The gap between fully original studio albums from Mark Kozelek, AKA Sun Kil Moon, AKA Red House Painters, has been fairly long over the last several releases. Old Ramon in '97, Ghosts of the Great Highway in '03, and April in '08. This ignores cover albums like Tiny Cities and solo acoustic performances like Lost Verses, which have been pleasantly frequent. New material from Kozelek you have to wait for, however. Thus, I was taken by surprise when Kozelek released Admiral Fell Promises, his third studio album of fully original music under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, just two years after April. I didn't know it was out till after release, actually, because I simply didn't expect anything for quite some time.

Admiral Fell Promises is different from Ghosts and April, however, because where those two are full-band albums that see their songs stripped down to classical guitar finger picking and vocals for live performances, Admiral is just Mark Kozelek, one, or at times two, nylon-string guitars, and his vocals. It's his live performances brought back to the studio. He's also showing off his most flashy finger work to date; the man can play, that is for certain, but it never comes close to taking over any of his songs. There's also a different style to the album; it doesn't sound like flamenco, by any means, but it has a sort of foreign tinge to it, and isn't the rock-based kind of music he's known for. It sounds like it was tailored around the classical guitar he plays the album on. Outside of those small differences, however, this is Mark Kozelek. The songs are longer, somber, nostalgic pieces about love and loss and regret. The guitar work is intricate and beautiful and lush, but the vocals mostly drive the songs.

Looking back, I actually heard a fair few of the songs on Admiral and the accompanying EP (which you get for free with the album if you order it through his site), I'll Be There, when I traveled to San Francisco to hear him play earlier this year. I'm pretty certain he played Ålesund, which is the opener to Admiral, and my favorite of the tracks there. The main riff is as technically impressive as it is pretty. Half Moon Bay, which follows it, is another highlight, and is almost catchy. The album is pretty good start to finish, though the two aforementioned tracks are the best, and they're not all absolute winners. The title track, Admiral Fell Promises, isn't bad, but it is perhaps a bit melodramatic, or corny, or something that doesn't sit completely well with me: "Come out from the burning fire, butterfly / Let me lock you in my room and keep you for a while / Could you be the answer to my every prayer? / Could you be the one for who I care?"

If there's a surprise on the album, it's, well, not actually on the album, it's on the I'll Be There EP, and it's the song Natural Light. It's a cover of a barely one and a half minute long song by the obscure lo-fi band (or actually solo musician with a band name, ala Mark and Sun Kil Moon) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. I can see the similarities - both Mark and Casiotone's Owen Ashworth reside and San Francisco, and both use fairly sparse instrumentation to back up their sometimes jarringly frank lyrics about relationships and the troubles that come with them. Just looking at some of Casiotone's lyrics in text form made my eyebrows raise a bit. It's painfully, shockingly honest stuff, though the main emotional blow from Natural Light actually comes in rather subtle form at the end of the song. I hate to ruin it, so as a sample, lyrics from another Casiotone piece: "I know your mom was your age / when she had your brother / but honey look our lives / how could we support another / we could be killers / just for one night."

I do feel there is a certain way in which Admiral Fell Promises is lacking. Specifically: it's not a full band album. I still really like Admiral, and I love Kozelek's live solo guitar performances. But his full band albums like Ghosts and April are also awesome, and usually contain my favorite material. There are some things that you can really only do with guitar and drums and bass and banjo and a string section and a mandolin and so on that you can't get with just a guitar or two. There's also the fact that whenever Mark releases a full band album, we essentially get two albums - the full band version, and the solo acoustic guitar live version that inevitably comes out later. I hate to think we're being deprived of that, and I do miss the lush instrumentation, but Admiral Fell Promises is still a good album.

