NerdLust.net

In hindsight, I’m still not sure how it happened.  Sure, I loved the original, self-titled Protomen album.  But it was a frenetic, metal-laced cannon shot of an album with only occasional moments of contrasting lo-fi, acoustic notes.  Act II is another matter entirely.  It retains some of the first album’s organic components, and rather than metal it features a fearlessly executed retro ’80s pop-rock style.

I have to admit, my age probably has a lot to do with my initial bias against that element of their composition, where younger listeners probably find it as endearing as I found ’70s rock when I was growing up.  Nonetheless, my initial reluctance to embrace Act II has been fully reversed.  I now find myself listening to the new Protomen album more than anything else in my collection, combined.

Yup.  It has me in a grip, no doubt.  I find myself wondering how many times I can talk about the Protomen before I annoy my wife enough for her to say something about it.  And my followers on Twitter.  And Facebook.  And IRC.  You get the idea.

It’s hard to say where the turning point was.  Certainly, I became more and more engaged as I worked out the lyrics and the story they tell.  And I suppose I’ve built up some immunity to the cheese factor through repeated exposure.  Regardless of the causes, I’m now free enjoy Act II for what it is: a thoroughly awesome concept album that tells an overdriven drama of heroes, villains, and the robots they create.

I am so sold on the new album at this point that I want everyone to hear it.  If you like robots.  If you like the hero’s journey.  If you like music.  If you have hearing.  If you have partial hearing.  Or even just a pulse.  You get the point; Act II – The Father Of Death is Essential Listening.

Official Protomen Site | Random Protomen Stuff on YouTube

I’ve unintentionally turned this into a video-only week of posts, but after someone posted this to Facebook earlier I was so impressed that I had to repost it here.

A lot of nerdy music, and especially nerdcore hip-hop, focuses on consumer-based traits of geeks and nerds like science fiction movies and video games. Some, like my friend Steve Rush (whom you know as funky49) have included science in their music. (His Rapbassador album deserves its own post here.) But I think this is the first time I’ve seen anyone effectively put music into science instead of the other way around.

There are, so far, only two videos available at symphonyofscience.com, but they are devastating works and if we’re lucky there are more to come.

As noted on the site, Sagan’s landmark series, Cosmos, is available on Hulu. You know what to do.

First, there’s this:

OK? No, not really. I couldn’t get halfway through that. Not even close. I’ve never been a Star Trek fan, but I can understand it. I cannot understand the Klingon immersion thing. The costumes and the speech… I just don’t get it. This is not nerdy, it’s just lame.

Now, topical in message and contrasting in quality, we have this:

Ahhh… that’s more like it. Alright, back to whatever you were doing.

If you read my PAX recap (I’ll understand if you didn’t) you’ll already know that I’ve taken a shine to Metroid Metal. Their performance at PAX was thoroughly enjoyable and I resolved to pick up their music immediately.

This album is good old-fashioned [metal] fun. The Metroid themes are easily recognizable, and the music is very tightly played. Listening to Varia Suite takes me right back to those red-eyed explorations of lonely, alien worlds scattered with abandoned structures and crawling with hostile life forms.

So much of the mood and atmosphere of the Metroid games is conveyed through its scores, and if anything, Metroid Metal’s translations not only preserve their message but amplify it. And where, perhaps, they deviate or embellish, I assure you it is always a successful attempt at more completely rocking.

Metroid Metal also gets kudos from me for using Bandcamp to allow a full preview of the entire album, and at least as important, offer the music digitally in all manner of formats, including Ogg and FLAC (yes!!) So I feel it would be redundant and perhaps a little rude to do my normal practice of putting up MP3 links when I can just allow you to check out their music directly.

So here you go, check it out for yourself! I particularly like these tracks:

4. Item Room (NES)
7. Ridley (NES)
8. Phendrana Drifts (MP)
14. Theme (NES)

Official Metroid Metal Site, MM on Bandcamp,

If you’re reading this and you read the review immediately prior to it (Ultraklystron – The Free Estate) you’re probably not expecting anything positive to come of it. In short, you’d be right.

Maja (pronounced “MAY-ja” by the way–a surprise to me) isn’t incompetent, but I felt his even tone throughout each track conveyed boredom, and I could only echo that temperament when listening, often completely tuning out the music as it rolled on smoothly.

