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.
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
37. Drudkh (841 plays)
Top track (67 plays): Fate, from The Swan Road (2005)
Ukraine was my gateway into black metal. My earliest exposure to bm in general was met with a closed mind; I remember picking up IX Equilibrium not long after it came out, hearing nothing but distortion and blast beats, and wondering what all the fuss was about, as if its brilliant classical component was non-existent. But somehow Nokturnal Mortum’s Goat Horns blew my mind on first exposure, when I was still a teenager rocking out to In Flames, Opeth, Iced Earth and the like. That pagan spirit screaming murder beneath a wall of chaos struck me with more force than “satanic” or “progressive” bm ever would, then or now. I spent a substantial chunk of my paychecks at The End Records in the years that followed, and I was not searching for “black metal” so much as “Ukraine”. The consequence was that I got to enjoy bands like Drudkh, Hate Forest, and Astrofaes before it was “cool” to do so. (Let’s face it, hype always influences our perspective on a band in one way or another, whether we like to admit it or not.)
Drudkh quickly became my second favorite band in that scene after Nokturnal Mortum, and what I have heard in them over the years is nothing like the steady degradation from Forgotten Legends downward that supposedly “old school” fans are inclined to proclaim. I don’t know why so many people see Drudkh as a one-track band. Perhaps it is because the rate at which they release new material softens perception of the major shifts in their evolution as artists. Handful of Stars (2010) was the only album on which fans actually had to stop and go “wait, is this still Drudkh?”, and the band answered that question decisively with the Slavonic Chronicles EP. But if you listen to Drudkh as a band who played the same solid thing for four or five albums and then got too successful and lost their touch, you’re fairly misguided. It’s true that their first three albums have a lot of similarities. I sort of feel as though their vision on all three was roughly the same, with Swan Road (2005) marking the point at which they had enough recording experience to really make their sound fully capture that vision. The band has rarely repeated the same sound since. Blood in Our Wells (2006), my personal favorite, was a tremendous shift in favor of their pagan undertones, with songs like “Solitude” and “Eternity” crushing the listener through anthems more than atmospherics. Songs of Grief and Solitude (2006) was perhaps the best folk interlude album in black metal since Ulver famously did it, and Estrangement (2007) completely revisioned their sound, replacing characteristic deep plods with rabid, shrill blast beats and grittier production. Microcosmos (2009) was a significant change in production towards the other end of the spectrum, and I rather doubt the gut-wrenching quality of “Ars Poetica” (a song I still think has an almost screamo vibe to it at the climax) would have hit home so forcefully otherwise.
Drudkh’s trip to France on Handful of Stars (2010) may have left some fans disgusted, but it would be frankly stupid to call a band so consistently open to change “sell-outs” the moment their vision failed to reflect stereotypical expectations of aggression, masculinity, whatever the fuck tr00 cvlt dandies demand. And anyone who thinks Eternal Turn of the Wheel (2012) was some grand return to the good old days is in stark denial of the (I think quite intentional) persistent French influence underlining this newest chapter in their discography.
If I seem to be taking a defensive stance here, it might be in part because I’m arguing against my own initial inclinations. I’ve made the shallow mistake of blowing off Drudkh as washed up many times before, and I never fail to regret it once I’ve given the album in question substantially more time to grow on me. (My initial review here of Eternal Turn of the Wheel was cautiously negative. Today I would say it’s great.) I think over the years I’ve developed some boneheaded stereotype of Ukraine as a third world nation–an opinion based mainly on Ukrainian Americans whose pseudo-heritage reeks of self-debasing Cold War propaganda and “world music” zines. (“Only my American non-profit organization can preserve the endangered culture of our pathetic, eternally oppressed, utopianly pacifistic Slavic ancestors! I’ll give you a cultural awareness award and my new Carpathian-Caribbean fusion cd! Buy my shitty handicrafts! Send money!”) I try to forget about it and remind myself that these people are the ultimate American idiots with no actual connection to the people they pretend to represent, but I still find it hard at times to give Slavic musicians the intellectual credit they deserve. Roman Saenko and co are actually among the most intelligent musicians of our generation, and when I remind myself of that and revisit their discography, I realize again that it has been consistently solid from start to finish.