Carpe Fulgur is one of those strange success stories that I can't quite figure out and wish I knew how to reproduce. By all means, they deserve it, but I still can't quite figure out how they got the word of mouth ball rolling. Carpe Fulgur, you see, is an independent start-up company that - well, based on their one not-yet-released title, anyway - translates indie Japanese games to English and releases them stateside. Their initial title is Recettear, which is decidedly niche. Only a demo has come out thus far, so it may be premature to declare them a success, but they've had lots of favorable internet press and plenty of downloads, so I think it's safe to say that they'll keep on rolling. I can't help but wonder how they managed to accumulate such internet goodwill, though.

That aside, I am entirely glad they did, because it ended up bringing the game to my attention, and I downloaded and played through the demo. There are lots of games out there that I like, and there are plenty that scratch my often peculiar video game itches, but only rarely does a game come out that feels like it was made for me, specifically. It's not often that I play a game that I could see myself making, that I wish I had made first. Obviously, I wouldn't be making such statements were Recettear not one of those games. I've even blogged about making this game before. The Atelier Iris series is essentially an old school, low production values, 2D Japanese RPG that sucks balls... except it has crafting and you sell shit at your store. More or less. I loved crafting and selling items, as well as gathering raw materials... I hated the game, the plot, the characters, and everything else.

And thus, Recettear has excised everything that I hated about Atelier Iris and left only the beautiful, sparkling gem at the center of all that shit. The game is a parody that doesn't come close to taking itself seriously: you're a young girl whose father went off to be an adventurer, and, surprise surprise, didn't come home. In order to pay off his mountain of debt, a debt collecting fairy offers to help you turn your house into an item shop. You can buy low, sell high, haggle with customers, buy from customers, and, in a nice change of pace, travel into dungeons with hired adventurers to collect both items to sell and raw materials to craft items.

It's everything I want, and nothing I don't. The game is comical, not serious, and even if it's not laugh out loud funny, it's pretty amusing. Recette, the heroine, has a battle cry of sorts: "Capitalism ho!" Between that and a simple description of the game, I was sold. There are some things about the demo that I didn't care for - like the inability to play the game in full-screen mode. Even if it is at 640x480, I'd rather have pixelated graphics than chat windows in the background and other reminders that I'm on my computer playing a video game. It just kills the immersion and escapism of it all.

The gameplay is terribly fun if you're anything at all like me, though. Features are limited in the demo - you can't craft, for example - but the list that the give you makes me salivate. I would love to get my hands on the full release, and thankfully, there is finally news on that front. The game will be released on Stardock's Impulse platform - one that I already have installed and quite like - will cost $20, and will come out September 10th. Supporting a pair of independent studios while getting a game that feels like it was built for me? A win-win, without a doubt.

Sadly and strangely, in their announced tour dates in support of High Violet, Cincinnati product The National is not actually playing a show in Cincinnati. There are three within ninety minutes, yes, but none within fifteen. Thus, it is with a slightly weighty heart that we made the customary hour and a half drive to the customary destination of Columbus. I'm not sure exactly why they get all the shows. Is it the Ohio University factor? That they are equidistant from all points in the state, and between the two other major cities? Do they have better venues? Whatever the case may be, we headed off to the Condom Communities Concert hall yet again.

I've seen The National life twice now, and their first showing places in my top five or six shows ever. They are an amazing live show, though that's not due to any one simple factor. moe. is great because they jam. Mono is great because they destroy. Dream Theater is great because they're fucking inhuman. The National, however, has a combination of things pulling in their favor. The music is fantastic, which never hurts. They don't jam, per se, but they do extended and slightly changed versions of their songs live, and, particularly, they build to ripping climaxes, with the Dessner brothers leading the way with distorted and tremolo picked ascending guitar parts. The band also brings three additional musicians - Padma Newsome, violinist, piano player, and the band's orchestrator, as well as a trombonist and trumpet player - along to help fill out the sound, giving things a very large feel live.

Thus it was no real surprise to me that The National put on another stellar show. If there was anything I didn't expect, it was the length of their set. The boys played for a solid two hours, performing virtually every song of note from High Violet, favorites from their last two full-lengths, Alligator and Boxer, and even a few older tracks, Wasp Nest from the Cherry Tree EP and Available from Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. Both were requests, apparently, which the band honored, along with a few others as well. Wasp Nest, in particular, was a highlight, as it was significantly different from the recorded version - and quite good.