The lyrics are often clever or cleverly pronounced, but the lack of any emphasis at all made paying attention to them a chore. The one exception to this impression was “Hip Hop Daikou” which has nice, minimal beats, a fun chorus, and more of the punchy flow that I find engaging. If I understand correctly, it’s outside of the Bleach-themed set of tracks on the release, explaining the scattered references to other anime and video games.

The samples were totally lost on me. Not only did they fail to add anything to the overall composition because of language, but I didn’t recognize any of them, though one guy sounded a lot like Gendo Ikari in Neon Genesis. Wait, that was indeed the same guy. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Maybe a Bleach fan would get a lot more out of this album, but for me, the so-so musical aspect combined with complete lack of familiarity or interest in the theme made this a very hard album to get through, and after a few subsequent attempts it didn’t get any better.

However, I do look forward to checking out what Maja does next. I think if he were to create a more personal musical project, it would result in a very interesting and engaging album. As a whole, Bleach’d Out was not for me.

Maja – Shinigami
Maja – Hip Hop Daikou

Maja on ReverbNation

In all honesty, I was not expecting to like The Free Estate, but Karl Olson, aka Ultraklystron’s difficult-to-categorize new release turned me right around.  Before I knew it I had his sharp rhymes and clever hooks bouncing around in my head at all hours, unable to be exorcised without touring the tracks a few more times back-to-back.

My expectation has to do with Ultraklystron’s rep for anime and manga fandom.  While I was a rabid fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion when I was younger, that’s the only anime* I could ever claim to be a fan of, and as for Manga, well, I feel that the best work was done a long time ago.  So I don’t expect to catch any of the references, and I expect the music to be as …how to put this gently… juvenile (whoops, that didn’t work) as those influences.

*Anything Hayao Miyazaki does transcends its medium and any genre-boxing to become simply wonderful storytelling.

But either I was mistaken in my impressions, or I’m losing my perspective as an outsider of this music scene, or this release was a departure from previous efforts, as it rests so lightly on any of those undesirable influences that they are easily digested.  Indeed happily digested, as this is one of those nerdcore releases that strikes me as having strong cross-over potential.  With great production, smooth performance, and engaging material, this has everything and more that you could expect out of a good pop album.

I challenge you to avoid nodding and grinning along to the refrain of Webcam Girls or Greatest, or if you go ahead and download the full, free release, empathizing with him in Not A Criminal and Dumb Crush.  I expect that, like me, you’ll wonder how it went by so fast when the whole album has finished playing, and that’s because (and this is the best part) this free version of The Free Estate is a subset of the tracks from the full release.  Kudos to Karl for embracing the new methods of getting your music noticed.  I’ll be the first in line when the digital retail release is ready!

Ultraklystron – Webcam Girls
Ultraklystron – Greatest

Karl Olsen’s Website, The Free Estate on Rapidshare, Buy Ultraklystron Music

So there I was, in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, with snacks in my bag, a loose agenda, and swarms of fellow gamers threading around me as I wandered like one of those empty-faced people you see wandering the malls on Christmas Eve, clutching their hardscrabble gifts and wearing defeat like a shroud.  (OK that was me too.)  What to do first?  Where do I go?  What if I miss something?

As it happened, the weekend was a blast and while I feel I missed a lot, it only seems to underscore what a massive and awesome thing the Penny Arcade Expo really is.  And there’s no avoiding it, no one could see and do it all, but all that means is you will always find something fun, interesting, or exciting to do, every minute of every hour the convention is open.  I ended up eschewing the tabletop gaming (RPGs, CCGs, board games, and who knows what else) completely in favor of the expo floor and a few sessions.  And while I was well and truly tapped out by the time the concerts were up Saturday night, I did make it to Friday’s, which was the one I’d marked as Must Not Miss.  The expo hall was extraordinary.  I found myself crossing the floor in a straight line, wandering booths and shoulder surfing the people playing demos along the way, but when I’d look back after making it to the other side, I’d see at least as many things that I’d missed along the way as I’d noticed!

