in here, y'know, as in the scene from Carrie, but then I thought about it and, apart from that being predictable as fuck, this is really the scene that is Carrie's centrepiece; we all know where the film's going, or at least have the feeling it's not going to end well, and this is the film at its happiest point, almost dreamily happy, so sickly happy that it's loaded with tension, especially as the camera starts spinning deliriously around the end. LOVE IT.

The Blair Witch Project

I find myself deeply depressed at how horror’s reputation has been torn to shreds in the mind of the modern moviegoer. Whenever I suggest watching a horror film to a layman of the genre, they have a tendency to lift their snooty noses and make very clear to me their opinion on how the horror film market is a rancid pool of schlocky detritus that only caters to a demographic of mindless idiots. The problem is, on the whole, they’re generally bang on the money, especially in this day and age. Horror movies have become so drearily manufactured, predictable and commercially superficial that people have practically forgotten how good a really good horror film can be, and how a well-made piece of horror can burrow into your psyche and lurk there for weeks, keeping you up at night and exercising your subconscious like any successful work of art should do. In all fairness, there’s been a rash of acclaimed horror films recently that are starting to fight back against the genre’s PR nosedive, but to me, the last bold, interesting, divisive but strikingly effective horror film to fire-axe its way through the door of pop culture is 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

For all the adoration I have for it, Blair Witch carries with it a fair amount of baggage. For one thing, people blame it for the ‘found footage’ subgenre of cinematic wankery that followed in its wake, all of which took the original’s unique and interesting concept and chucked away everything good about it, believing repeating Blair Witch’s central premise without any of the craftsmanship would be enough to keep people interested (which, inexplicably, they were kind of right about). There are also a number of complaints that the film is ‘boring’, or that ‘nothing happens’ and ‘nothing gets explained’. I like to use whether or not people identify with any of these statements as a litmus test of their emotional stupidity. See, horror has had a schism lately into two distinct categories: the modern approach, where much of the ‘horror’ comes from cheap, startling jump-scares and O.T.T. sadism – mostly enjoyed by children – and then there’s the true horror, frequently categorised as ‘psychological horror’, which affects you slowly, subtly; getting under your skin rather than shoving entrails in your face. Blair Witch, to me, is a master class in creating something truly haunting, which, believe it or not, was the original objective of the horror genre before it became the equivalent of popping a balloon next to someone’s head while they’re falling asleep.

Blair Witch’s legacy has been overshadowed in popular consciousness by its shrewd marketing campaign, which created, from our modern perspective, a completely bewildering word-of-mouth semi-rumour among idiots that the low-budget film was actual ‘found footage’ documenting the final moments of genuinely missing people. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall for this, but I can only assume this must’ve been due to the primitive minds of the people of the 1990s, and it was commonly proclaimed that the film’s terror came entirely from the actual belief of actual human beings that what they were seeing was ‘real’, and that this was the driving force of the film’s ability to scare. To me, this is all totally irrelevant. Blair Witch isn’t terrifying because I think what I’m seeing is real, although its realistic qualities are an important part of its effectiveness – it’s terrifying because it’s a straight-up well made, original, and more importantly (my favourite word in the universe): SUBTLE film. No jump-scares, no blood splatters, no ancient demons named ‘Bagul’; just a bare-bones production and some brilliantly-executed set-pieces and attention to detail. Blair Witch is more than its seminal marketing campaign, more than its timely and original gimmick – it’s a fucking great film, and it’s probably one of my favourite films ever made, regardless of how many people look at me every time I say that as if I’ve just announced that I’m a registered sex offender.

In case you don’t know, the story of the film concerns three young, twattish film students setting out to make a documentary on a mysterious figure of local folklore known as the ‘Blair Witch’. They set off into the woods to grab some incidental footage of a few historical murder scenes before quickly becoming lost and finding themselves set upon by an unseen supernatural entity that spends the entire film fucking with them in various ways, pushing them to the brink of insanity before leading them towards an ambiguously sticky ‘end’. The reason that this film works is that it’s never clear what the supposed ‘Blair Witch’ actually is, what it wants, or how it even operates. It’s not a ghost or a ghoul or a literal ‘witch’. You never even catch a glimpse of it. This should go without saying, but the less you explain in a horror film, the better. There’s nothing more frightening than the unknown, and there’s nothing that turns a horror film flaccid faster than having someone explain the precise details of what, why and how everything is happening. Blair Witch takes this to the next level by explaining absolutely nothing. All there is to go on are interviews with the locals at the beginning of the film, who waffle, Fight Club-style, about all the million different rumours they’ve heard, and passing mentions of historical kidnappings and ritualistic murders. Nobody knows what’s out there in the woods, but these accounts still linger in the back of your mind. The occasional clue is left as the story unfolds, and at reaching the point of its weird-ass conclusion, you’re left to fill in the blanks yourself as to what exactly went down.

