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live review: volifonix, excellent gentlemen, & just people – doug fir – 8/11/11

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You guys. I haven’t seen a live show in months. Months! I will be the first to admit that I have been No Fun and sometimes a Party Pooper. I’m not sure what got me into that rut, besides awesome video games. Seriously, Fallout: New Vegas has taken away a lot of my time. Plus I was kind of broke, from buying so many video games. While I do occasionally feel slightly bad for not leaving my computer chair some days, I really don’t regret buying video games or playing them with joy. I love video games. But that’s a blog post for another day.

My girlfriend’s cousin Peter is in a band called Just People, and he was arguably somewhat instrumental1 in getting her to stay in Eugene, OR, rather than flying off to Hawaii and never being heard from again. Peter is about to move up to Portland, and the rest of the band is already here, so whenever they play a Portland venue, we go, because they’re genuinely a good band, and Peter is an excellent guitar player, and their shows are always fun and lively.

Last night we made the trek to the Doug Fir to see these three bands play. I hadn’t been to the Doug Fir in a long time. Their burgers are still delicious. Their bartenders still take forever to acknowledge your existence. That mannequin in the window still freaks me out.
The venue wasn’t especially packed the entire night, which is a shame because Portland, for god’s sake, you need to go and enjoy this kind of music. No more Horse Feathers. No more twangy jangly Appalachian music. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of going to see a show and getting four dudes with huge beards, and one woman playing quarter notes on a violin, like before the show they gave her a goddamn lobotomy or something. It’s ridiculous. It’s time to embrace the funk. It’s time to, as Technotronic said back in 1989, “pump up the jam.” And thankfully, that’s what happened last night.

First band up was Volifonix, a quintet from Eugene playing a jambandesque funk mix that was immediately enjoyable. The lead singer reminded me of a jammier version of Electric Six (minus the humor). They also had elements of early Living Colour in their sound, which is always a plus in my book. Also their bass player, Elijah, was pretty knocked out, but really, he kind of has to be, considering that genre of music demands a strong rhythm section.

Anyway, they blasted through a great set, really set the bar high for the entertainment for the night. The highlight, of course, was when their saxophone player, Tomo Tsurumi, hailing from Japan, performed some awesome Japanese rap over a song called, I believe, “Wow Wow Wow Wow.” A woman I can only assume was his mother was in the audience, dressed, for reals, in what looked like a traditional Japanese kimono, and just looking happy as a god damn clam watching her son take the stage. I loved it. I lover her maybe more than the song itself, to be honest. It was sentimental, okay? So Tomo, thank you for that, and kanpai!

After Volifonix was my unexpected highlight for the show: Excellent Gentlemen. I must admit, up front, that I am a huge Stevie Wonder fan, as well as all the funk music I’ve gotten my grubby paws onto. So when Excellent Gentlemen began playing (I had no idea what I was about to listen to), I was blown away. They wear their influences on their sleeve – Stevie, of course, and some modern day Cee Lo as well2, and generally any funk band that uses a talk box (Roger Troutman, for example). They blew the roof off the place, to be honest. They were tight, they were confident, and their music was perfectly composed and excellently performed. And their drummer looked like he was a line cook at a restaurant. I just have to say that. Kind of off topic, I know, but never before have I seen anyone, much less a drummer for a band, and immediately thought, “That guy looks like a line cook!” I don’t know. It was the black baseball cap coupled with his shirt. He looked like a line cook! It was uncanny.

I would like to go off on a tangent for a bit. If you haven’t signed up for Spotify yet, please do so. It’s amazing, and even more importantly, you can listen to all the bands from this review there! It’s a hell of a lot easier to do this than to try and find their music to steal online. Look, I’ve stolen a lot of music online in my day, and that’s because there was no outlet to listen to music before I bought it. Spotify solves this. You can listen to an album and not feel too bad because there are some ads (or you pay a fee to remove the ads) and at least the band gets some of the profit. Not a lot, I know, but some.

Obviously, the best way to support a band is to see them live, and/or buy their merch, especially if their merch is self-released. The more money that goes straight to the artist, the better, I say. But at least with Spotify, you’re not outright stealing music from the internets. The internets is bringing you music! It’s saying, “Hey, here’s some music for you to listen to. Yeah, there’s some ads, and yeah, they are some of the most annoying ads you’ll ever hear, with some of the worst music you’ve ever heard, but at least you’re not a dirty thief, right?”

Alright, back to the topic at hand. Just People! I’ve seen them play a couple of times now and they always impress me. They’ve got a great following and really lively, engaging jamband music, without being too jambandy. You know what I’m talking about. I’m not a huge fan of the jamband scene, so I get leery at listening to those kinds of bands, especially ones I’ve never heard of before, but JP puts on a great show, and they defy the jamband stereotype by having strong lyrics and tight songs. Very upbeat and powerful. I was worried that, after the awesome performance from Excellent Gentlemen, maybe they wouldn’t be able to compete, but they did, and then some. Not that music is a competition, except maybe a friendly competition, wherein all candidates try to out-funk each other3.

