Review: David Reinfurt's "A *New* Program for Graphic Design"

A *New* Program for Graphic Design is a book in three parts, based on author David Reinfurt’s eight years of teaching at Princeton University. “One semester-long course was compressed and presented [over three days] as six 45-minute lectures.” Those lectures were recorded, and in turn, became this book. A *New* Program for Graphic Design does not prescribe a way to do graphic design; rather, it gives the reader an abbreviated history, and allows them to take from this history tools and ideas they can put into use in their own design practice.

I am a self-taught designer. I do not have any formal training, aside from one semester of game development in community college, and as a result, my approach to design in the past was a sort of art-first approach. An idea comes to mind and I try to execute on that idea as well as my skills allow. This was true in both graphic design - creating album art, show posters, and band logos - as well as in my game design. This first began to change when I read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. That book had a lot of lessons for me, but the biggest was that design is as much about research as it is about making. 

In A *New* Program for Graphic Design, David Reinfurt begins with typography. From Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century moveable-type, to the printing presses of Benjamin Franklin, to Beatrice Ward’s work at Monotype, we’re given a both chronological and winding history of type. The advent of reproducible prints sits side-by-side with the psychology of writing. Franklin’s work at New England’s newspapers is paired with a discussion of the power of the written word (and an anecdote about Franklin’s use of humor writing to drive a competitor into so much debt he flees the country). Eventually we get closer to the present, with the work of Bruno Munari, Muriel Cooper, the end of the printing press and the advent of desktop publishing as we now know it. 

It’s in the section about Muriel Cooper that the book really takes off for me. Reading about Cooper’s approach to design, creating a hands-on, process-oriented laboratory of production techniques, was a reminder of those things I had begun to internalize from The Design of Everyday Things. Rather than thinking of design as strictly making a piece of artwork, it leads me to think again of it as a journey and process. Design becomes a loop of learning and doing and learning from doing - find a question, explore the question’s bounds, see how other people have answered the question in the past, find new potential answers for the question.

The next section of the book, “G-E-S-T-A-L-T,” continues the informal style of the first section, this time giving a history of the meeting of design and psychology. Beginning with an excerpt from Max Wertheimer’s “Investigations in Gestalt Principles,” we dive into why people perceive things the way we do. Why does flashing slightly different images one after the other convince our brain that these still images are moving? Why does our brain look at two lines of the same length and convince itself that one is longer than the other? Gestalt, in this context, tells us that it’s not the parts but the whole of the experience is what the designer should orient themselves to. The book provides examples of Gestalt in design from Max Bill, Rudolf Arnheim, Dondis A. Dondis, George Corrin, and the recurring designers Bruno Munari and Susan Kare.

The final section, “I-N-T-E-R-F-A-C-E,” deals with human interaction design. This section has several of my favorite stories in the book. One of them, the story of the Olivetti typewriter. The creator of this typewriter, Camillo Olivetti, is described as feeling a strong responsibility to the area in which a business operates, and wanted to make a machine that felt more human to use. The book describes his factory as being built expressly to make the workers more comfortable, with large windows facing the Alps. His son, Adriano, was convinced that machines and humans were at odds, and only through design could their relationship be reconciled. The photographs of the machines, with their shells designed by artists, are beautiful, and the ethos professes the need for designers to be thinking of the societal impact of the work they do. Design, the book argues, should not just be oriented towards commercial success, but towards societal good.

Tetracono animated 480p from Dexter Sinister on Vimeo.

Two stories in the final section really reinforce how important research is as the first step of the design process. In the story of the Tetracono, the author talks about his process hunting down, photographing and researching the object, detailing its history and how it fit in with the work Munari was doing with Danese Milano, a company that was concerned with selling art objects as much as they were with home goods.

In another story, the author details his work on the user interface for the Metrocard vending machine that would replace tokens in the New York Subway. Reinfurt shows how you start with a design question (how do we make buying Metrocard credits as fast and intuitive as buying tokens) and through research, testing, redesigning, and retesting, you can end up with something that has endured for 20 years.

To me, research is easily the most important concept the book touches on over and over, the thing that ties all design practice together. For any designer who is, like me, without any formal design training, A *New* Program for Graphic Design functions as a fantastic survey of design’s history, and what goes into great design. The next time I’m working on a project I know I’ll be thinking about this book and its lessons before I rush pen to paper.

A *New* Program for Graphic Design is written by David Reinfurt and published by Inventory Press and Distributed Art Publishers. You can buy it directly from the publisher, or whichever local independent bookstore near you sells books about design.

Review: Language Lessons

Language Lessons is a film about friendship and the kindness of strangers when you need them most. It’s a story about grief, and how it can sometimes be embarrassing, or mean, or make you feel like everything is suddenly out of place.

The movie begins with Cariño, played by Natalie Morales, who is also the co-writer and director, appearing on a video call screen, waiting for her student to arrive. She says hello to an empty, but large, living room. From the furthest point on the frame, which we discover is the bedroom, Adam, played by Mark Duplas, emerges. Confused, he asks “Why are you in my house?” She lets him know that his husband, who is off screen, has paid for 100 Spanish language lessons and that they are to meet every week. They immediately begin to speak in a kind of stuttered, mostly-right Spanish, thanks to Adam’s conversational Spanish classes in high school. But he says his morning routine is important to him, so they move to the pool, where he plunges back and forth from the cold water side to the hot tub. They begin to speak; they get to know each other. 

Two people find themselves in a peculiar situation, and then they talk a lot about interesting things. This is the Duplass Brothers way. In Creep, someone responds to a weird ad to hang out with a weird guy, then they talk a lot until conflict happens; in Blue Jay, two old lovers bump into each other in the grocery store of their hometown, then they talk a lot until conflict happens; and in Paddleton, the last movie I saw by Mark Duplass, two neighbors connect, they talk a lot, then something very sad happens for a long time. So I was primed, in a way, when things turned in Language Lessons.

The film is divided into titled lessons where the Spanish language word and pronunciation are set opposite the English word. In the second lesson, which is titled “Comprensión/Comprehension,” Cariño is having a hard time reaching Adam. She calls but he doesn’t answer. She leaves a voicemail. She calls again and he answers this time, but is extremely despondent. In bed, in a dark room, he looks like he’s been through an emotional hell - because he has. His husband has died the night before in a sudden vehicle accident, which he tells Cariño as part of their conversational “lesson.” The playful, strange situation of the first lesson is suddenly behind us. It’s dark and the world is real.

Language Lessons is beautifully acted. Natalie Morales, who co-wrote the movie with Mark, is incredible. Cariño is caring and reserved. She’s embarrassed by some of the situations she finds herself in, but she’s also defensive when Adam tries to help. Making a movie over video calls is challenging. The emotions are hard to portray, the timing is weird. Glitches in the video and audio were left in the film intentionally. But Morales’ performance easily cuts through. There is a scene in the middle of the movie where Cariño calls Adam drunk, at 2:30 in the morning his time. She’s just found out it’s his birthday thanks to some light internet stalking, so she wants to call and sing him happy birthday in Spanish, as a lesson. She’s jubilant in a way we haven’t really seen her in the film. She’s drunk, obviously. But she’s funny and assertive. She’s willing to open up to Adam about her life.

Then, the next day, she dodges Adam’s call. She’s embarrassed. We see her rehearse several video messages to send to him. She tries to tell him she can’t continue their lessons. Something personal has come up and she has to postpone, or maybe refund. But we don’t see the one she sends. He returns voicemails, but there’s no response from Cariño, which puts him at a loss because he thought they were finally able to say the things they wanted to say to each other about friendship.

What Natalie Morales brings to the film as a director is more than her own character depth. The film is expertly paced. From platonic rom-com, to heavy drama, the film flies by effortlessly at one hour and thirty minutes. Plan B, which was her directorial debut, felt very similar despite being much more of a buddy comedy. Although she did not write Plan B, I find it interesting that both films revolve around a platonic, but still almost romantic relationship between two friends. While this may be entirely coincidental, the ability to navigate emotionally deep, authentic friendships can be difficult, especially when there are so many tropes around it in media history, but in both films Morales nails it. 

Often media made during the COVID-19 pandemic feels too close or too soon to me, as if I have not accurately prepared myself to be mirrored by the creators I love. Going into Language Lessons, I was nervous about having to see people talk only through video call. But by the end of the film, I was so taken by the performances and the writing that I stopped paying attention to how the film was presented because the story was so strong. The characters were so realized and pure that it didn’t matter how or where or when they were presented. There is no romantic story at the heart of Language Lesson, only the love of new friendship, and that makes it more unique than the format.

Language Lessons is available for rent or purchase on VOD services.

Review: Knocked Loose "A Tear In The Fabric Of Life"

A Tear In The Fabric Of Life is the latest release from Knocked Loose, a hardcore band from northern Kentucky. What started as an attempt to create something less personal and more artistic ended up a vehicle to work through feelings of grief and self-doubt. A fictional narrative is woven through the six tracks of the EP, not just through the lyrics but also through the musical choices the band makes. 

The first track, “Where Light Divides The Holler,” begins the story of a car accident, one that kills the narrator’s partner, leaving them soaking on the side of the ride, alone. The song begins with a car starting, a radio, then, a collision of guitars, drums, and screaming breaks through. As the narrator crawls from the river, so does the music - the rhythm slows to a half-time breakdown, again mimicking the narrative moment.

In a genre not known for subtlety, Knocked Loose uses the brutality of their sound to a really fantastic effect. As the narrator is “crushed by the weight of terror,” the listener is subjected to equally crushing, drop tuned guitars, palm-muted and grinding away. In the later songs, as the narrative becomes more about the grief, confusion, and pain of the narrator, these feelings are really effectively conveyed within the conventions of the genre. For the melodies in “Forced To Stay,” the band uses a guitar tone that wouldn’t be out of place for a band like The Deftones; this tone really helps bring the grief of a burial to the forefront. “Contorted in the Faille” utilizes a common-in-the-genre sort of circular riff to mimic confusion and a self-destructive inebriation. I can’t think of another hardcore album that is constructed in this way, and I think it speaks to the more art-focused approach to the release.