Too many horror antagonists are things that are recognisable to us – ghosts, for instance, or crazed murderers, or aliens. Sure, these things are inherently ‘scary’, but they’re still familiar. The antagonist of Blair Witch is far more abstract. It’s more like the characters are at the mercy of the setting itself, the austere American woodland, so remote and endless that it begins to feel like the hapless students are trapped in a dream world, wandering in circles, plagued by an overbearing sense of dread, as things go from weird to bad to worse. And the best part is how the characters react to all this; at first they’re bickering with each other, then they’re at each other’s throats regarding their confidence in each other’s map-reading abilities, and soon they’re spiralling into terrified hysteria. There’s something darkly satisfying about watching their miserable descent, night after night. In fact, the film’s not so much about the ‘Blair Witch’ and its spooky designs as the psychology of its characters – witnessing their despair, their hopelessness. The most famous scene of all is Heather’s snot-laden confession to camera, utterly broken, wide-eyed with terror. It’s bare, human fear in the face of total oblivion. And that’s the beauty of the film, in my opinion. There’s no tense orchestral score or special effects. Everything about this movie is so authentically raw. In a world of slickly-produced, ‘oh-no-don’t-go-in-there’ horror movies, Blair Witch is a breath of fresh air; bleak, horrifying air.

The amateurish veneer of the film hides the creativity that went into it. The no-name actors were chosen based on their improvisational skills, ordered in the audition process to react immediately to whatever the directors threw at them; if they hesitated, they were passed over. They were given GPS systems and sent into the woods to film everything themselves, having instructions left for them in milk crates specific to each actor as to what their motivations were, unbeknownst to the others. The actors, basically, had very little idea what was in store for them – Michael C. Williams, for instance, was genuinely frightened by the children’s laughter played to them from a boombox brought out by the directors. They were intentionally starved and deprived of sleep. ‘Taco’ was their safe word for when they wanted to speak out of character. In short, the authenticity of the film was carefully orchestrated, nearly all of the dialogue was improvised, and there were times when the characters genuinely had no idea what was going on and were actually being fucked with by the directors. The fear you witness is, at least in part, real fear. And that’s what gives Blair Witch such an edge, and its achievement of this is undoubtedly what fuelled the water-cooler bullshit about its honest-to-god realism. When most people think of horror, they think of ghouls, vampires and zombies, but Blair Witch strips away the bullshit clichés and presents you with something genuinely, bleakly compelling.

Okay, I’ll admit I might've been a little harsh earlier; as much as I adore it, and I do adore it, The Blair Witch Project may not be for everyone. If you aren’t taken in by the soft touches of characterisation, or the slow pace and the build-up of the first two-thirds of the film, I can see why you might feel like moaning about it, especially if you’ve heard all the hype about how pant-wettingly frightening it’s meant to be. But, in my eyes, it’s just brilliant, and as I said, it’s brilliant because it’s so fucking raw. The creeping finale, especially, is just so nauseously strange, and best of all, left completely ambiguous, as all the most effective works of psychological horror should be. It’s the unanswered questions that keep a movie in your head long after it’s ended. The stripped-down nature of the film, its lightness on visual impact and spectacle, is undoubtedly what turns people off from it. It’s no Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s no Saw. But it is, in my mind, uniquely creepy, gripping, and, having been filmed on a pitiful $30,000, a testament to the power of subtlety and suggestion, a reminder that it’s not what you pack into a movie that makes it great, but what you do with it.

NEW BURIAL: YOUNG DEATH / NIGHTMARKET

As a Burial fan, I have to admit that I’ve been brutally teased by the dark, visionary, beauty-weaving motherfucker for about three years now. The last truly heart-blasting release that he made was around this time back in the ancient epoch of 2013, Rival Dealer, a cross between an EP and a religious experience, taking you down to Hell, up to Heaven and back again. It was more of the same, the same in this case being ‘cathartic genius’, but it was also a change in direction, and there we all were, cans round our heads, wondering the same thing: where the bloody hell is he going to go from here?

