AMV of the Day: Protectors of the Earth (Shingeki no Kyojin)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Arleigh

The latest AMV of the Day has taken Japan and the rest of the anime-watching world by storm. I’m talking about the horror-action series Shingeki no Kyojin (“Attack On Titan”) that’s based on the manga of the same title by Hajime Isayama. This particular AMV uses the tried-and-true song “Protectors of the Earth” by Two Steps from Hell.

What is Shingeki no Kyojin?

It’s horror combined with dark fantasy, action and drama. It’s pretty much about whats left of humanity hiding behind massive walls that’s suppose to protect them from the giant humanoid-looking Titans who have no other goal but to devour every human they come across. It’s what would happen if you crossed the zombie apocalypse with giants instead of shambling corpses.

This video by LTTuall AMV does a great job of using the track from by Two Steps from Hell to create an action-packed anime trailer that shows some of the reasons why this anime series has become so popular so quickly.

Anime: Shingeki no Kyojin

Song: “Protector of the Earth” by Two Steps from Hell

Creator: LTTuall AMV

Past AMVs of the Day

Ten Years #32: Elliott Smith

Posted on August 13, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
32. Elliott Smith (946 plays)
Top track (95 plays): Southern Belle, from Elliott Smith (1995)
Featured track: St. Ides Heaven, from Elliott Smith

This October will mark ten years since Elliott Smith’s tragic death. I remember hearing the news only a few months after I started listening to him. The Royal Tenenbaums was my favorite movie at the time, and I picked up his self-titled album after hearing Needle in the Hay in the suicide scene. As if the album’s lyrics weren’t bleak enough already, the relevance of my first experience of Elliott Smith to his death added a whole new weight. It’s a pleasant if odd coincidence that the album soon became intimately tied with one of the most positive experiences of my life.

Smith died in October, and I shipped off to basic training the following month. Music deprivation–the only really challenging aspect of the whole three month process–came to an end when I was marched out of my barracks with my confiscated cd collection back in tow and shipped off to my year-long advanced training. I hopped on a plane in a bitter sub-zero St. Louis February and fell back off in the palm-tree coastal paradise of Monterey, California. Elliott Smith was spinning all the while, and it kept on playing until I left that strange and beautiful place for good. Something about the juxtaposition of Smith’s depressing lyrics and ethereal performance perfectly captured the simultaneous homesickness and bewilderment that I experienced as a rural 19 year old alone and out of his element with an enormous Army pay check, left to roam the hills of one of America’s most affluent coastal cities every night. That otherworldly vision of a serene Pacific bay surrounded by city lights will always go hand-in-hand with this album for me, and I can’t bring myself to listen to any other Elliott Smith recording without being overcome by a desire to put his self-titled back on, close my eyes, and relive the experience. It might not be exactly what Smith had in mind when he recorded it, but I would rather like to remember him for the beauty lying beneath his depression than for his death.

Ten Years #33: Аркона

Posted on August 11, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
33. Аркона (909 plays)
Top track (49 plays): Покровы небесного старца, from От сердца к небу (2007)
Featured track: Гой, Купала!!!, from От сердца к небу

It’s no coincidence that a lot of folk-oriented Slavic metal bands have more of an edge than their western counterparts. There is a spirit of primitivism and barbarism that seems to permeate these acts; while Alestorm and Korpiklaani are reveling in booze, bands like Arkona are delighting in something more savage. Grittier distortion, harsher vocals, lower quality production, and a tendency to incorporate black metal all play a role. While this has allowed a lot of Slavic folk metal bands to capture a slightly deeper, more introspective connection to their cultural roots, it has also reduced their accessibility. Arkona are impervious to this consequence; they manage to invoke that essence of savage Slavic glory while still constructing songs I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to people unconditioned to extreme metal. This is due in part to their above-average production quality (obviously lacking in a youtube rip), but more so to Masha’s wildly diverse range of sung and screamed vocals, often accompanied by a glorious operatic Russian chorus.