And that was it! A really stellar night. This company called AudioGlobe was streaming the show for free on their website, and making copies of the show for people who wanted to pay five bucks. So I now have a live set of Excellent Gentlemen from that night. Pretty sweet!

  1. Is that a pun? Oh lord. ↩
  2. Of course, Cee Lo wears his influences on his sleeve as well… ↩
  3. Don’t confuse this with the hipster version of “out-funking,” which is when they compete to see who smells the worst. ↩

a bit on amnesia: the dark descent

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Okay, I’ve been wanting to write about this game for some time, because I played it, in like fifteen minute increments, for the month of May and I finally finished it and I wanted to talk about it. Because it’s scary as all hell, but also, it’s not?

LOOK PEOPLE THERE ARE SPOILERS, OKAY?

Maybe you’re one of those people who are never going to play this game ever. If that’s so, please, continue reading.

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review of the sims 3 mobile

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the bane of my existence

Every month I grab a new game for my Samsung phone from T-Mobile. My phone isn’t flashy, and it doesn’t have a keyboard or anything, but it’s a good little phone and it plays lots of decent games, which I like1.  So when I was browsing the game list and I saw that they had a mobile version of The Sims 3, I was intrigued.  It had a good rating and lots of people had downloaded it. On the other hand, it was the Sims.  I haven’t really played the Sims that much, but I worried about what it was all about and if I’d enjoy it.

(Brief tangent: I also downloaded Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for my phone. I thought it would be awesome. Instead, it runs horribly slow. Sonic should not run horribly slow.  I also downloaded Mega Man III, which has clunky control problems. So much for porting console games to the phone. [However, I also have Final Fantasy, and it was great.])

Eventually I caved in and downloaded it, and honestly, it’s a pretty decent game. Except for one glaring thing that I hate so much it makes me not want to play it anymore. Most everything is great, because it’s stripped down and works well for a phone user like myself, who usually only plays games on the bus to and from work. You get a job, you maintain your Sim’s hunger levels and stuff, you talk to your neighbors and try desperately to make them like you, and you go fishing. Pretty routine.

But then there are the “mini-games.” I put quotes around them because they’re not games, because torture is not a game.  Let me explain: there are five mini-games; fishing, cleaning, repairing, gardening, and cooking. These games are all horribly imbalanced, both in the individual games themselves and in relation to the other games. For example, let’s talk about the repairing game, which is the most frustrating thing I’ve had to experience on my phone so far. It works like this: When you begin, there are three wires on one side of the screen, and your pliers and what looks like the end of a wire attached to it on the other end.  As the game starts, blue “sparks” travel down one of the wires on the left. Your job is to make some kind of “antispark” from your wire by touching it to the wire where the blue spark is coming from.  Forgetting the inherent impossibility of what you’re trying to do from a scientific standpoint, this sounds easy, right?  Well, when you start the game, it IS easy — but as you continue fixing things2, the difficulty gets harder. At one point you pass a milestone where it is assumed you know how these things work, and suddenly there’s four wires instead of three. The wire on the bottom, the new one, has the shortest length to it, so it becomes a matter of How Quickly Can You Get Your Wire Down to That Wire, which, as I have found many times lately, it Not Quickly Enough.  So as I am supposed to be getting better at repairing my appliances — because, you know, I keep repairing them — it’s actually becoming harder to repair them, so I get worse at it.  This is ridiculous.  It’s like the most ridiculous.  It’s bad game dynamics. In the end I just sold my fridge and now I go down to the bistro and buy food there.  Fuck you, repairing game.

The other games aren’t nearly as hard.  Gardening is by far the easiest — you just plant things and then gather them up, and it keeps giving you points for that.  There’s actually no mini-game to it.  Cooking involves keeping the temperatures of two boiling pots from getting too high without getting them too low, a neat little game except it doesn’t make sense when I’m making cheese on toast, unless I’m making cheese on toast stew.  Cleaning is just a matter of wiping up green gunky bits off of a linoleum looking screen.  It’s getting pretty hard too, though, because my cloth that I move around with the keypad moves on its own, bobbing up and down like I just caught a severe case of Parkinsons.  So while I’m trying to wipe up green gunk it keeps leading me AWAY from the gunk.  When does this happen?!  When, after wiping gunk from my toilet, my shower, my sink, and my stove countless times, and the game telling me I am getting better at it, when does it get worse?!

Part of the problem is my phone, which runs these games a little slowly.  But really, I don’t want to spend my time cleaning up gunk and repairing things.  Nobody asks why the Sims don’t have to pay rent for their houses, so why should cleaning up your toilet be an issue?  And real life dictates that the more you do something, the better you get at it, so why is this not the case for Sims?  Are they just stupid?  Why the hell would an extra wire pop out of nowhere after I’ve been fixing this damn fridge for weeks now?!  Why does everything break?  Why, when I ask the girl I invite over to my house to move in, does she get creeped out? I’ve been flirting with her nonstop for weeks.  I go to her house and eat food from her fridge because mine keeps breaking.  One time she peed in my toilet while I was washing my hands.  It’s obvious we’re meant for each other.  I figure the only way I can date her is to get her to move in.