Setting aside the artistic choices Knocked Loose made to communicate the narrative of the EP, A Tear in The Fabric Of Life is, for lack of a better phrase, fully sick. The pacing of the tracks is excellent - the band knows when to pick up the speed and when to drop into brutal half- and quarter-time breakdowns. Front to back, the tone of the guitars is fantastic; whether it’s drop tuned, palm muted grinding riffs, or dissonant harmonic picking, everything feels balanced to create as brutal and clear a sound as possible. Nothing gets lost in the ordered chaos of the riffs. I can’t listen to the EP without getting out of my chair and picking up some nickels, wearing a face like I just smelled the most foul scent of my life.

A Tear In The Fabric Of Life is out now, available from Pure Noise or through Bandcamp.

Review: Sally Rooney's "Beautiful World Where Are You?"

Sally Rooney is a novelist I found through the Hulu adaptation of her book Normal People. The dour, smart, university-age protagonists swept me into a world of romance, sexuality, and conversations with friends at parties held in what can only be described as the most beautiful Irish apartments and countryside houses - all of which had been pretty well hampered by the beginning of what would be a still ongoing global pandemic. I tried to listen to her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, through the library’s audiobook system, but I wasn’t ready. The characters were too close to those in Normal People. This was not a problem that actually existed between the two novels, which were released a year apart, but something that had to do with my own reading habits, which would take almost a year to return to normal.

When Beautiful World, Where Are You? was announced, I quickly pre-ordered it without checking what I would be in store for many months later. The cover design, which is a wonderful light blue with swipes of yellow images and black lettering, was enough. When it arrived, I was bouncing between books I didn’t really enjoy my time with. Most of my pandemic reading had been spent diving into the large omnibuses of Goodnight Punpun and Planetes - something that would slowly propel me back into novels and my love for reading prose. I was ready for the drama and awkward realities of modern people. I was ready for Sally Rooney.

Beautiful World, Rooney’s third novel, advances the age of it’s protagonists to around thirty, which is something I was not expecting and became a little frightening. People my age, I thought, smart and out in the world at parties, having sex, meeting each other. Written over many years, the novel takes on the lurid isolation of a small town cast. Even in Dublin, where half the characters spend the majority of the novel, the scenes are set inside of apartments or at the tail ends of small gatherings; or on the bus home, stopping suddenly to visit someone who comforts them (even if it might be a little awkward and weird); or visiting with a new friend’s roommates and meeting their dog. These are the kinds of scenes on which Rooney sets her cast. 

Structured as a mixed epistolary novel - letters between the two main protagonists Alice and Eileen, which are then interspersed with sections of third-person prose - Beautiful World tells the story of two relationships. Alice, who is a famous author, has moved away to the countryside in Ireland after a psychiatric episode (caused in part by her new found fame). After deciding to meet someone new in town through Tinder, she begins an awkward and, at times, argumentative relationship with a handsome, often troubled warehouse worker named Felix. Eileen, who roomed with Alice in University and remains a close friend, tires of her mundane job at a literary magazine in Dublin and begins to spiral back into the arms of a childhood crush, Simon, who she has been on-again-off-again with for most of her life. 

There is a sense, at times, which is close to how I often feel, that the characters are almost upset to have to know and repeat the things people approaching “adulthood” are want to talk about: the climate, generational progress, the standards of beauty and love and culture all around them. An element of fantasy comes through in the way Alice and Eileen exchange multi-page emails about Christianity and the history of the written word. And yet (even though I’ve never sent an email longer than a few paragraphs, let alone pages), their emails are exciting to read, and they’re revealing, and hurtful sometimes in the way they are interrupted by the trivial nature of love and life. The insecurity about the kind of love you don’t want to let yourself be swept away by because it feels so Hollywood, or novel, or childish, but you do anyway, all gets shoehorned in at the end of a long email. 

This is the strength of Sally Rooney: she makes you believe there are these kinds of friendships in the world still, where people reach across a three hour divide to tell each other about how they are suddenly rethinking everything they’ve done in their lives because a childhood crush has resurfaced (seemingly endlessly, for the forth, or maybe fifth time). And he’s Christian, in 2020! Catholic, at that!

After finishing the novel, I thought the sexual situations were different when compared to Normal People. With some distance it seems like they serve a similar purpose, but were presented differently. Perhaps with the age difference between the narrators there became a certain understanding about the comfort or the need for sex to fill a certain emotional aspect of a relationship. In Normal People, it felt to me like sex was a means to an end - a way of getting close to someone by using your body as collatoral. The immediacy of sex was a device of confrontation and mutual avoidance when it came to having to talk about how the characters felt about one another. Whereas, in Beautiful World, I felt like the sex, while serving a similar need for comfort and closeness, was a way to bring an emotion to the surface. To share yourself with someone physically in order to show you have a desire to be near them. In the end, these are the same when it comes to closeness, but feel different. The maturity of a relationship that is burning to be more physically intimate versus using their bodies as a weapon (even if the purpose of that weapon is to get closer to each other). This could also be due to having only seen the mini-series version of Normal People, where the nudity is imagery to confront as opposed to words within a larger narrative context.

It’s strange to read a novel about characters your own age, especially during a time of such unnatural isolation and distance. At the end of the novel, the characters write to each other from inside of the pandemic isolation, which feels both too soon to read about and also strikingly too late. Voyeuristically, I want them to succeed in their new entrapments. I want them to thrive in all the ways we all thought we would thrive when the idea was that it would only be a few more months. Pragmatically, pessimistically, as the second anniversary of pandemic isolation looms nearer and nearer, I fear for my new fictional friends and lovers. I hope they make it together.

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a wonderful portrait of what it is to be thirty-something. Through success and failure and milieu, Rooney finds a way to make an extremely successful author relatable to her new warehouse-working love interest. Through conflict and misunderstanding, through personal history and confession, and the unending obligations of being employed and living in the world, the characters become real for what I hope will be a wide range of readers. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You? is out now in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Review: Sable

Sable is a game that sent me back and forth, both in expectations in the lead up to its release, and in playing it. For a long time, GIFs of Sable would come across my timeline, and I’d be amazed by how good the Moebius-inspired art looked. It was hard to not be excited by something so beautiful. Then, years after GIFs first started showing up, we finally had some gameplay demos. This was, for me and some other game designer friends, the first sign of trouble for the game. Built on exploration, shooting across a desert landscape on a hoverbike, this core mechanic looked clunky and floaty. The game was still beautiful, but watching it in action was underwhelming. But demos are demos, and judgment has to be reserved for actually playing the game itself.

Screenshot from the game Sable, it shows a masked person riding a hoverbike across a desert landscape. In the background is a brick tower with a domed top, and campfire smoke snaking up to the sky.

When I started playing Sable, my first impressions were good. The game was, of course, beautiful visually - little details in the architecture and the design of the characters all fit together to construct a world that feels fully thought out. The opening platforming section (platforming being the other core mechanic of the game) felt good. This good impression lasted for about half an hour. Once I was let loose on the world, my fears were confirmed - the bike did feel clunky, constantly being spun out on little bits of geometry, and floated in a way that felt disconnected from the world around it. In addition, in the starting area, points of interest are set so far apart that most of the time spent here was experienced through this slightly irritating bike.

Then I started running into bugs. On more than one occasion, the controls just stopped working and I had to save and quit to get the controls back. One of these occasions happened during a particularly arduous climb, and sent me falling all the way back down to the ground to start again. Then, after I finished a long climbing section, I went in search of my bike to find it missing. I stood on the map marker looking around, but it was nowhere to be seen. I restarted the game, hoping it would pop back into existence, only to find it was still gone. At this point I seriously considered just giving up on Sable. 

There was no way I was going to play through the incredibly tedious 2 hours I just went through again to get back to this point. On a whim, I pressed the A button hovering over a map marker on a previously visited location and discovered the game had a fast travel mechanic. I audibly groaned at how much time I had spent just holding the right trigger, zipping through empty desert, because the game had not told me about this feature. I hit the fast travel button, and as I expected, my bike reappeared next to me when I arrived at my destination. I decided I would continue on.

After some more exploring, I ended up in the city of Eccria. This is probably 3 or 4 hours into a game that, according to HowLongToBeat, is an average of 6-8 hours long. It’s also when I started to enjoy the game. Eccria is beautifully designed. There’s lovely little nooks and crannies, filled with details that make it seem like a place that was actually lived in. There is, unfortunately, not a lot of people filling out these little spaces, but it still is a more dense hub of things to do than most of the game up to this point. Where most of the quests in the early game sent me 5-10 minutes across some dunes to pick something up or drop it off, Eccria offered several quests that involved exploring the city, talking to people, investigating, and learning more about the world. 

Screenshot from the game Sable. It shows a tall, broken stone bridge, with two enormous green statues of soldiers. One soldier trying to climb the face of the bridge, and the top soldier preparing to strike.

In the end, my feelings about Sable are complicated. While the first half was tedious and frustrating, I legitimately enjoyed the back half of the game. The writing was great - there was nice characterization of the people you met in the world, a feat considering how short many of the interactions were. The way the Sable’s words were delivered through their thoughts, and not through dialogue, worked well to show how they were thinking and interacting with the world they were exploring. The art, of course, was beautiful, and when you came across a vista like the Bridge of the Betrayed it was legitimately breathtaking. And of course the sound track, written by Japanese Breakfast, was fantastic. Can I recommend playing Sable? I’m not sure if I can. I don’t know if the tedium was worth getting through to the end, and that’s disappointing for a game that I really wanted to love.

Sable, the first game from Shedworks, is available on consoles and Steam. 

Review: King Woman "Celestial Blues"

Celestial Blues does a lot more work than is readily available on the surface. It is immediately gratifying - the heavy moments are really heavy, catchy riffs and choruses drive the tracks, and the lyrics are seductive: “my name is Lucifer, nice to meet you.” At the same time, the distorted or loud moments never feel discordant, or like a surprise, because they map so cleanly to the emotional highs and lows of the song’s (and the album’s) structure. The characteristically doubled vocal technique makes the words both clear and mysterious in places, which sometimes feel like confessions in passing, especially as the music overwhelms them, or when words drop from stanzas as the spoken section is broken with emotion.