Since then, there have actually been a number of Burial appearances, although they’ve been teeny, tiny drops of this, that and the other. Remember ‘Temple Sleeper’? It was an oldschool braid-flinger decorated with the Burial hallmarks, and part of the problem was that that’s exactly what it felt like; a 1992 cut picked up from somebody’s cellar with the thinnest layer of that Burial magic painted over it. A surprise, really, considering his last release practically pulled you up beyond the stars and blew MDMA dust into the face of God. 'Temple Sleeper' was a drop back down to Earth, which was a direction it made sense to travel, in many respects, but I think it left everyone feeling a little ‘egh’, especially now Burial’s been hyped to the point where everything he does is given the same mad reverence as a verse of the New Testament.

Then earlier this year (unless I’m forgetting something), there was ‘Sweetz’, a Burial/Zomby collaboration that I believed, based on the combination alone, had the potential for true greatness, maybe even the same chart-topping success amongst narcotic, pretentious audiophiles as ‘Moth’. But the track was divisively experimental, a real out-there work of atmosphere and repetition that I understand some people enjoyed, but I wasn’t at all taken by. To me, the elements were there, as were the few loops and Burial fingerprints I went along with, but the almost seven-minute study in audial abstraction didn’t leave me truly satisfied. Once again, maybe I was blinded by the hype, but I found the release a strange disappointment, leaving my Burial-balls as painfully big and blue as ever.

And now, we have a new release, a two-track EP: YOUNG DEATH / NIGHTMARKET. Cool, nice, I thought; good names, and an actual auteur EP for the first time since the forgotten days of yore. The first thing I noticed was the shortness of the tracks; together, they came to about thirteen minutes of pure Burial, and all I could scream inside was “MORE! MORE!!”, but something always beats nothing when it comes to being a devout Burial fanboy, and upon listening I was glad to hear in these two tracks what I always truly hope for in any Burial release: a committal to the audial personality that made him a genius – you know, the intakes of breath, the zippo clicks, the track’s pieces bursting into life like rediscovered memories – and an exhibition of bold, new experimentation.

So, are the tracks any good? Obviously this is no opus like Rival Dealer was intended as, and it makes no claims to be. Instead, there are two very different creations here. The first, ‘Young Death’, is Burial in his most comfortable territory – out in the rain, with a synth as a blanket against the cold, and soulful samples guiding you along its roughly-beaten dirt track. The refrain is uplifting, and typically gorgeous, supported with pieces that range from subtle arpeggiated blips to the brief but powerful hammering of piano keys. As usual, the track transforms, and its second act is far colder and mysterious (I have to point out the jarring laugh of the Skull Kid), and brings you down until what could easily be the ‘Teardrop’ beat exits stage left. It’s tried-and-true Burial, but it works. If you want to step into an oil painting and have your heartstrings pulled with all the gentility of a lover’s spirit, then yeah, ‘Young Death’ is a success.

But what’s really worth talking about here is the second half; a longer track, ‘Nightmarket’. Immediately, the sound is radically different – above the clinking background noise, the human sighs, all of that, is an electronic fluttering of bleeps, like alien waves from outer space – a rarely heard sound for Burial, or, rather, a sound rarely heard in such a raw, electronic form; more artificial than his usual organic kind of style. It arrives and vanishes repeatedly, punctuated in between by segments of distant beauty or anxious nothingness, and the track just builds and builds, and its refrain becomes stronger and stronger, the voice turning from indistinct mumblings to graceful piano-like trills up into proud, aggressive synth stabs, with cinematic sampling creating a fucking hell of a buzz. There is no drumbeat – it is nonexistent, or at least it might as well be, and that in itself is a sizeable change of pace. I found it strangely arresting, and very, very interesting as a new droplet from heaven that I see in the work of this mysterious bloke and his weird, creepy tunes.