As with the last entry in my last.fm series, there is not much I care to say about Arkona that I did not already cover in a previous post. Their position as my 33rd most listened to band of the past decade is no accident. Hell, they’re the initial reason I learned how to transliterate Cyrillic.

Song of the Day: Mako (by Ramin Djawadi)

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Arleigh

Finishing off my Pacific Rim soundtrack trifecta is the Mako Mori theme by Ramin Djawadi.

The first two parts of this trio were the theme to Pacific Rim and the theme to Gipsy Danger. Both were composed by Ramin Djawadi (the film’s composer) and featured lead guitar work by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. My third choice and latest “Song of the Day” was simply titled “Mako”. This part of the soundtrack occurs primarily during a Drift sequence in the film that becomes the unifying thread to the relationship between Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori character and IDris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost role. Ramin Djawadi has singer and songwriter PRiscilla Ahn join him in this song as we see an important backstory play out within the Drift. It’s Mako’s past history with the kaiju and Stacker and why she’s so determined to become a jaeger pilot despite her adopted father’s reservations.

With this track we see that Djawadi can handle emotional musical pieces as well as the more hard rock and chest-thumping sections of the film’s score. It helps to have Priscilla Ahn’s melodic harmonizing backing up Djawadi’s composition which starts off gradually and dream-like before it transitions into a soaring string movement that Djawadi’s mentor, Hans Zimmer, wished he could pull off.

To say that the Pacific Rim soundtrack was just as awesome as the film it was composed for would be an understatement. These three choices were just my personal favorites. There were more throughout the 25-track soundtrack and each and everyone of them fits the film perfectly.

Ten Years #34: Hiroki Kikuta

Posted on August 1, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
34. Hiroki Kikuta (909 plays)
Top track (105 plays): A Wish, from Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) (1993)

Hiroki Kikuta–or 菊田裕樹 as I like to tag my artists–is in reality my #1 most listened to artist of the past decade, if only because Premonition from Secret of Mana has been my cell phone ring tone since something like 1999. (I actually manually recorded the song on my phone and set it up as a ring tone back before you could load mp3s.) The fact that I still have yet to tire of it is a testament to just how great the Secret of Mana soundtrack was. I regard the first half of the 1990s as the pinnacle of video game music, thanks in no small part to Square’s exquisite attention to audio at the time. Hiroki Kikuta, like Yasunori Mitsuda two years later, was something of a no name in the world of vgm who Square tasked with an enormously high-demand project and who rose to the challenge in full.

Everything I could desire to say about Kikuta I’ve already summed up in the Secret of Mana entry to my video game music series last year, so I’ll make this entry to my current post series brief. Suffice to say I think Kikuta was a brilliant composer on par with Uematsu and Mitsuda. He unfortunately made some relatively poor career choices which prohibited him from being tasked with enough high budget game projects to make his name as much of a lasting fixture in the history of vgm as these latter two, but the Secret of Mana soundtrack rightly deserves a place among the finest gaming music ever conceived.

Ten Years #35: Blur

Posted on July 24, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
35. Blur (850 plays)
Top track (43 plays): Parklife, from Parklife (1994)

It wasn’t until about 1996 that my mother decided it would be acceptable to allow me to purchase cds. Prior to that, all non-Evangelical Christian music and television was banned in our household (aside from The Beatles and Pink Floyd; she liked them as a kid, so they must have never done drugs or any of that Satanic stuff). Her lovely father was exploiting me for slave labor at that point for the fair wage of 25 cents an hour, and I found that, at $8 a pop through the BMG music distribution club, I could buy a new cd every four days. I quickly replaced all of my secret cassette recordings of radio singles with actual albums, and some time the following year that lead to the acquisition of Blur’s Parklife. I was initially appalled to find that it did not contain “Song 2”–the only Blur track that most Americans have ever heard–and considered writing to BMG demanding my money back for their faulty advertising. How dare they sell me some other cd by a band that, according to my radio, only ever wrote one song worth listening to.