When I returned to 2017’s Created In The Image Of Suffering, I was surprised to find a sound palette that felt similar to Celestial Blues. There is a mixture of grunge-sounding distortion and heavy-fuzz sludginess that has been carried through all of King Woman’s releases, but now on tracks like “Boghz” are used as an emotional punch to the gut, whereas on many tracks from Created In The Image of Suffering, the fuzzy sound design was the primary element. It started songs and ended them - the emotional rise and fall of a track was much more dependent on the power of the vocals and the doomy quality to the guitar riffs. A reserve was taken when writing Celestial Blues, as if each element were put through more scrutiny before placed in a track, and the tracks themselves were arranged and rearranged until the entire runtime created a clear emotional experience.

In an interview with New Noise Magazine, Kris said: 

“I was very angry in Doubt and Created in The Image of Suffering, and just working through a lot. With this, I was more interested in the character, because I wanted to tell more of their stories in a way, but also tie it in with my own personal experiences.”

This is most present on the track “Golgatha,” which starts in the way many of the songs start - a clean, but reverberated guitar, and a vocal section. In this case though, the lyrics will repeat and grow, giving the song a slowly escalating effect. “It never ends,” Kris speaks softly (later doubled, later with an elevated harmony, later against a wall of guitar distortion and cymbals, then with a scream behind it), “no, it never ends, the snake eats its tail and we return again to this hell.” The beat intensifies. More lyrics get added to the mantra, which continues to repeat without losing one ounce of emotional power. Then, when the tension is high and the mantra has lulled you along with the character, the guitars kick in and it’s huge. Big riffs. “This hell / this hell / I’ll return again with these scars, my friend / No, it never ends.” 

It encapsulates what it’s like to be alive. Even when violins enter and the drums break down, releasing the tension and creating a moment of respite from the feeling of endless misery, the mantra has no other place to go but back into the rotation of the song. It slows down, it gets quieter, and the words fade with the rest of the song. Hell is the words that repeat in our heads and, like the emotional arc of this track, we may never return to that one loud moment in our lives, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away.

As a quick aside: as much as this album maps to the hopelessness of the last few years for me, it isn’t a pandemic record. In an interview with Beyond The Boy’s Club, Kris said: 

“I wrote this record between projects and recorded it in December of 2019 [...] It’s been done for a while. I was taking my time with releasing, and I wasn’t in the mood to rush it. I took my time with the video and photos and just said, ‘I’m going to take my time.’”

The video she’s talking about, released alongside the single “Morning Star,” is a magical 360-single-shot with Kris at the center as the eponymous Morning Star. Directed by Muted Widows, and expertly staged, the video was well worth taking the time on. Of all the music videos I’ve seen this year, this was the most compelling. It encapsulated so much of what drew me to Kris’s performance style, but it also brought out a thriving character. Dancing, smoking, with slick-backed hair, Lucifer appears to bring you their message. About “Morning Star,” Kris said: 

“We were told that Lucifer was so bad and evil, but I feel like oftentimes the people who are portrayed as bad guys in different stories or the news are not what they’re perceived to be, so I wanted to flip it on its head and make it something interesting. So, it’s Lucifer’s way of defending himself.”

The only track I don’t like on the album, which is purely personal taste and not at all a knock on the album, is “Psychic Wound,” which I feel is out of place in the scale and emotionality of the rest of the album. The psych elements are too far forward in the mix compared to the rest of the album. But psych-inspired music, in general, is not something I often listen to. At the third-to-last slot on the album, it doesn’t bother me. The front half is so, so strong, that it doesn’t affect my read on the album at all. “Ruse” comes on right after and I forget all about it. So, your mileage may vary.

Celestial Blues ends with “Paradise Lost,” which is a quiet and heartfelt song. I try to pay attention to the lyrics, which are often doubled and sometimes whispered, because they feel like deep wells of personal reflection. But all I can ever take away is the final line “it’s just the saddest story,” which comes as the final transition in the song, and the album. The words are devastating. As a reflection of the characters we’ve met on the album this line brings an end to the transformation of a life’s story - at least for now. 

While digging into the different interviews, lyrics, and music videos for this album, it is clear that there is so much more context to the album than is immediately available on the surface. It rewards passive listeners, but also those who like to dig and find meaning in the additional content. I’m excited for people to find this record, and later, when it is safe, to see it played live, because I feel like it will be an all-time favorite in many circles. There’s so much to revisit.

Celestial Blues is the second full-length album from King Woman. Available now from Relapse Records.

Review: Humankind

The first time I played a 4X game was at a cousin’s house. They had Civilization 2 on their family computer, and after a couple turns I was completely enamored with it. When I got home, I had to get it for myself and put in hours and hours of playtime. As time went on, I played Alpha Centauri, then Civilization 3, 5, and 6. Across the games, I’ve probably sunk close to 1,000 hours into the turn-based strategy series.

Over the years, I’ve tried a number of other 4X games and nothing really captured me like Civilization. I found Crusader Kings and Stellaris interesting, but the level of depth and complication was more than I usually wanted from my 4X sessions. Total War: Shogun captured me for a while, but didn’t pull me into the Total War series the way I had been pulled into Civilization. Humankind is the first time I’ve honestly been able to say a game does everything I want a 4X to do, and it does it better than Civilization in every instance I’ve encountered.

Humankind starts you off in the Neolithic period. Unlike Civilization, where you feel rushed to start your first city as fast as possible, Humankind encourages you to move around and take in your surroundings a bit. You start with a single unit and, by encountering special food tiles or hunting deer and mammoths, can create new units from your existing one. This lets you explore further and wider before settling down. It’s completely feasible to make it all the way to the ancient era before you even put down an Outpost, the precursor settlement that can eventually become a city. 

Screenshot from Humankind shows a tribe unit on a cliff, overlooking a forest and the ocean, with mammoths, deer, and bears roaming the map. Source: Amplitude

Like other 4X games, choosing where you’re going to start is a matter of finding a good balance of food and industry resources. One nice change from Civilization is the use of terrain - where Civilization does have some defensive bonuses from things like hills and forests, Humankind has several different heights of terrain, which create really interesting and dynamic battles. 

The battles are a place where the Humankind approach really shines. When you start a battle against another unit (or set of units), you have two options, a manual battle or an automatic resolution. If you choose to go with the manual battle, you enter a little mini tactical battle round. You can deploy your units across the terrain, taking advantage of high ground and mobility bonuses to make battles where you’re theoretically weaker into more even affairs. Unlike in Civilization, where you may take several full game terms to resolve a battle between several units, Humankind let’s you finish many fights within a single turn of the game by breaking the battle out into this tactical system.

One of my favorite systems in Humankind is the ideology system. Throughout the game you’re presented with random events asking you to make choices for your people. The way you answer these questions moves your civilization left or right on four different ideological spectrums - collectivism versus individualism, liberty versus authority, tradition versus progress, and world versus homeland. Rather than preset archetypes like Civilization uses, this system creates a more organic way for AI civilizations, or other players if you’re playing online, to build relationships with you. If you’re more authoritarian, liberty-focused empires will like you less; if you’re more collectivist, individualist empires will be more antagonistic. The more extreme the ideological differences, the more likely you are to be in conflict with the other empires. 

The key system that really sets Humankind apart is the culture system. Rather than selecting a leader and being locked into their bonuses and weaknesses for the rest of the game, each time you change eras (from neolithic to ancient to classical and so on), you are given the opportunity to change cultures. Maybe you started with a money focused culture like the Egyptians but have found yourself in conflict with one of your neighbors. When you move up to the classical period you may choose to switch to a more combat focused culture like the Huns. This really helps the game feel more fluid, and resolves the problem of needing to pick a single way to play on turn one and grind that style out for several hundred turns, regardless of how circumstances change over the game.

Screenshot from the game Humankind, it shows a carousel interface with Teutons, Khmer, English, Mongols, and Umayyads cultures. Source: Amplitude

There are so many places like this where Humankind takes an idea or system from Civilization and fleshes it out or makes it feel better. The game is full of small quality of life improvements (like the battle system) that you feel every single turn. More than 20 hours in and I’m constantly marvelling at how the game continues to flow along without the sort of slumps and slogs of mid- and late-game Civilization. While it’s not breaking any extraordinary new ground for the genre, it is so well refined that it feels almost revelatory in comparison to other 4X games.

As a final thought on Humankind, I would like to note that the game does not seem to grapple significantly with the problems intrinsic to the genre. 4X (which stands for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) is founded in power fantasies of settler-colonialism. While Humankind does eliminate the barbarians of Civilization in favor of peaceful and aggressive animals, and later independent nations you can build actual relationships with, the game is still focused on the expansion of empires, and, as such, conquering, assimilating, or exterminating at least some of your neighbors is a likely consequence. In my experience so far, it is easier to avoid war with your neighbors than in games like Civilization or Crusader Kings, but not to the degree where I can say it is discouraged or unrewarded. I would love to see a large-scale strategy game grapple with this part of the genre, but Humankind is not that game.

Humankind was released in August 2021 by Amplitude and Sega, and you can find it on Xbox Games Pass, Steam, Epic, and Stadia.

Review: Galen Tipton - “goddexx (deluxe edition”

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more catchy and disgustingly composed collection of tracks in my life. Every track on goddexx is so wet and chaotic and, yet, there are parts of Galen Tipton’s songs that get stuck in my head for days. Fragments of tracks pass through whatever else I might be listening to; a gross glittering oil seeps into my resting brain waves to the point that I have no choice but to throw on the goddexx (deluxe edition) for the second or third time that day. Like Lauren Bousfield’s Palimpsest, the crashing electronic mess becomes a rhythmic meditation that I can lose myself in - voices on top of other voices, raised a few octaves, crushed and spit back out, too fast to comprehend; a music box chimes, and brings me back to clarity; a symphony of surreal choirs and flutes and strings lifts everything up, higher than you thought was even possible, always adding more layers. But then it breaks down and the chaos of voices stabilizes into deep base, and space, and I suddenly realize I’ve been banging my head hard enough to make myself dizzy. That’s what it’s like to listen to Galen Tipton.