So is it good? Yes, it’s very good. Of course it bloody is, and it’s just indescribably delightful to hear new Burial that I actually enjoy and don’t find myself straining to enjoy just because I’ve latched onto the name like an entitled little leech. But is it really good? Hmm, well that’s tough to say. It doesn’t break into your life and rearrange the furniture like anything on Rival Dealer, but it’s unfair to expect that. What I do hope is that it’s a sign of things to come, something that will meet my unfairly high expectations and beat my heart into a slab of tenderised meat, but in the meantime I guess I’ll give the verdict as: great if you’re as obsessed with the man as I am, and parts of it, like the denouement of 'Nightmarket', can still smack you around, but there’s very little here that really gives your insides a good, solid kicking.

Why Silent Hill 2 is the Greatest Game of All Time

Anyone who knows me well enough has probably experienced me going off on one about the genius of Silent Hill 2 at some point in our relationship. It’s a game that’s disturbed and fascinated me since childhood, and it was one of my first truly beloved works of art, for Silent Hill 2, as well as being a clunky survival horror that would shitten the pants of even the most jaded fear fanatic, is pure art. In fact, I’ve never seen any game that aims for the emotional depths Silent Hill 2 dares to plumb, and definitely nothing that succeeds so beautifully, or horrifyingly. So, since I’m still completely obsessed with it, here’s another (shh) blog on why Silent Hill 2 is not only my favourite game of all time, but possibly one of my favourite works of art of all time, of any medium.

SH2 isn't just a scary game; it's a crushingly sad one, too, so it's even more fun!

Okay, so the Silent Hill series has blown up in popularity since the year SH2 came out, and the franchise has since disintegrated into total dogshit (except for that one thing that pains me too much to talk about). The first Silent Hill came out on the PS1 and was intended as a challenger to Resident Evil’s B-movie zombie carnival. It involved a single dad getting trapped in the titular town and fighting to save his daughter from the spooky designs of a bunch of sinister occultists, and the story continued in Silent Hill 3, with the weird Alessa-and-the-cult nonsense continuing to pop up all over the franchise, including the movie adaptation. Silent Hill 2, however, is unique in that it follows its own story. It’s not a game about villains or cults or ghosts or any of that bullshit; instead, the team decided to revolve SH2's story around its central character rather than the town itself, and, by going down this more personal route, ended up creating maybe the best videogame story of all time.

The story is: One day, melancholic everyman James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife, Mary, telling him to come meet her at Silent Hill; however, James tells us that Mary actually died three years ago from an unnamed disease. Intrigued, confused, and maybe a little desperate, James drives over to the town, which is now deserted, thick with fog and crammed with freaky monsters, to search for her. As the story progresses, the history of James and Mary’s marriage is illuminated, in all its brutal tragedy, and James descends further and further into the darkest corners of his own soul. Along the way he meets a number of other disturbed and unhelpful individuals who've found themselves beckoned by the town, including a mysterious woman who calls herself Maria, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife. The plot thickens, reality turns on its head, and tragedies begin to unfold.

Symbolism is scattered all over the place, and not always as obviously as this.

Remember when games didn’t insult your intelligence? Believe it or not in this age of hand-holding narrative rubbish, back in 2001, Team Silent poured their heart and soul into this game, stuffing it with so much symbolism and fascinating detail that I’m still discovering new things about it to this day. Nearly every tiny part of it is deliberate and meaningful. The monsters, for instance, aren’t just creepy enemies intended to stand in your way, but actual, manifested inner demons, perversely sexual and just human enough to give you the howling fantods. Freudian psychological shit is going on all over the place, from the esoteric puzzles to the surreal, dilapidated settings; this isn’t so much a game as it is a horror walk through the inside of someone’s head, and what could be more disturbingly raw and terrifying than that?

It’s the little things that make the atmosphere of Silent Hill 2 so unsettling, and it might’ve been the first thing to ever teach me that for something to really fuck you up, subtlety is key. The dialogue, for instance, is jarring and unnatural, almost as if the characters can’t understand each other and maybe aren’t having the conversations that they think they are. Fucked-up English dialogue in Japanese games is usually either hilarious or irritating, but in this game, it actively works to keep you feeling truly alone in the nightmare. In fact, the sound design in its entirety is one of SH2’s crowning achievements, with its ungodly monster cries, its industrial shrieks, and the deafening use of silence itself. Also, the soundtrack is a masterpiece, capable of pulling at your heartstrings one moment and tearing your nerves to shreds at the next.