Well, suffice to say I gave it a few more listens and it became one of my lasting favorites of that decade. I was oblivious to its tongue-in-cheek social commentary at the time. What I heard was a vision of some foreign, advanced culture in which people spoke in tantalizing accents and could sing about subjects other than religion without resorting to aggression. The novel experience of a world beyond a particularly self-isolating yet prominent American subculture and its proclaimed enemies (grunge music and video games–we hadn’t reinstated the Crusades yet) is largely responsible for my persistent, overly glamorous and unrealistic Europhilia today. Blur’s ability to craft a sound that perfectly reflected the modern British life they were mocking placed them at the forefront of this experience. For me at the time, the most popular band in Britain was a close-kept secret. To have grown up and realized they really were one of the most talented and creative bands of their generation is just icing on the cake. Blur remains one of my most listened-to non-metal bands today–my 35th most-played band of the past decade–and I can’t imagine I’ll tire of them any time soon.

Song of the Day: Gipsy Danger (by Ramin Djawadi)

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Arleigh

This latest “Song of the Day” will be the second of what will be a trifecta of my favorite tracks from the Pacific Rim soundtrack by composer Ramin Djawadi. The first one was the main theme from the film and featured Rage Against the Machine lead guitarist Tom Morello providing lead guitar work. This second track I’ve chosen is siply titled “Gipsy Danger”.

Where the main theme has been everyone’s favorite in the entire soundtrack it’s difficult not to enjoy the motif for the main character of the film. Let’s be honest and just admit to ourselves that the main character in Pacific Rim is the jaeger christened Gipsy Danger. The track which introduces her theme in the film actually precedes the main theme. We actually hear the “Gipsy Danger” theme right from the start of the film. It combines some of the hard rock melodies and chords from the film’s main theme, but also expanding on the deep bass tone (sounding like a fog horn blowing) that punctuates throughout this theme more than it did in the main theme. This deep sound I always thought of as the “monster arriving” musical cue. It appears not just when Gipsy Danger makes her initial appearance but also whenever a kaiju emerges from the ocean and makes landfall to cause destruction. It’s a sound cue similar to classic giant monster flicks from Japan that announces either Godzilla or one of his kaiju brethren which was followed-up by the iconic monster scream.

We get both the rock and roll and heroic sound from the main theme combined with the more ominous musical cue in this chosen track. It pretty much focuses on one of the film’s taglines about creating monsters to fight monsters. The Gipsy Danger jaeger is a monster in her own right. But then she’s our monster and we always have a fondness for monsters as long as it’s our own.

Ten Years #36: The Mountain Goats

Posted on July 22, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
36. The Mountain Goats (846 plays)
Top track (37 plays): Home Again Garden Grove, from We Shall All Be Healed (2004)
Featured track: Fault Lines, from All Hail West Texas (2002)

Back in my later high school days, when my early obsession with metal music coexisted with an active participation in games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, I remember stumbling across a 1/1 beast in Ice Age that I became bound and determined to name a pseudo-grim heavy metal band after:

I was very briefly disappointed to find that a band had already beaten me to the punch on that one. One of the things that makes John Darnielle an awesome person, though, is the very real possibility that this is no coincidence and he took his band name from M:tG too. (Probably not, given that his first album came out in 1994, but you never know.) This guy has made a guest appearance on an Aesop Rock hip-hop album and written an acoustic love song set to a Marduk black metal concert in the same year; his appreciation for the awkward and out-of-place couples with an above-average awareness of other musical scenes to conjure a constantly befuddling self-image. The first time I saw him live, before I was very aware of his works, I wasn’t sure if I ought to take the dialogue between each track as stand-up comedy or legitimate commentary by someone who was hopelessly socially inept. In retrospect, it was more the former, but the heart-felt sincerity Darnielle packs into everything he says or writes is both a quintessential part of the act and a reflection of who he really is–someone both incredibly aware and controlling of his public image and just a little bit legitimately weird. He has made his claim to fame writing sentimental solo acoustic songs with over-the-top lyrics and awkward subject matters that are simultaneously heart-felt and tongue-in-cheek. He has cultivated his awkwardness into some of the best solo acoustic albums recorded since Bob Dylan.