The artwork for goddexx, which is how I found the album in the first place, is wild. It reminds me of the A.I. generated artwork that was being passed around for a while on Twitter, where the AI was fed a number of famous paintings, took them in, processed them all at once, and then created a gross and unsettling image - not quite right, not quite something tangible, but still somehow packed with the emotion of all the great source material. By Sam Rolfes, the goddexx cover is an ethereal being against a pastel cloudscape. Grey and green and pink and black, the body of the being is graceful (but also, in some ways, coming apart). It holds out in front of it a smaller, slightly more recognizable form, which has a pink bow and is heavily caked in makeup. As if presenting a child as it’s own face, as part of itself, but still holding the thing at a distance. There are swords, and a bulbous clown nose, and stubby fingers on swollen ball-hands. But it’s pastel. It’s shiny, in places. Why does it feel so gross?

While pitching this EP to a friend recently, I said that the cover art is an emotional replica of the music. It’s chaotic and beautiful and disturbing and otherworldly. It’s part rave and part glitch and part symphonic grace. The image is heavy with low frequency, but at the same time there’s a computer music quality to the visual and sonic atmosphere. The stereo mix is intoxicating. Every new track expands out and pulls in, like a low resolution screensaver of the ocean, jittering all around you. It’s transporting.

With seven original tracks and three remixes, the deluxe edition is just long enough to feel like a complete journey. The sound design is deeply consistent. For something so chaotic, it’s a little surprising how the tone of the original tracks flow so well into each other and still, somehow, remain distinct. I could see how this album would be grating for some people (there’s a lot of uncomfortable glitching), but for me the tonal consistency and the repetition of distinct elements (like the music box chimes or the flutes) tether the whole thing to a world designed solely for goddexx. The only song that takes me out of the flow slightly is “pixie ring,” which features Diana Starshine, N. Hell, and Junior Astronaut, because it has a very clear vocal section. For the first time, after about 20 minutes of highly processed, stuttered vocal segments, a voice appears. Upon multiple listens, though, this break is kind of welcome. It signals its own movement: we’re getting closer to the end. “elf fetish,” which is the next (and final) original track, feels more somber because of this change, where something like “courageous grieving” or “girl dick” would have felt too abrasive or chaotic to end on. 

For example, the Seth Graham remix of “girl dick” takes an atmospheric and moody approach to the otherwise very rhythmic and dramatic song - turning it into something closer to a soundtrack - wherein the samples are tied to an emotional movement rather than a driving rhythm. While these re-interpretations are interesting, and shine light on the depth and versatility of the sound design that went into goddexx, it is very clear that the EP came to an end when “elf fetish” was finished.

In an interview with Paste Magazine, Tipton said writing goddexx “was imagining myself as this type of [shonen anime/manga] character, able to take on anything from internal struggles to social constructs that want me and others like me dead.” I feel this imbues the sound design with triumphant defiance. Many times throughout the album, I felt like a struggle was finally breaking into something comprehendible, something safer, and lighter, and more understandable. To read that this EP was written in a time of great stress in Tipton’s life is unfortunate, and something I wish she never had to experience. But the emotion comes through. It bleeds pink and purple and orange and dark heavy liquid onto the catchy, rave-like elements and makes them punch harder. Often when I think of cathartic music, my mind immediately gravitates towards the raw, traditionally heavy, guitar-based, drop-A-tuned metal. Or sad shit like Lingua Ignota or Miserable or Our Lady. But goddexx fits this catharsis to its own tuning. A brighter and catchier mess. “That sometime[s] healing is ugly and can happen at a much slower pace than you want,” Tipton says, when asked what people should take away from this release. “That it's just as important to [lose] yourself and mosh in the club as it is to dance.”

Galen Tipton has been releasing music, at least on Bandcamp, since 2016. goddexx, for my money, is her best work to date and is on heavy rotation for all the reasons I’ve mentioned in this review. The tonal consistency and the sound design is just on a different level. It’s so good. She also releases music under the moniker Recovery Girl. goddexx (deluxe edition) is available now through unseelie records.

Review: Yakuza - Like a Dragon

Yakuza: Like A Dragon is the 8th game in the Yakuza series. While the last 7 Yakuza games (and the spin-off game Judgment) have been brawlers, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has gone in a new direction with Like A Dragon, creating a fantastic and engaging JRPG, filled with all the heart the Yakuza series is known for.

Once I dove into Yakuza 0, I immediately fell in love with the series. After I finished 0, I jumped straight into Yakuza Kiwami (a remake of the original game), then on the recommendation of a friend I skipped forward to Yakuza 6 and Like A Dragon. 

Like A Dragon moves away from the series’ enduring long running protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, and introduces Ichiban Kasuga, a young Tojo yakuza in the Arakawa Family. Kasuaga was born in a bathhouse and raised without ever knowing his parents. A troublemaker, his life was saved as teen by Masumi Arakawa, the clan’s patriarch. This brought Kasuga into the yakuza, and in time Arakawa became something of a father figure to him. 

When a shooting threatens the Arakawa Family, Kasuga is asked to take the fall in the place of his captain. After spending 18 years in prison to protect his clan, Kasuga is betrayed by his patriarch and left for dead in Isezaki Ijincho. Unlike previous games, which focused on a conflict between the Tojo and Omi Alliance in Kamarucho, most of Like A Dragon focuses on the conflicts of this new setting, and a brittle truce between the competing criminal organizations that call it home.

Despite the change in setting and genre, a lot of the mainstays of the Yakuza series appear in Like A Dragon. One of the most endearing parts of the series are the many “sub-stories,” side quests that range from goofy to dramatic to horny to heartbreaking. These side stories are what gives Yakuza its unique feeling. One moment you might be helping a yakuza gang that loves dressing as babies, the next you might be helping a little girl raise money for her brother’s life saving surgery. Seeing how your character reacts to these different stories, always eager to help people in need, really gives him life and shows you the type of person he is.

Because of the change in main mechanic from brawler to JRPG, there are some interesting new features as well. As you move through the game, you recruit new characters to be a part of your party. Each of these characters has a unique story associated with them, with story beats gated behind a relationship meter. Eating at restaurants, playing minigames, and winning battles increases these relationship meters and allows you to progress through their individual stories and unlock unique and powerful battle abilities. These relationship stories help not just to show who your party is, but who Kasuga is as he reacts to their troubles.

The combat itself is fairly standard JRPG turn-based combat. There’s an auto-mode if you don’t feel like inputting commands, but in either manual or auto mode the game keeps you active with inputs for skill attacks, and the ability to reduce damage by making inputs when being attacked. While the combat in many JRPGs lately has left me feeling bored and impatient, I think this more active turn-based combat kept Like A Dragon engaging.

However, there were a few points in the game that had me feeling a little less than enthusiastic about playing. At a couple points, you have to make your way through “dungeons” (levels full of enemies where you can’t save except at checkpoints). These dungeons were visually uninteresting and often felt like filler. I would have much rather fought through another thoughtfully designed building or arena rather than slog my way through twisting identical concrete hallways.

There’s also a major boss fight near the end of the game where the boss has a one-hit KO move, and if he uses it on Kasuga it’s an instant game over. This led me to discover that the way to avoid this is to have leveled a specific job for Kasuga to unlock a character ability that prevents one-hit KOs. Learning this, I ended up having to back out of the mission to a previous save (which meant I would later have to fight my way all the way back up to the boss), then grind for hours to get this ability so I could finish the game. The most efficient way to grind, unfortunately, was in the uninteresting dungeons. If it hadn’t been so close to the end of the game, I may have taken a break from the game for a month or so out of frustration.

This one-hit KO mechanic, placed right near the end of the game, felt like it was punishing me for not choosing the “right” job for Kasuga. The job system is something I really loved experimenting and playing with for much of the game, and now it suddenly felt weaponized against me in a way that hurt the experience and ground the pacing to a halt.

Despite this, I did really enjoy finishing the game. It tells an emotional story about family, identity, and the corruption that comes with power. The acting was great - Kasuaga in particular, voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya, was incredibly well performed. There’s a scene near the end where Kasuga is sort of sob-screaming, and it’s hard to imagine how that would have landed with any other performance. 

Like A Dragon, even with its major mechanical change, even with its change of setting, captures so much of what I love about the Yakuza series. While being a pulpy crime story, Like A Dragon is full of heart. Ichiban Kasuga, desperate to be a real version of the video game heroes he played growing up, always wants to fight for what’s right and the people he cares about, at any cost. He’s a very different character from Kazuma Kiryu, but in this way he feels like a wonderful replacement as the franchise’s future face.

Review: "The Many Deaths of Laila Starr"

By the third issue of The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, I feel like I could have followed Death through whatever life she wanted to show me, if only to see the kinds of worlds she hangs around. Inhabiting the body of Laila Starr, and with a few favors to call in, Death is flung wildly into the different lives and times of Mumbai to find a way to restore her role as a god. Written by Ram V, the story is framed in such a way that hooked me every time a new issue began. The familiar stranger at the party, or the friend tagging an old pillow factory wall, sweeps Laila into slices of life (and death) she may have missed in her previous profession. Filipe Andrade, the artist for all currently released issues, makes the city breath with the energy of a large population. At times the details are overwhelming, crowded, and intricate. But in other places they flow in the shaky dance of smoke - or water, or flowers, or the hot city streets - that make the pages feel all consuming. The colors are bright and fluid, which makes even the night feel unique with life.

In the first issue, “Once Upon A Falling Starr,” we are shown the rapidly colliding paths of Death, the goddess who is fired from the corporation of gods and cast to live among the mortals; Laila Starr, who’s orphan body Death now inhabits; and Darius Shah, the baby who would grow to be the inventor of immortality. As Death, now Laila Starr, grapples with living in a mortal body, and whether to kill the baby Darius Shah or not, she dies and is brought back to life again by an old friend: the God of Life, Pranah.

Death and Pranah share quiet moments at the end of each episode and, as coworkers, as old friends, they catch up in the way only people who know each others’ past can - with sympathy and wisdom.