Um, anyway.  The Sims was fun until the mini-games got frustratingly hard, so now I don’t play it as much anymore.  But if you need something fun to do while you’re on the bus, I think it’s worth the price.

  1. Let’s not talk about how, out of all the games I have on my phone, the one I play the most is Solitaire. ↩
  2. I should also say that your appliances in this game break CONSTANTLY. Whoever’s in charge of the construction of these appliances should be fired. ↩

a few words on the new weezer album

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I’m not the type of person who writes reviews about albums.  I’m not the kind of guy who finds a ton of meaning in particular albums.  I do, however, find myself attached to particular albums because those albums are just really good.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of those albums; it’s not like I attribute some long-lost symbolism to the album, or its Anne Frank and strange twin imagery.  It’s not like I first listened to it in an opium den with my closest friends, and let its melodies and Mangum’s voice break new ground in my cerebellum.  I just like it.  It sounds good, it sounds put together.

Such is the case with Weezer’s first two albums.  The Blue Album is an anthem to nerds everywhere.  That’s just it.  Lots of people around my age love that album, but some of us identify with it.  Pinkerton is even more of that kind of vibe, an anthem of frustrated and sometimes unrequited love.  It’s a theme that a lot of people, men and women, identify with.  It’s why most people prefer Pinkerton to Blue.

I, like many people, first found Weezer through the “Buddy Holly” music video, which was brilliantly placed on the Windows 95 CD.  It couldn’t be any more perfect — me, and countless millions of other nerds, were delving into the CD, this new format which holds music and data — pouring through file folders, and we all found the hidden cache of videos and demos.  And that was it.  Buddy Holly was ours.  (It arguably is one the greatest songs of the 20th century.)

And like many other people, I found myself a bit obsessed with the band.  After they began to play in 2000, I started downloading tracks from their summer demos, and eagerly awaited their “comeback” with the Green Album.

When it arrived, it was quick, but it was good.  It wasn’t Blue or Pink good, but it was good.  It still contained that Weezeresque identity, and a lot of fans who were following the demos knew the songs from there.  Which was a lot of fun.

But, this was also the beginning of the “We want another Blue/Pink” syndrome, in which fans longed to hear an album from Rivers that contained the same fervor, the same frustration, the same … something, that powered Weezer’s first two albums.

Now we’re on, what, album seven? Eight? And it’s called “Hurley.”  And it has a picture of Jorge Garcia (aka Hurley from LOST) on the cover.

The point, I think, is that Rivers doesn’t give a shit what his fans want.  He just wants to have fun.  And a new gaggle of kids are latching onto that.  The rest of us, the old fans, are angry, but who cares?  We’re starting to be angry at all kinds of hipster bullshit things1.

The past few albums have had a lot of terrible songs on them2.  But there are some genuine good songs there as well.  And this album has an edge to it that I haven’t heard in a long time.  There seems to be a power to Rivers’s voice that wasn’t there before.  I suspect a switch to Epitaph is the reason behind this.  But regardless, it’s not a great album, but it’s not a bad album either.  Like, I might listen to this one all the way through.  More than once.

It seems that as Rivers gets older, he just doesn’t feel like writing sad songs anymore.  Any why should he?  It’s not like he’s having a bad time with his life right now.  So he writes this power pop stuff and some of it is awful, but some of it’s not bad either.

So far the best stuff I’ve heard from Rivers recently were the B-sides to the Red Album.  It’s the closest to that 2000-era level of songwriting (especially “Turn Me Round).  Nothing will touch Blue or Pink.  I think Rivers knows that, which is why he’s just enjoying himself.

Unfortunately, when he enjoys himself, his music’s not that great.

Still, I follow Weezer and steal all their albums, because they’re fun to listen to sometimes.  One of these days I’ll compile a “Top 10 Tracks Beyond Green” blog, because their first two albums were only 10 tracks, and it would be fitting to find the best of the rest, if you know what I mean.

I feel like I rambled a bit here.  My point is that I like Hurley, even if it sounds like some kind of All-American Rejects bullshit occasionally.

  1. For example: I realized the other day that I really hate the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  I can’t stand them, and I hate the singer’s hair.  There.  I said it. ↩
  2. Can’t Stop Partying?  Love is the Answer?  Heart Songs?  Etc etc ↩

live review: 11/29 – loch lomond and the decemberists!, crystal ballroom

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colin talkin' to some girls

colin talkin to some girls

I’m not shy about my love of the Decemberists.  At one point I owned five of their t-shirts and an assortment of CDs and vinyls (some of which were all but stolen by my ex-girlfriend), and I can play almost all of their discography on guitar, and know most of the lyrics by heart.  So when the time came for them to play the Crystal Ballroom, I was excited.  Like, little girl excited.  Little girl watching the end of American Idol excited.

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