As the game progresses, the levels become more and more warped and illogical.

Now, when it comes to gameplay, Silent Hill 2 isn’t a winner by any means. It’s not exactly a game to wind down with; it’s barely even fun, in the purest sense. In that case, why do I say that it’s my favourite game of all time? Well, for one thing, games aren’t all about running around killing bad guys and picking up loot. Games are also about setting, and ambience, and exploration. Silent Hill is, at its essence, a walk through a haunted house, or an entire complex of haunted houses. It’s a descending march into a spiralling abyss, a masochistic journey of fear, intrigue and misery, and from start to finish, you're completely submerged in its unique atmosphere. And it couldn’t be a film, or a novel, or a comic book, or anything else. It only works as a world that you yourself must dare to walk through, and be personally affected by.

I could probably write about the ins and outs of Silent Hill 2 for the rest of my life, but, ultimately, the reason I love Silent Hill 2 is because of how much work it puts into making you feel something. As a horror game, it’s the absolute zenith, getting under your skin and keeping you up at night better than any of today’s jump-scare asylum-walkers could hold a candle to. But it’s more than just a thrill ride. SH2’s horrors aren’t in zombies or ghosts or things beyond our understanding; its power to disturb comes from the horrors we all understand – things like guilt, shame, despair, grief, hatred, desire and death. Silent Hill 2 is an expedition through the bleakest shadows of the human psyche. It’s cerebral enough to be analysed within an inch of its life, and harrowing enough to haunt you from now until the end of time. It's fifteen years old now, and maybe a little dated in many ways, but there's still never been anything like it, and if you're looking for a heavy, emotional, frightening and multi-layered gaming experience, consider yourself told that, for me at least, Silent Hill 2 is the number one option, and a work of genuine artistic genius.

P.S: If you’ve read this far and actually fancy giving it a go, as you obviously fucking need to, stay the hell away from 2012’s HD collection, as it’s a monumental clusterfuck. If you can't get the PS2 version, the PC one's easily downloadable.

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.

EMA - The Future's Void

EMA, that is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of depressing experimental drug-rock duo Gowns, made ripples on the hipster sea back in 2011 with her solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which was an absolute stonker of an album; heartfelt in its distress, personal yet otherworldly, and packed with gloriously bold levels of variety, from the bonkers to the beautiful. Three years later, she’s back with The Future’s Void, a matter-of-factly polemic title which betrays this second album’s overarching theme of our exciting new maybe-dystopian lives in the Information Age and beyond. The new world order forming around us in the wake of the Internet Revolution has become an alluring concept for artists of all kinds across the globe, all of whom are undoubtedly hoping – as much as they might deny it – to be the ones to truly encapsulate the zeitgeist of this exciting and bewildering period of human history. The Future’s Void is an album that retains the exasperated angst of its predecessor, but throws it into a more ambitious thematic scope, with interesting and varied results.

I was faintly disappointed when I read the album title, saw the Oculus on the cover, listened to a couple of the tracks and realised that this was an album with a ‘modern life’ sort of concept, since I’d fallen in love with EMA on her last album thanks to her offerings of those more timeless and analog miseries like abuse, emptiness and self-harm, which made no attempts to be topical or generational, and were the all the greater for that. Immediately, on The Future’s Void, you can tell that the more personal side of Anderson’s songwriting has been compromised, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and second albums that fail to deviate from those before them run the risk of sounding creatively stagnant, for me EMA’s – and in fact Gowns’ – appeal was the personal touch that made all the heartache in the songs truly palpable. Not to mention the fact that writing any music about ‘the Internet’ is cause for alarm. Shit, my last review was of St. Vincent’s self-titled tirade about life in the Twitter epoch, and songs like ‘Digital Witness’ are a singularly rare success in this area.

But enough moaning about boring things like ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’, let’s talk about the music, shall we? Past Life Martyred Saints had a thrillingly eclectic range of sounds – folky guitars, thundering drums, graceless space-age synthesisers – and this continues in much the same vein here. However, the real warhead in Anderson’s arsenal is her voice – capable at performing a decent tune, sure, but also a material in itself to be manipulated and layered into a variety of forms. Unlike another Anderson, the one from The Knife with the extra ‘s’, EMA doesn’t mangle her voice or distort it beyond its humanity. Instead, all throughout this album, most notably on tracks like ‘Solace’ and ‘Satellites’, Anderson is joined by a choir of herself, creating vocal sections that are lushly put together, and make her raspy inflection all the sweeter to listen to. Whether she’s going grunge on ‘So Blonde’, industrial on ‘Smoulder’, or soft as a whisper on ‘3Jane’, it’s Anderson’s voice which really succeeds in drawing the emotion out of her songs, and every line is sang with conviction – cool, clamouring, disinterested and desperate all at the same time.