What is striking about The Many Deaths of Laila Starr - as the second issue flies by, and then the third - are these tender moments. Reflections on death and life couch so easily into the different characters’ histories. Whether the focus is on the personhood of a servant, who spends his days harvesting mangoes and jackfruit and sapodilla but is not allowed to eat them, or how new love can sometimes make you contemplate mortality, The Many Deaths… is a delicate look into what surrounds a person’s life, and what makes up their inner worth. There are mistakes and fleeting moments; there are heavy realizations. There is death. But when the issue ends, and Laila Starr returns to Pranah (to Life) from another death, there is often the calm sea - or the view from the balcony, or a room with a bed and a chair by the window - that acts as a re-centering of perspective. The finality of death becomes the end of a day from which you can start again to realign with the cosmic reality of a person’s journey.

This comic is a gift to the audience, not only because it’s an insight into a world and culture we may not be familiar with (especially in this medium, especially this widely distributed in the US), but also because the story builds beautiful empathy for life (and in many ways death). By forcing the God of Death into a mortal form, even if that form is repeatedly resurrected by the God of Life, the story becomes about the human elements she may have missed in her previous existence. It becomes about us.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr is written by Ram V and illustrated by Filipe Andrade, and issue #4 is out this week from Boom! Studios.

Review: Spellling's "The Turning Wheel"

The Turning Wheel, Spellling’s third full length album, is a fantastical departure from the synth driven records before it. Featuring over 30 musicians, the album feels plucked from another time, or maybe from outside of time.

The Turning Wheel, according to the artist behind Spellling, Chrystia Cabral, “revolves around themes of human unity, the future, divine love and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called life.” Split into two sections, Above and Below, the album navigates these themes first with a sense of wonder, then with a darker tone.

On the first side, Above, I was surprised by just how joyful the songs could sound. “Little Deer” is flowy and fantastical - horns lend a big band jazziness, while the harp adds a dreamy texture to underlie the song. “Always” feels inspired by doo-wop ballads, singing “Please don’t steal my heart” while a bass plucks under strings and horns. 

To me, the big standout track of the album is the title track. “The Turning Wheel” is anthemic. Tonally, it sounds like it came straight out of the early 70s. The piano, backed up by organ, guitar, strings, and horns, builds to a joyous mid-track solo that invokes a feeling of people laying in fields of flowers. This, paired with Cabral’s fantastic vocal delivery, makes us believe that maybe we can, in fact, break out of the Turning Wheel of life, step out of time, and transcend to a new state of being.

“The Future” is the most theatrical feeling song on the album. It is easy to imagine this track performed in a musical play, perhaps where the lead is discovering a latent magical ability that has been hiding within them. “Awaken” continues this theatrical feeling. The vocal delivery and organs paired together, with the climbing percussion and horns, are the first steps to beginning a journey that will change you forever; a crossing of the threshold in sort of Campbellian terms (as a note, this is not an endorsement of Joseph Campbell’s ideas of monomyth, moreso an acknowledgement of his influence on modern storycraft).

With the track “Boys at School” we have fully submerged into the Below. Darker tones reign from this point forward - pianos dance in minor keys, and the formerly flamboyant horns now feel more somber. The boys never play by the rules, and we hear a grasping at youth and innocence sure to be lost. The following track, “Legacy,” is a sort of seductive haunting; rolling strings and plucky synths backed by a Latin percussion section invite you in. Cabral sings “I’ll crawl, I’ll crawl, into the daylight” to find a frightening legacy.

While Below is darker, and less fantastical than Above, it also feels connected to change. In the Above section, we are in the dream world; we see the unity and divine love from Cabral’s statement. In Below, there is action: “I draw my sword from the sorrow,” “too far to turn back now,” “I’m in a permanent revolution.” Reality is painful. It can feel like we’re trapped on this Turning Wheel with no way off, no way to stop the repeating revolutions of the sun. But this reality is also where we explore how we can bring ourselves closer to our dreams and to each other. There’s a hope in the darkness of Below that we can find our own pieces of the utopian Above. It’s a theme that could easily come off as corny, but through Spellling’s fantastic and fantastical writing, it comes off as sincere and heartfelt.

The Turning Wheel is available now on Bandcamp and through Sacred Bones.

Review: Ryou Minenami's "Boy's Abyss"

Content Warning: This review, and the manga it highlights, deal directly (and often) with the subject of suicide. This manga is also sexually explicit and not safe to read at work.

What stood out to me about Boy’s Abyss (Shonen no Abisu in Japan) in hindsight was that every character the story interacted with was haunted by the legend of their town. Up the road, not far from Market Street, or the school, or the bridge that becomes the centerpiece for many chapters of Ryou Minenami’s Seinen manga, is a place called Lover’s Abyss. Made popular by the novel Spring's Coffin (a fictional novel famous within the story), Lover’s Abyss is the location of a lover’s suicide that happened a generation before our main cast takes the stage. Throughout the six volumes currently available – through tumult and peril, life and death, escape – nearly all of the characters are burdened with the mystery, or in some ways the seduction, of Lover’s Abyss, which not only connects all of their stories in a meaningful way, but builds their foundational drives. 

Small towns are the settings for many dark stories because they easily embody a relatable seclusion from what a majority of readers may currently be experiencing. In Boy’s Abyss, the small town is introduced as Reiji, the main protagonist, takes the very attractive and secretly pop idol famous Nagi Aoe around on the back of his bike. He’s amazed that she has decided to live in their small town after not only being famous, but also living in Tokyo (a place he dreams of going, but feels very far from ever living in). Reiji, who has many challenges to his home life and with his self esteem, is easily swooned by the story of Lover’s Abyss and the idea that a lover’s suicide might actaully be a way to escape his life; while that is a very obvious and emotionally charged journey for the main focus of the story, it is not what I’m talking about when I say the characters are haunted by Lover’s Abyss. Nagi Aoe knows the story – she’s read it– saying at one point, looking over a bridge at night with Reiji, as they both dwindle into apathy, “I kinda felt jealous [after reading Spring’s Coffin]. It’s the happiest way to die, after all.”

But Boy’s Abyss is not a loveletter to suicide, despite its repeated motifs and direct mention of the act. Reiji goes through many iterations of the outcomes of his own death and, repeatedly, finds reasons to live (even if they are, sometimes, for the wrong reasons). Most of the characters are confronted by it. The dreary, rainy small town. The poverty of Reiji’s family and why they feel stuck in their situation. The bridge, ominously between Market Street and home. As Reiji tumbles to the edge of the bridge and back to the safety of the grassy hill just to the side of it, he is embraced by the different characters in his life. His best friend, Sakuko, who introduced him to Nagi’s idol group, not to mention the novel Spring’s Coffin, fills him with hope that they can both escape to Tokyo and be happy together. Yuri, a well meaning homeroom teacher, interferes to give Reiji some financial and housing assistance – although, at points, this is to his detriment and serves to amplify his depression and hopelessness. As you get further into the volumes, Boy’s Abyss becomes a deeply connected story that often pays off things that were thrown away early in its serialization in Young Jump magazine. The characters shift and push against each other, always leaving room for new realizations and perils. Reiji goes from hopeless high school senior, stuck in the endless cycle of his family’s life, to someone with profound life experience stuck in the endless cycle still. 

The serialized nature of the story works for a large part of the six volumes that have been translated, but towards the end (as new chapters are released weekly, then later translated and put online) the story begins to reach further than its core premise. At a certain point it became obvious the manga was popular and the demand meant the story would need to continue much further than it might have been originally planned. Side characters are given front-facing motivations and storylines that feel slightly out of place next to the pitch-perfect mood of the first five or so volumes. 

Popularity, while good for the manga and for reaching a larger audience, can often lead to unreasonable (and dangerous) work conditions. An ongoing conversation about burnout and health risks related to the timelines and expectations of manga and anime are a topic that I have only recently become aware of, but see as a parallel to conversations about game design crunch, wherein a smaller number of people than necessary are rushed and bullied into completing tasks through extremely long work periods, despite the evidence being high that this practice does not produce quality work or longevity in the industry. This is all to say that I do want this manga to blow up and become popular, but not at the risk of the creator’s mental or physical health and, while I think it’s within the means of this review to be slightly critical of the story spreading thinner than it may have been originally planned, I’d like to note that this is definitely not a commentary on how the creator should just “work harder” or “plan better,” but instead a commentary on how we should treat creators with patience, time, and the money they need to live productive and healthy lives doing what they love to do. 

Boy’s Abyss is the best manga I’ve read so far. After consuming six volumes, I started over because I knew there would be minute details I missed and couldn’t stop thinking about them. The characters and the writing are deep wells of human insight and drama. At no point, even now, do I feel like I would be able to tell you where their lives would go or in some cases where they’ve been. But I feel like I know all the characters so well. I think about Reiji and Sakuko’s friendship. I think about Nagi Aoe and why she made the choice to leave fame to live as an anonymous person in a small town. I want to read Spring’s Coffin, which we get small excerpts of in the later chapters. Ryou Minenami reaches into the dark, small town of Boy’s Abyss and finds a cast that can not only act as the shadow facets of a relatable psyche, but also shows his audience where people come from and how they’re built; how escape is misguided by youthful angst, and how a home can be shaped around the survival more than the unit of a family. 

More people need to read Boy’s Abyss so I can talk to them about some of the elements I wasn’t able to spoil in this review. Unfortunately the only place to read the English translations legally right now is through Kindle. A physical edition has not been produced yet in English.

Review: Schwefelgelb - "Der Rest Der Nacht"

I have a long history of pushing Schwefelgelb on this site. From the first time I heard Dunkel Vor Den Augen Uns I have been totally hooked on their synthesis of techno and EBM. Ten records later I’m still finding their interpretations of the genre the most compelling of any EBM act out there.

Der Rest Der Nacht, Schwefelgelb’s latest release, hits immediately. “Impulskörper” slams out of the gate with an incredibly hard hitting kick and minimal composition. Slowly building, Schwefelgelb layers on hats and bass. It’s fully a minute and half before we get some semblance of a melody, and even the melody, when introduced, feels percussive. 