Lately, The Mountain Goats have evolved from a solo project to more of a full band. Last time I went to their show the audience had expanded from about a hundred to a few thousand, and Darnielle was hamming up the rock-star image with a shit-eating grin on his face the whole time. I absolutely love this guy and his works, and while I can’t say that I’ve kept up with him consistently over the years (his discography is massive), I’ve certainly listened to him enough to rank in my top 50 most played artists of the past decade. Here are the lines to Fault Lines, to give you some idea of his brilliantly bizarre lyrics:

Down here where the heat’s so fine
I’ll drink to your health and you drink to mine
As we try to make the money we scored out in Vegas hold out for a while
We drink vodka from Russia
We get our chocolates from Belgium
We have our strawberries flown in from England
But none of the money we spend seems to do us much good in the end
I got a cracked engine block, both of us do
Yeah the house, the jewels, the Italian race car
They don’t make us feel better about who we are
I got termites in the framework, so do you
Down here where the watermelon grows so sweet
Where I worshiped the ground underneath of your feet
We are experts in the art of frivolous spending
It’s gone on like this for three years I guess
And we’re drunk all the time, and our lives are a mess
And the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies
is stumbling across its bleak ending
But none of the rage in our eyes
Seems to finish it off where it lies
I got sugar in the fuel lines, both of us do
Yeah the fights and the lies that we both love to tell
Fail to send our love to its reward down in hell
I got pudding for a backbone, and so do you
La la la la! Hey hey!

Song of the Day: Orion (by Metallica)

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Arleigh

Been more than a bit listless and tired of late so what do I do to fix that than listening to some classic metal. One can’t get any more classic metal than one of the best metal instrumentals ever: Metallica’s “Orion” off of their Master of Puppets full-length album.

“Orion” would mark one of the the last great works by Metallica’s great bassist, Cliff Burton. He would pass away while on tour to promoting this album. Details of his passing could be read anywhere so will bypass that to instead celebrate one of his great achievements with this extended instrumental which just showed how great a metal bass player he was, but also just one of the greatest metal musicians of his time.

Fans of metal always wonder just how much more he could’ve contributed to Metallica’s success if he had lived. Would their later albums have been up and down in quality? Would he have gone along with the changes wrought by the band’s producer after his death, Bob Rock, whoguided the band out from their thrash metal roots and into a more pop-friendly hard rock sound. Metal will never know the answer to these questions, but if Burton had lived and remained with the band it’s more than likely that Metallica wouldn’t be the one we know now after their many stylistic changes, but probably still considered by their early, loyal fans as being pure thrash.

One thing for sure, we probably would’ve been given more extended instrumentals like “Orion”.

AMV of the Day: Let Them Eat Rei (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Arleigh

In honor of GLaDOS’s cameo in Pacific Rim as the A.I. voice of the American Jaeger, Gipsy Danger, I’ve chosen an oldie, but goodie AMV from 2008 as the next “AMV of the Day”.

This has to be the very first AMV I’ve ever seen and it was in the spring of 2008 when I attended my very first anime convention with Anime Boston 2008. The video had won Best In Show and Best Drama. It used scenes from the very popular mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, but more important to the convention attendees was the song used for the video: Jonathan Coulton’s “Still Alive” featuring the voice of GLaDOS herself, Ellen McClain.

“Let Them Eat Rei” was the name of the video and it does a great job in combining some of the dark humor from both the song and the anime, but also it’s more darker dramatic aspects. When I think about it I’m not even sure if this video had won Best Drama or Best Comedy, it could’ve won either in addition to Best In Show.