The opener, ‘Satellites’, is a marvellously apocalyptic call-to-arms with deranged movements from tragic choral interludes to whistling distortion and a death-knell bass tone. ‘So Blonde’ is plucked straight out of the nineties, awesome or derivative depending on your cynicism. ‘3Jane’ is a lost-sounding and reflective ballad that might just be the album’s highlight, misty-eyed and beautifully sung. On her blog, Anderson described ‘3Jane’ as the ‘lyrical centrepiece of the record’, and talks about trying to control her online image while living in constant worry of having a visible online presence now that cunts like me are finding out who she is. ‘It’s all just a big advertising campaign’, she bemoans wistfully on the record. ‘Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease’. It might all sounds a little preachy, but it’s sang with such bored surrender that it kills to listen to. ‘I get stressed out and I wanna get high / it’s cos I’ve seen my face and I don’t recognise the person that I feel inside’. Anderson’s lyrics are unrefined and directly talk about ‘selfies’ and ‘interwebs’ with an artistic-mindedness that might make some internet users a little uncomfortable, but I find them captivating. Some of the lyrics, apparently, didn’t even make it past being made up on the spot, and I like this rough-around-the-edges quality, as well as the imagery of lines like ‘we just smoulder where the flames went out’, even if the intended mondegreens of ‘earn/urn’ and ‘might lose some fur/my Lucifer’ are a bit befuddling at times.

EMA seems to be reaching for the bigger-sounding tracks on this album. ‘Satellites’, as mentioned before, intends to be as stratospheric as its title, and ‘Smoulder’ is slow and sweeping and satisfyingly grand. Perhaps the weakest effort on the album is ‘Cthulu’, which is appropriately aiming for largeness and impact, but its constant, repeated hook doesn’t generate the gravitas that its creator might’ve originally hoped, and its epic denouement would’ve been more effective had it been built on sturdier foundations. It’s not like EMA can’t write long, huge-sounding songs – ‘Grey Ship’, from the previous album, is a mind-blowing affair, as is Gowns masterpiece ‘White Like Heaven’, but ‘Cthulu’ isn’t great. ‘Neuromancer’ is better, with its stomping drumbeat backed up by machine-gun fire, but all of these big-arena belters, for all their volume, are missing the emotional impact that comes with EMA’s more understated material. Conversely, the ringing piano chords on ‘100 Years’ are as deathly quiet and sombre as a distant church bell on a misty morning, and although Anderson is singing about something as big and important as the state of the world at the moment (‘How it shudders from its expanding’), the effect is serene, yet deeply haunting.

Returning to the idea that this is an album that’s ‘about things’, I’m relieve to say that for all the stumbles that EMA seems to be making in creating an album with a whole lot more ambition than her previous effort, mostly concentrated in the more anthemic offerings, there’s plenty of good shit here, and Anderson’s talent for interesting sounds and lyrics hasn’t diminished since people started learning her name. ‘Solace’ is an absolute triumph, for instance, soaring and cathartic in a way that the grander songs on the album never manage, pulling your ears to attention with a catchy chorus, a bubbling synth hook and its madcap percussive debris. The album ends with its most evidently ‘of the times’ effort – ‘Dead Celebrity’, which could’ve been a whole lot more trite if it wasn’t for its bastardised riff on the Last Post, its climactic fireworks display and lyrics like ‘we wanted something timeless in a world so full of speed’ – all awesome. Songs that reference the controversial selfie and clicking on links might still be hard to get used to as the Internet envelops our lives more and more, and as far as trying to make a topical statement on this generation of avatars and statuses goes, EMA hasn’t quite cemented a totally coherent point anywhere here, but her songs are still as excitingly bold as ever, and her style and lyrics as simple yet affecting as in her masterful debut. It’s not as good as Past Life Martyred Saints, but maybe nothing will be.

EMA - Satellites