Something Schwefelgelb consistently does well is create songs that, despite averaging around 6 minutes in length, manage to have such movement and evolution that you never really have a chance to get bored with what’s happening. Just when a rhythm starts to feel like it’s about to get repetitive, they hit a switch up, moving to a new bassline or making significant changes to percussive soundscape, and pull you straight back into the movement of the track.

You can really hear this expert construction on the“Lichtenberg-Figur”, a 7 minute long absolute banger of a track. Starting with a simple four on the floor backed by a percussive melody, the track soon cuts the kick and introduces off-beat hat hits. This moves to a simple vocal section that introduces some subtle variations in the kick rhythm and some distorted hits. Before you know it, the song cuts away to a sort of rave stab melody that completely changes the feel of the song. Schwefelgelb goes on to use subtle variations on the earlier percussive melody and the rave stab melody to ensure that the track keeps you moving and unconcerned with its length. 

When confronted with tracks like “Horizont,” with its stuttering kick, rolling stabs, and compressed to hell percussion, I find myself involuntarily jumping around, dancing, hooting and hollering in my room, pulling out my hair in disbelief of just how good it makes me feel. When you break down what’s happening at any given point, you find there are not that many layers there - despite sounding maximalist at points, the choices Schwefelgelb makes in their compositions are clearly very intentional, with nothing more than what’s needed to achieve their desired effect.

The final track is a remix from Randomer. It’s always hard to imagine taking a Schwefelgelb track and turning it up. Everything is already so well constructed that it requires a full reimagining to pull off a good remix of Schwefelgelb’s work. Well, “Wie Viel Haut” is certainly re-imagined here. Ripping acid synths roar over a wild, driven, and absolutely unhinged reconfiguration of the track. It hits me in a completely different way, but still manages to never be boring and keeps my head slamming from start to finish.

If you haven’t dipped your toes into the discography of Schwefelgelb, Der Rest Der Nacht is absolutely a great place to start. There’s not a bad track on the release, and when played at high volume I imagine you’ll find it as hard to sit still as I did.

Schwefelgelb is a techno project based in Berlin. You can find Der Rest Der Nacht on Schwefelgelb’s Bandcamp.

Review: Hiraki - "Stumbling Through The Walls"

Over the last few years, chaotic art music has become a core-level emotional experience in the experimental metal and noise scenes. With bands like Mamaleek, Frontierer, and Street Sects making deep ruts in my frequently recommended albums for anyone seeking an intense musical experience, I was surprised to find that I’d never heard Hiraki’s 2017 debut album Modern Genes. How could a band with such a perfect balance of messy and cohesively chaotic energy make a follow up that could not only rival their debut, but turn it in a way that felt fresh and linear at the same time?

How could someone win me over after hearing Mamaleek’s Come and See? For Hiraki, the answer to this was to go even harder. More discomfort; more crushing, intense rhythms; more beauty in moments of chaos (and sometimes malice). From the analog synth gates to the blown-speaker transcendence of modern noise rock, Hiraki finds a way to make the discomfort stick to your ribs. The vocals are gross, but also deeply emotional. The drums are huge, never to be overtaken by other sometimes more intense rhythmic elements.

“Proto Skin,” which comes six and a half minutes into the record, is the first moment of reprieve from the madness of the first two tracks. But even “Proto Skin,” with it’s almost post-hardcore second half and it’s suddenly more traditional emotional hardcore scream, can’t be trusted. From the start of the track, a very mechanical guitar riff, which is almost old school industrial in its rhymicallity, devolves into a mess of cymbals and catharsis, which then returns to the mechanical, plodding-along tension of the start. “I’ll be here all year,” vocalist Jon Gotlev repeats many times, “just yelling.” 

Out of context, “Proto Skin” would slip rather comfortably into a screamo playlist. It would have to be near the noisy peak of pure emotion, but I believe it would work. In context though, next to the aggressive churning and frantic “Wonderhunt,” or the nearly death industrial vibe of “New Standards,” it is the balancing point that forms a cohesive map to the latter half of the record. It shows that Hiraki are not only not fucking around, but that genres are for suckers. Heaviness by any means necessary and transcendence through raw human emotion.

“Mirror Stalker,” like “Proto Skin,” is built around a pulsing, mechanical rhythm. The track is littered with almost-notes from the guitars. It’s almost a strum, but cut off. Even the notes that are played are out of tune. It’s so frustratingly uncomfortable. But goddamn does it work well as an atmosphere that surrounds someone yelling “Mirror stalker, mirror stalker!”

The final track, “The Alarmist,” combines all of the energy and catharsis of previous tracks to bring the entire frenetic mess to a stumbling, noisy end. The track devolves from a classic hardcore build up, to a breakdown driven by quick hits on a highhat, with the guitar and the noisy atmosphere filling out both the high and low end, until the noise layer takes over and churns slowly from a melodic, almost uplifting, run to a nightmare of overblown, clipping bass distortion. The drums disappear, then the guitar, then everything, into the reverb tail at the end of the track.

The evolution of Hiraki from one album to the next seems to be more bleakness, more disgusting, raw humanity, and I’m here for it. The noisy, electronic elements are more developed and the overall sound design has crossed from progressive art metal over to raw electronic power. In a decade filled with fantastically avant garde and progressive art musicians like Street Sects, Lingua Ignota, and Daughters, it’s always amazing to me when a band manages to just blow my mind in the category. Stumbling Through The Walls is a massively intense and complicated album, and if the progression from debut to sophomore album is any indication, the next work from this project will be crushing.

Hiraki’s Stumbling Through The Walls is out now on Nefarious Industries, or directly on Bandcamp.

Review: Go

Go is a 2,500 year old two-player board game where players take turns placing stones, working to capture territory on a grid. The basics of Go are relatively simple, and with a friend who knows the game guiding you, you can see improvement in your play within an hour or two of starting.

Photo of two people playing Go by Brian Jeffery Beggerly

I started playing Go in mid-2020 as a way to spend time with my friends online. A good friend introduced me and several others to OGS, one of the main western servers for playing Go online. I was surprised to find that once I knew the basics of the game, I could very quickly look at more advanced players’ games (even professional matches) and have an understanding of what was happening and who was ahead. Unlike Chess, where you need to know a huge number of set-ups and variations, Go is visually straight-forward and easy to follow. All the information you need to understand the board is right there in front of you. 

I started watching Go matches on YouTube, doing tsumego (life and death) puzzles, and bought books so I could study and become a better player. Go became a direction to point myself during a pandemic that had robbed me of my focus. While I had trouble creating music or art, I could look at these little black and white stones and learn their patterns and strategies. I felt it change not just how I played Go but how I approached other things as well; the study had affected and sharpened my problem solving outside of the game. Slowly, I began moving up in rank on OGS.

A beginner starts at a rank of around 30-kyu and moves to lower numbers as they get better. Kyu can be thought of as a “student” rank. Within the kyu rankings, you can generally think of double-digit kyu players (often abbreviated as DDK) as casual or beginner players, and single-digit kyu players (abbreviated as SDK) as more intermediate players. Once you pass 1-kyu, your next rank would be 1-dan, with dan being a sort of “master” rank. At this point, you can rank up to 7-dan, the highest amateur rank.

Right now I’m sitting around 15-kyu. I’ve been playing enough to not be quite a beginner but also not quite intermediate. As one of the few things I’ve been able to focus on in the past several months, I’ve spent a lot of time watching games live on OGS. As a semi-casual player, it’s fascinating to watch different ranks of play in Go. At low ranks, like 25-20 kyu, I am amazed to see mistakes that, while obvious to me now, I was making constantly not very long ago. Then, when watching SDK ranks, I’ll think I’ve read out a solution to an area of play, only to see moves I never would have considered completely blow my reads out of the water (looking ahead in a series of moves is referred to as “reading” in Go).

Go also lends itself to developing a personal style. Masaki Takemiya, a 9-dan player, who uses an instinctual “cosmic style,” says that Go is more like a dance than a fight, and notes that learning to dance made him a better player. Cho Chikun, also 9-dan, is extremely thoughtful about how he reads out moves, and is a master at fighting for the life of groups. Then you have many players who study the latest AI inspired plays, plays with potential for high points but may seem unintuitive to human players who can’t read out hundreds of possible board states in a split second. This room for creativity and expression is another reason Go is both fun to play and interesting to watch.

While the increase in focus has been nice, the most important aspect of Go has been the time that it’s given me with friends. We’ll periodically call an impromptu Go club, where we take turns playing each other, with various handicaps to account for differences in rank (stones pre-placed on the board), and review the games we’ve played to help each other better understand the game. Now that my friends and I have started to get vaccinated, one of the first things we plan to do as a small group is play Go on real boards, in person (probably in a park because, let’s be honest, we’re all going to be dealing with a lingering anxiety about enclosed spaces for a long time). This deceptively simple game has had what I believe will be a long lasting impact on me and my relationships, making those friendships stronger, and creating a noticeable difference in how I think about problem solving, pushing for more patience and strategy. 

During the pandemic, we’ve all had to find ways to be with the people we are forced apart from. For you, maybe it’s been a book club, a remote movie night, or video games. I’m deeply grateful for my time with Go and with the people it’s brought me closer to. I look forward to seeing where it takes me as I start playing in person. I hope you’ll try the game yourself and find it as capturing as I have.

Review: GLAARE - "Your Hellbound Heart"

When we interviewed GLAARE back in 2018, outside of the now demolished Tonic Lounge in Portland, we were not prepared for the live show we were about to see — the energy of the flashing lights and the fierce movements of the band were not quite what we expected from a project that is so steeped in the dreamy atmosphere of post-punk synth music. For me, it reframed their first album, To Deaf and Day, in a way that shifted from darkly dreampop, to a kind of sinister vulnerability. Tracks like “Ruins,” which start punchy and active are overtaken by a stressed and almost painfully maudlin performance by not only lead singer Rachel Pierce, but the rest of the band too. Perhaps I’m nostalgic for live shows, after a long year of streaming concerts and festivals, but when the new GLAARE album was announced, all the excitement and intensity of their performance flooded back to me. 