By and large, even the games I wasn’t terribly interested in had engaging and fun booth presence, but I have to point out how disappointed I was with the Blizzard booth.  I went by both Saturday and Sunday and both times it was the same thing: people silently playing Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 with intensity, people playing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm with scarce interest (there were no ready-made characters that I saw, so it was just the starter towns and level 1 abilities for both Worgen and Goblin characters), and, what I found very puzzling, the booth attendants just sat behind a bare counter talking with each other and looking vaguely annoyed by everything going on around them.  Maybe they felt they didn’t have to try, just coming from BlizzCon and all, but for someone who was extremely excited about all of their upcoming offerings, this was a major buzzkill.

A company that really managed to get it right was Take 2.  They had a great setup in their corner of the hall, with a set designed to look like a bar out of the upcoming Mafia 2, a viewing room for the Bioshock 2 demo (which I unfortunately did not get a chance to see) and a wicked open set for the Borderlands play demo area, which they timed and regulated with relentless precision.  I came to appreciate that regimentation when I got my turn and realized I could play Borderlands until my legs gave out (granted, not a long time given it was the end of Saturday).  Not only is it a very attractive game with a striking visual style, but it’s a very natural game to just pick up and run with.  And that’s coming from someone who has scarcely held an Xbox 360 controller before.  That team should be proud of themselves; their game is going to do very well.

I’m still a little confused by the release of Dungeons & Dragons Online Unlimited, but they had a fun booth and I actually attempted to install the game when I got home.  The installer had trouble with some Microsoft DLL dependencies under Wine, and I couldn’t muster the interest to resolve it.  So that’s that.  On the flipside, I was delighted to come upon the Serious Sam HD display and demo.  The first Serious Sam is a gem and while it had a great graphics engine for its day (mostly due to lighting) it unfortunately did not age well.  This re-release with upgraded graphics looks fantastic and I’m going to enjoy hopping on some co-op servers to plow through the waves of monsters with other gamers again.  You can see some comparisons here.

I was surprised and hooked by another game I hadn’t previously heard of, Fallen Earth, which is a sort of Mad Max scavenge-the-wasteland dystopian MMO, that has a sandbox design to it much like the more innovative notions that made Star Wars Galaxies such an inappropriate vehicle for its license.  I am so looking forward to playing this game (it was released last week) that I may pay full price even though it might not run in WINE and I’ll be forced to boot Windows to play.  Killer ideas.  If I designed my own MMO, it would have been very, very similar to what I see in Fallen Earth.  I queried someone at the EVE booth, and someone at the Pirate of the Burning Sea booth, and of course another at the DDO:Unlimited booth (of the three, I haven’t played only PotBS) and none of them felt or were able to communicate that their game would satisfy my needs in an MMO, continuous solo play, exploration, advancement without the grind, except for Fallen Earth.

One of the few scheduled events I decided to attend was the Star Wars: The Old Republic demo, and I left very happy with that decision.  Not only were all of the attendees treated to the first Knights of the Old Republic via Steam (coinciding with its debut there) but we were treated to an awesome play demonstration and the cinematic demo on the big screens.  When playing through KotOR on my old Xbox, I could not stop thinking about how this should have been the Star Wars MMO (I was long ago disappointed by Galaxies).  Seeing the confirmation that it was not only going to happen, but that it was going to be very, very, fun, was electrifying.  I’m looking forward to this game in a huge way.

I should also mention the Ubisoft presentation, which took place in the same hall and featured the new Splinter Cell: Conviction and Assassin’s Creed 2.  I love the direction they took with Splinter Cell.  I love the Thief series and playing stealthy where games allow it, so hearing about how they rethought stealth play and how to make it more engaging and fun was extremely interesting and definitely stirred my interest in a series that I’d discarded mid-way through the first title.  Likewise, I wasn’t all that interested in the news of Assassin’s Creed 2 previously (I still haven’t made it very far through the first one) they appear to have constructed a worthy sequel, with an interesting and beautiful setting and that special sort of gameplay that made the first stand apart from others in its class.

Among my favorite memories of the weekend are those involving the friend of all gamers, Wil Wheaton.  Each of the scheduled events I attended required an hour-long wait in line, and so too did shaking Wil’s hand and telling him he’s just an awesome guy.  While there I bought his chapbook, and I have to tell you all that when he releases fiction, do not miss it.  He is just as engaging and entertaining in this medium as in his non-fiction and blogging.  I also, fanboy that I must be, waited in line for an hour and a half to see him speak on Sunday for an hour (and a half, thanks, Wil!) and that turned out to be my entire PAX attendance for Sunday.  Three hours, all for Wil.  Yes, he really is that awesome.