Ok, to say that my latest musical obsession comes directly from Pacific Rim shouldn’t be quite a surprise. I’ve been so hyped about Guillermo Del Toro’s valentines card to all things mecha and daikaiju that it is only logical that it should progress right to it’s soundtrack. The latest “Song of the Day” is the awesometastic and auralgasmic opening theme song to Pacific Rim composed by Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi featuring the lead guitar stylings of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.
The “Pacific Rim Theme” is quite the homage to the classic mecha and giant robot anime series of the 70’s and early 80’s. It doesn’t go for the recent trend of classical-based opening credits song with the latest mecha series from Japan, but it instead goes for the full-on rock’n’roll treatment. It’s mostly brass and strings with some cameos from the horn section. It also makes great use of the electronic style that evokes early John Carpenter and some of the scifi action films of the early 80’s.
It helps to have Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine doing lead guitar duties throughout the piece.
In the film, the Jaeger pilots were seen as rock stars by the public and this theme made damn sure that we know that when it plays out in the beginning.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
38. Split Lip Rayfield (789 plays)
Top track (46 plays): Thief, from Never Make It Home (2001)
Featured track: Barnburner, from Split Lip Rayfield (1998)
I chose the soundtrack to my four years in Texas appropriately: 92.5 The Outlaw. Poor San Antone lost its favored child–the only country station in the area that focused specifically on bands from Texas and the surrounding region–about a year after I left. (The owners thought they could make more money by instead offering another ultra-right Rick Perry-worshipping neo nazi talk show station.) Well, I didn’t actually ever hear Wichita, Kansas-based Split Lip Rayfield on The Outlaw anyway, oddly enough, but I did stumble upon them while listening to last.fm radio playlists of Texas country bands. It’s not like I’d never heard boisterous, edgy folk music before; the stuff The Outlaw was spinning had more balls than half the heavy metal out there. But to hear it in bluegrass was still a bit of a novelty to me at the time, and to hear it with this degree of technical proficiency blew me away.
They/their label unfortunately seems to have fallen pray to that fallacy that non-mainstream file sharing diminishes revenue–as if people just randomly buy albums from groups they’ve never heard without sampling a track or two first–so I can’t offer any studio selections, but the live video I’m showcasing here was one of the first recordings of the band I ever heard. In retrospect, it was a huge influence on my own personal guitar style. A bit of guitarist and singer Kirk Rundstrom’s total disregard for any supposedly necessary point of transition from acoustic to electric guitar has resonated in everything I’ve written or performed since. Sad to say, he tragically passed away of esophageal cancer right around the time I started listening to them. Rest in peace.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
39. Camera Obscura (786 plays)
Top track (228 plays): Country Mile, from Let’s Get Out of This Country (2006)
Featured track: Razzle Dazzle Rose, from Let’s Get Out Of This Country (2006)
The presence of Camera Obscura on my decade-spanning last.fm charts might be the only fluke in this series. They basically got here because I listened to “Country Mile” on repeat for about 12 hours one day. Let’s Get Out of This Country is the only album I’ve really listened to extensively in their discography (they just released their fifth last month), and while I did get the pleasure of seeing them live once, I can’t say I know much about the band. But I do think this album is absolutely delightful–a little hidden ray of light in my mostly heavier music collection that warmed my heart the first time I heard it and still does today. Its retro vibe feels oddly more authentic than any of the actual classic pop sounds it replicates, made fresh by a heavy dose of 2000s indie aesthetics and Tracyanne Campbell’s angelic vocals. Let’s Get Out of This Country takes me back in time so vividly that I swear I remember growing up surrounded by the wallpaper on the album’s cover. It’s flooded with innocent ennui, played out in front of a kitchen window on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Its depression is refreshing and nostalgic, replaying some childhood memory in which boredom seemed to be the worst thing life had to offer.