Your Hellbound Heart has a bright and grotesque cover. Not Pharmakon grotesque, where the sweaty bodies pile over each other and give me a sticky, queasy feeling, but the washed out neon grotesque of a late-80s digital underground. Fingers in a pink mouth, aggressively. It’s an image that fits the album musically, but also communicates so much of the themes in each song. Love and vulnerability, aggression and for-better-or-worse, aging and that feeling when you just want to leave town forever.  

From the first moments of “Young Hell,” it is clear the production is huge. The blend of post-punk, heavy reverberated guitar, noisy atmospheric pads, and electronic drums — something that was so key to the sound of To Deaf and Day — has been fine-tuned to an almost overwhelming wash of glamorous tension.

Post-punk, which has been going through a decade-long explosion in popularity, does not quite describe GLAARE. In the same way that bands like Hante. or All Your Sisters have shifted into something more unique than the larger scene label, Your Hellbound Heart feels characteristically unconcerned with sticking to the conventional wisdoms of what you might think of as post-punk. On “Divine Excess,” for example, the synth melody is much closer to computer-music or bedroom-pop than the big washy synths used on “Young Hell,” or the more guitar driven, classic sound of “Mirrors.” Then, a track like “Buyers Remorse” will hit and, while it sometimes feels out of place next to previous tracks, it bangs. The trance gate that leads the track is layered on and subverted by more and more instrumentation. The track evolves in the way I would expect something from Boy Harsher to turn and grind into that deep close-your-eyes-and-drift feeling. The dark room, the crowd all around you, swaying. I cannot wait to see this song performed live.

After a fluid mix of heavy drums and atmosphere — some dance tracks, some big moods — a drumless soundscape takes us home. It isn’t sudden; the plucky, single-note rhythms that filtered through the entire album come to a close in a slow wave that disappears into nothingness. “I guess I’ll just be happy” are the last words we hear, then the music fades out, and it’s over.

GLAARE is a band I forgot I was so in love with. From To Deaf and Day, which was a strong debut for a collection of experienced and lived musicians, to Your Hellbound Heart, where the production and sound design is second only to the emotion and tension that lies in every synth stab and pad, GLAARE have easily slipped back into my everyday playlists. Rachel Pierce is a force on stage and I think a lot of that energy has been captured in the vocals on this record. Your Hellbound Heart is a strikingly beautiful and subtly uncomfortable record that I feel will only be more intense in a loud, live environment. 

GLAARE’s sophomore album, Your Hellbound Heart, is out on April 30th via Weyrd Son Records. You can pre-order it now on Bandcamp.

Reveiw: Amulets - "Blooming"

In the summer of 2020, I was flashbanged, chased, and screamed at by the Portland Police, marching not far from my own neighborhood. The experience left me reeling, having trouble sleeping, and, for a while, I had a hard time processing music like I normally would. In this time, I started listening to ambient music on repeat; Crystal Quartez, Marcus Fischer, and Amulets became the soundtrack for my weeks.

It was a chaotic time. The quarantine lockdown was only a few months old, and after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, protests demanding justice and racial equity filled streets across the country. For Randall Taylor, the artist behind Amulets, it was also a moment of personal upheaval. This was the backdrop of Amulets’ new album, Blooming.

Blooming is an interesting and complicated album. Tonally, it feels darker than previous work by Amulets. The first track, also titled “Blooming,” enlists heavy, pounding guitars that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Holy Fawn or Planning For Burial album. It firmly announces that we’re hearing something new and different. What sounds like distorted screams roar under a sparkling soundscape punctuated by the songs of birds. It’s emotional, it’s heavy, but as its title implies, there’s also a sense of rebirth and hope to it.

The long, beautiful droning textures underpinning “New Normal” create a sense of anxiety and waiting – through the morphing unending tones, you are left wondering what comes next. Strings enter, and with them a feeling of sadness. The layered textures create a sense of loss at what came before as we settle into the wait.

When the pandemic started, I was living alone in a studio apartment. From March until October, I didn’t have any in-person conversations – no human contact that wasn’t mediated by a screen or a pair of headphones. I had all the time in the world, but a complete inability to focus or concentrate on anything. An endless holding pattern – waiting for some unseeable end to this isolation.

In “Heaviest Wait,” Amulets continues the heavier tone of “Blooming.” Growling bass that would be at home in a Ben Frost composition underpins the track, creating a seething feeling that plays against the soft twinkling guitars that float over the top of them. It feels like anger and anxious hope – maybe something will give, maybe change will come, but in the meantime all that can be done is to wait.

A few weeks into the pandemic, I started to get hopeful that this crisis would spark some mass change. Unemployment was skyrocketing and it was clear that there were no real safety nets to help people through the crisis. People finally were seeing what essential work was – what would we do without the grocer? Without the delivery driver? The farm worker? Jobs that were treated as low wage and low skill were finally seen as the piece of critical infrastructure they were. Maybe, I thought, we would see the failings of our system and through some mass political awakening we would restructure ourselves into a more fair and more thoughtful society. 

“Tears in the Fabric” is testing the waters, putting one foot in front of the other, searching for solid ground as it moves forward. Slowly intensifying drones, distorted bass, and sweeping guitar march into destruction as the song builds. Repeating mechanical sounds rip at the fabric of the track, until it gives way back to that searching, careful feeling.

I feel like I barely remember life before the pandemic. I can think back to going to shows, sitting in a movie theater, seeing my friends, but it all feels fuzzy and unreal. Even with the vaccine in my arm, it’s hard to imagine ever doing the things I did before. What does it feel like to be in a room with 200 other people now? What does it feel like to give a friend a hug? How terrifying will intimacy be after COVID killed more than 2,400 people in Oregon, 561,000 people in the US, nearly 3,000,000 world wide?

The textures of “Collapse in Memory” feel like they’ve lost sight of the hopefulness of some of the earlier tracks. The reversed, repeating tones feel like they’re reaching out and grasping for something, but it’s slipping through their fingers. Deep drones create a baseline of anxiety in this reaching tone. These tones build, and as the track moves towards its conclusion, are supported by a building, distorting texture, wavering left and right through stereo space. Like the previous track, it is pulling apart at the seams, but this time there’s no release back to some earlier feeling – the distortion tears you straight to the end.

Blooming is filled with beautiful and masterful compositions that, for me, really capture the feelings of the year. Anxiety, anger, sadness, a deep collective and repeating trauma that, for a long time, had no end in sight. Through the use of looping textures, drones, strings, and guitar, Amulets creates a soundtrack for one of the worst years of the 21st century.

Blooming was released on April 2, 2021 on The Flenser. You can find it on Bandcamp, or on The Flenser's website. You can also find our recent interview of Amulets here.

Review: Dreamwell - "Modern Grotesque"

I have always been a person who judges books by their covers and Dreamwell’s Modern Grotesque is no exception. Running orange and white and black, diluting to yellow, almost burnt in some places, bubbling – not quite a shape, not quite nothingness, but the swell of colors melt together to visualize emotions. The album title appears in a square of letters that don’t quite match up – MOD ERNG ROTE SQUE. Back in February, during the pre-order, I wishlisted this album but never listened to it, which seems to be the only way I can find anything at all in 2021.

Modern Grotesque begins with soft guitar and reverberated pads. Then, screaming – far away – for a minute and a half. While this is a very apt mood setter for the album that follows, and a track that leads seamlessly into the next, it could have easily been in the middle of the album (or at the end, for that matter).

My introduction to screamo/post-hardcore was the My Fictions / Aviator split, which Wes thought I would like. At the time, I was straddling Boston hardcore acts like Have Heart and deathcore beatdown bands like Emmure. But Aviator was different. Longtime readers/listeners will be very familiar with how we both feel about Aviator (a seemingly annual mourning ritual we both parade out for our listeners whether they like it or not!), so to say that Dreamwell accurately captures the feeling I had when I first heard Aviator is extremely high praise. It would be hard for me to describe the sense of excitement with every new track that came on as I ticked through this album.

The third track, “Sayaka,” reminded a lot of reviewers of La Dispute, but I feel that misses a far more interesting aspect of both the vocal performance and the song writing. There is a moment, at 1:38, where I am convinced Tool’s “Sober” was expertly slipped in for twenty seconds. What the fuck? I had backed the track up many times. It’s not the same. But it feels the same. It hits me so hard in the back of the head that I am back at a childhood friend’s house watching the Tool music video collection after his parents went to bed. The bass runs with the drums as the guitar pushes out ethereal single note melodies. But then the groove breaks down and the guitar melody gets faster. The vocals, too, remind me of Tool in that moment: “I need someone to believe in, because I need someone to betray.” What is amazing to me about this section of the song is that, without feeling awkward or messy or out of place, what follows both reminds me of La Dispute and AFI. For a moment, a characteristically similar Davey Havok-like, high-pitched section takes us to the edge of the breakdown, to a one-word turn. The emotionality of the vocal style is never lost as it twists and turns through the different moments in the song (or throughout the album). They become a part of the vulnerability in a way that feels natural.

The album progresses, effortlessly, like the art of the album cover. Influences spill and blend into each other, burning at the edges – creating something new. While I find the listed influences for Modern Grotesque truly fascinating (thanks to this extensive IDIOTEQ.com article, where vocalist Keziah Staska reference Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want as a massive influence on writing and vocal style), they can only be a vessel for what makes this album bleed emotional depth. Like so many of the bands they credit, Dreamwell isn’t here to hide deeply personal elements of their life. Sometimes it is steeped in metaphor, like in “Plague Father, Vermin Son,” when Staska sings: “This anxiety’s a black stone you vomited out when you swallowed your children. You must have engraved the worst parts of you in my bones.” But sometimes it is more direct, like in “Painting Myself A Darker Day,” in a long line of screaming comes: “I'm just nervous for the future. Exhausted by the present. Hands are shaking and always on the verge of beating myself into the ground where I can get some sleep. I'm so desperate for sleep.”
Wes and I only made it to one Aviator show before they disbanded. If shows ever return in a real way, and Dreamwell somehow makes it from Rhode Island to the West Coast, I will not be making that mistake again. Modern Grotesque, played start to finish, gets me so amped to bang my head that it's hard for me to even imagine how wild the live experience will inevitably be.