Now, this is normally a music blog, though I do intend the occasional foray into gaming, so I’d be nuts not to include anything about Friday night’s concert, right?  Anamanaguchi was fun (I wasn’t expecting that) but I wasn’t particularly enthralled.  Chiptunes isn’t for everyone.  Metroid Metal, however, definitely impressed me and I’m looking forward to picking up their new album (which was released that weekend) Varia Suite.  But of course, the headliner MC Frontalot was the real reason I attended.

I hazily (read: dimmed by rum) recall meeting the Front at Nerdapalooza and seeing him perform a bit later.  So it was good to see him this time while sober and take in the whole thing.  I’m glad I did because the first thing that happened was Wil Wheaton stepping out from the curtain to play some fake plastic rock (Rock Band?  Guitar Hero? I wouldn’t know.) when the Front’s band-mates looked confused about the lack of said Front.  This was only a brief intro as Frontalot quickly took the stage and delivered his performance.  Joined at varying points by Beefy, Paul and Storm, Jonathan Coulton, and Rai Kamishiro, it was an epic trip through the Front’s catalog and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

All told it was way more than I was expecting or conditioned to handle.  I think next year I may need to train ahead of time with some kind of nerd version of the Ninja Warrior contestant’s home rigs they mock up to train for the course.  PAX was completely overwhelming and I came away full to bursting with appreciation for what Mike, Jerry, and their crew have put together.  PAX ‘10 here I come!  (…Or, dare I say it, PAX East ‘09?)

Is it possible for me to describe how I feel about The Protomen’s long-awaited release, Act II?  I’m going to try.  Forgive me if it gets muddled, but that’s just the state of things here.

Before I awkwardly stumble about the page with haphazard and confused words about this album, let’s just take a good look at the cover art, OK?  It’s brilliant, isn’t it?  The whole noir aspect, the early vs. late 20th Century cities, bridged by Dr. Light and Emily.  Is that Wiley on the screen?  And who is that watching from the ledge?  Brilliant work.  Few album covers are as interesting these days.

Now the music, well, the music is hard to pin down.  It reflects the same division of culture depicted on the cover, varying between acoustic thrumming when describing the world Light grew up in, and heavy synthesizers and electric guitars when the setting shifts to the hyper-industrialized world where Light becomes a pariah and fugitive.

To be honest, I’m a little disappointed with the direction they took musically.  I was greatly excited by their Father of Death single, expecting it to be more representative of the whole upcoming release.  I admire their dedication to concept and think they did a fantastic job of executing on their ideas, but I should have heeded the warning that was their cover of “Danger Zone” when I saw them at Nerdapalooza this summer.  Half of this album is, unfortunately, just not for me.

On the other hand, I’m still dreadfully starved for more details of their story.  I think the mythology they’ve constructed around the thin skeleton of the MegaMan games is awesome and exceptional.

And if there’s any way you can make it to a live Protomen show, I highly recommend it.  They were great at Nerdapalooza and I still have some slim hope of attending their Act II CD release show in Nashville on the 25th.  If it’s even half as epic as they describe, missing this show will be a dreadful mistake.

The Protomen – The Good Doctor
The Protomen – Breaking Out
The Protomen – Here Comes The Arm

Official Site (includes links to buy)

NerdLust.net is going to PAX!  While I’m missing most of the first day (grumble, grumble) I’ll be there this evening and throughout the rest of the weekend.  So, say “hi!” if you see this guy:

See you there!

I have to appreciate the honesty in naming this release.  The accuracy of “Good Enough – Collabs and B-Sides” comes through in the inconsistent quality of the release.  But don’t take that as a condemnation of the entire work; there are some note-worthy moments balancing out the skip-worthy ones.

My only strong complaint about this release is how far it goes into modern rap territories of violence and misogyny.  I understand these are character portrayals, but I still find it unpleasant and fail to find the humor in it that others do.

Basically it’s just the b-sides that wont be making my next pressed album, I actually asked the producers who contributed for throwaway beats to make this one.

Fair enough.  With that sort of expectation in place, even the occasional so-so production and sometimes “meh” lyrics in this teaser release, it can still be considered overall “good enough”.

Epic-1 – Lvl 99

Epic-1 on EMPulse Records, Epic-1 on MySpace, Good Enough: MP3, FLAC