Dreamwell managed to capture everything about my favorite bands and distill it into a release that feels both nostalgic and progressive. From riff-heavy bangers like “Painting Myself A Darker Day” to the peak-Aviator meets Our Lady sad chaos of the titular track, Modern Grotesque is an album that greatly rewards multiple listens. While a lot of the core members worked on their debut album, The Distance Grows Fonder, Dreamwell has made something entirely new with their sophomore release. I would have been perfectly happy with a very competent screamo album (which I think their debut album is), but Dreamwell have shown us that there’s more to be made of the genre yet.

Modern Grotesque was independently published by Dreamwell. You can find it on Bandcamp.

Review: Saturate Records

Longtime listeners and readers of Talking To Ghosts will be familiar with my love of Saturate Records. Going back to 2012, they were a jumping on point for my introduction to bass music as a genre broadly. At the time, I wanted to find something that scratched some of the same itches as aggressive American dubstep, but also something that I could find more artistic interest in. Juke, 2-step, and especially future bass really hooked me, and this led me to the artist Krampfhaft, which in turn brought me to Saturate Records.

Saturate Records’ free compilations became a staple in my repeat listening - Saturated! Vol. 3 introduced me to Luisterwaar, G Jones, and Subp Yao. Vol. 4 introduced Deadcrow, Mad Zach, and Ethan Glass. Later releases, like Frenquency’s Greyscale and Starkey’s Odyssey Five, became instant favorites.

A couple years ago, before we entered this long quarantine, I started going to a bass music night regularly here in Portland called Wake The Town. Located in the basement of The Liquor Store, I’d show up around 10:30 and dance until close, around 2:30 in the morning. It didn’t feel like home in the way the industrial nights had when I was younger, but it was still a wonderful and physical escape – it was a feeling I had forgotten as I got tired of hearing the same goth songs over and over every week. Every month was something new, something I hadn’t heard before, and it all made me want to move.

At some point I stopped keeping up with Saturate’s new releases. Part of this is inevitable - I am constantly trying to find new and interesting music – but part of it was that as time went on, Saturate was focusing more and more on a post-trap sound that, while still fun, was a little less interesting to me than the weird syncopated experimentation of the earlier future bass releases. The music felt increasingly predictable, and that just wasn’t where I wanted to spend my listening time.

Recently, Michael put me back on to Saturate, sending me a few of their recent releases. They were pretty post-trap focused, as I expected, but I was surprised by a strange feeling of nostalgia that took over when I put them on. Every drop, every triplet snare roll, made me want to move in the way that all those nights in the Liquor Store basement made me want to move.

Saturate’s most recent release, Syntax Error by SIGKILL is just completely nasty - the song “Diesel” in particular trades the traditional post-trap 808 with a huge distorted saw that just rips through the mix and begs you to go wild. “Nah Nah” opts for a more drum and bass inspired beat to underpin the track, throwing screaming samples and synths on top to great effect.

Malware by Zack Hersh, released in October of 2020, scratches some of those same itches - dripping acid leads over huge distorted bass and syncopated rhythms brings back incredibly sensory-specific memories of dance club air, humid from a hundred and fifty sweaty bodies pressed into each other going wild over some previously unheard track.

The more I dig into Saturate’s recent releases, the more I’m overcome by this deep and intense nostalgia. I miss those early moments of the evening, where the DJs are playing more experimental tracks. I miss the radiant energy of people enjoying themselves. I miss escaping to the cold rain outside for a few moments to cool off from the heat of a packed basement. The longer this quarantine goes, the more intense these feelings get – the memory somehow becomes more sharp and more distant. It’s hard to know how to process this nostalgia – is it a hope for things to come back soon? Or instead of looking back should I look forward, and hope that some strange and interesting change happens in how we approach clubs and shows? 

As long as that remains a question, as long as resolution is pushed into the endless horizon of this quarantine, music from labels like Saturate will continue to spark these complicated nostalgic feelings for me. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to shake ass to Pixelord in the privacy of my own home.

Saturate Records is a label based in Hamburg, Germany. You can find their many releases on Bandcamp.

Review: La Dispute

The first La Dispute album I heard was 2014’s Rooms of the House, which constructs a fictional group history that interconnects time and location. In an interview with Noisey’s Mischa Pearlman, frontman and lyricist Jordan Dreyer says he aimed to “capture the way that objects retain history and a shared memory and can kind of create this sort of time travel when you consider them.” Struggling with writer’s block, Dreyer and a close friend went to thrift stores in his hometown and selected objects that looked like they had history. In the same interview, he says: “we cleared out a whole room in [my parent’s] house and we spent some time arranging these objects and taking pictures, partly to document the process but also trying to delve deeper and get myself out of that funk.” Some objects, those that were found in the family’s attic storage, were more directly personal, but as the story became a meld of fictionalized experience and Michigan history, the line between personal and found objects began to shape a new narrative. The meaning became less about the direct memory of the object and, perhaps, where it was from or who it once belonged to, but about what it could mean, sentimentally, to a person.

In the early months of 2019, I was on a family trip to celebrate my father’s retirement. He wanted to go, with the entire family (and our partners), back to Hawaii, where I’d spent my teenage years. It was, for him, one of the last times he felt we could be together in a place that was sentimentally special for him. He had served in the US Navy, for a short time, in Hawaii. He was married there once. And we returned for about five years starting in 2001. For me, despite being a tropical vacation, in a way that I’d never really travelled before, it was still a place filled with teenage memories. Some good – like when, with the encouragement of a much older friend, I played my first show as a solo industrial musician before a popular dance night. You could smoke inside then, and bars didn’t have an age limit to attend, so the room was mostly filled with friends sneaking drinks under the tables. But some memories were bad – like when I decided being asleep on the wrong bus was better than sleeping at the Ala Moana bus station and ended up on the other side of the island from where we lived. The bus driver woke me up and said he was leaving and I could stay if I wanted, but it would be another hour before the next route started. I can quickly recall the deep loneliness I felt then, smelling like old cigarettes and beer, wearing a trenchcoat and torn fishnets. Faded eyeliner. Tired, but unable to sleep for more than a few minutes.

As we drove through the center of the island – along freeway cutting through green mountain rifts – from the commercial, tourist-heavy Honolulu to the smaller towns of the North Shore, I could only think of one band who could embody what I was experiencing. At once, nearly equally: regret, history, beauty, and a sense that I was, and have been for a long time, in a much better place. Older now, it seemed that I was more sentimental about the way this place lived in my history than I thought. In the Noisey interview, Dreyer says, “I’m a really sentimental person which makes packing things up pretty difficult. So there was this time period of picking things up and suddenly being 18 again or in a different location or remembering something I had always planned on doing and never got around to.”  This resonated through all the songs in the La Dispute discography to me all at once. From Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair when Dreyer says: 

“I think you saw me confronting my fear, it went up with a bottle and went down with the beer, and I think you ought to stay away from here. There are ghosts in the walls and they crawl in your head through your ear,” 

to Here, Here. III when, as if lost in memory, Dreyer speaks far from the listener: “I should’ve stopped to paint our picture. Captured honest pure affection. Just to document the difference between attraction and connection,” or in Panorama, as the narrator reflects on death, when we hear: “[I] never needed to live and suffer through the pain; all the tyrannies of grief. If I ever do, will I even have the strength to do anything?”

Rooms of the House is the kind of tragedy that embodies most family histories. Small tragedies that shape the way a group of people splinter or stay together. From the first track, where a storm crashes through Terre Haute, Indiana, separating a family from each other to “Woman (In Mirror)” where a house is being put together for the first time. Moving in. Creating new sentimental space. 

“In the bathroom, off the kitchen, leave the door ajar in a brand new dress. Let me watch, put your makeup on. let me in, give me holy privileges. There’s a dinner thing, Thanksgiving. Dress up nice, make a dish to bring. There are moments here, only yours and mine. Tiny dots on an endless timeline. All the motions of ordinary love.”

Listening to the sad songs in La Dispute’s discography, I told myself: remember this. Allow yourself to reflect and miss it. Let in all the things that you’ve kept out for so many years. Growing up, making mistakes. Write it all down, be honest.

I was quiet for a lot of that trip. An hour at a time in the car, I sat in the backseat trying not to fully disconnect from the experiences we were having as a family, together. There were roosters in the streets. It rained nearly every morning as the sun came up. I sat on the porch with my father reading, trying to imagine what it was like to have two adult sons and be in the early days of retiring from a job I’d held for forty years. In AirBnB’s it’s easy to see yourself outside of your space because nothing in the house is yours. You have luggage, you have the things you could fit in the car, but nothing else. I don’t remember the objects in the houses we stayed in, but I remember finishing a book early in the morning when everyone else was asleep. Not knowing what else to do I laid and listened until the rain stopped. Palm fronds in the wind.

When I tell people about La Dispute, I try to tell them about the writing. But the writing isn’t alone. The writing is good – it’s thoughtful in a way I feel is deeper than a lot of bands, even in the screamo/hardcore genre, which tends to be ripe with emotional vulnerability. The music is made to fit the lyrics so well. It has to be. The emotions are only as strong as the soundtrack behind them, and the soundtrack is only expressed through words at times. Silence comes – quiet strumming of the guitar, a tiny organ, a trumpet – and the lyrics drive the scene. But sometimes it feels so loud that the words don’t make sense. They scatter, as the music becomes frenetic and the tempo changes, embodying the way a moment in your life can shift quickly, maybe when you least expect it. From sitting quietly alone with a notebook to screaming at the top of your lungs in a storm, the visceral nature of the album is expertly crafted to reach the realities of existence.

I believe Rooms of the House is the most thematically consistent album La Dispute has put out to date. Panorama, which is their most recent album, has a more consistent tone and musical arc – the songs flow through an ethereal environment, presenting moments as reflections and questions instead of histories. But if I had to start someone out on their discography, I would choose Rooms of the House because I think if you sit with it, and let it in, you’ll find the kind of reflection that makes art in this form personal. The stories are not your stories. The emotions are not your emotions. But they could be.

La Dispute’s discography is available on Bandcamp.