I heard everything I wanted to from High Violet, including my favorite that I thought was something of dark horse, Lemonworld. Bloodbuzz Ohio was as great as I hoped, as was Conversation 16, England had a surprisingly fierce climax, and Terrible Love found its way into the encore, and was probably the best song they played from the album, despite not being my favorite on the album. It melted a face or two, I think. Other live favorites made appearances, like Abel, Squalor Victoria, and Fake Empire, but it's rare that any exceed two of their last songs, Mr November, which also destroys live, and perhaps their best song, About Today. I mean, it's great on the EP, but live it's something else completely.

There was one other surprising thing about the show: how many people were there. The last time I saw The National touring as The National (i.e. not at a get-out-the-vote rally on Fountain Square), it was in support of Boxer, and they were playing a respectably sized indoor venue that holds maybe 1,000 people, 1,500 at most. This time they were playing the same venue that I've seen Primus and Smashing Pumpkins play. It wasn't packed to the gills, but I'd guess that there were 3,000 people in attendance. I'm not sure of the why and how they became so big overnight, but it is an encouraging sight. They've earned every bit of it, and more.

Some shows simply are not meant to be. Thursday's trip to Columbus to see Gogol Bordello and Primus was, unfortunately, one of them. Luckily for myself, I've seen both bands before, so I had relatively little to lose, outside of the $35 tickets, $7 parking, and $20 worth of gas it took to get to the show.

It started with the commute up, which takes 90 minutes on a good day, and two hours on a bad one. This time around, it took three hours. Within just ten miles of our destination, traffic ground to a standstill as highway construction reduced us from two lanes to one. We took a detour, and were doing fine, until traffic ground to a standstill as road construction reduced us from two lanes to one. By the time we arrived at the amphitheater, it was 9PM, and no one was on stage. That was because Gogol Bordello, half of the ticket I'd purchased, had already taken the stage, played a set, and left the stage. I knew it would happen by the time we were halfway to Columbus, and I almost felt like turning around and going home.

But hey, we were at the show, so why not enjoy Primus? It's the the third time I've seen them, and obviously the farthest departed from their glory days. Yet, somehow, the crowd was the largest I've ever seen for a Primus show. The appeal of Primus never ceases to amaze me. This is, by my math, a band that should be playing to crowds numbering in the low hundreds after twenty years of touring. They play some uncategorizable hybrid of funk and metal, dominated by Les Claypool's bass and topped off by Ler's atonal, never-the-right-note, never-the-chord-you-expect guitar playing. I think they're great, but it always shocks me that more than a few thousand people like them. The crowd was at capacity, likely in the neighborhood of four thousand, and they haven't put out a new album in something like a decade, and haven't recorded any new material in years. It boggles my mind.

The crowd was also as eclectic as any I've ever seen at a Primus show. Hippies, hipsters, music nerds, metalheads, and even a white-haired man in his fifties dressed in nice business clothes - every demographic seemed present. Hilariously enough, when I went to the bathroom, there was a little banter flying around, and someone said something to the effect of, "hippies don't know anything but who Jerry Garcia is!" The speaker then turned around to find himself chest to chest with a hippie, who asked him precisely what he was saying about hippies. Minutes of awkward and mutually drug-addled conversation followed in which the first speaker tried to convince the second that he was a hippie, too, at heart ("Look at my Humphries McGee shirt! I've been to twenty-five shows!"), and then, once they were presumably on the same page, he bitched about the pitfalls of being a hippie. "I mean, people assume, just because you're a hippie, that you do a bunch of acid. I mean, look, I like acid, and I do it a lot, but it just sucks how people stereotype you, man." Speaking of, I was practically bathed in a steady stream of second-hand marijuana smoke. I don't think I've ever been a show so rife with weed, and that includes my days doing the jam band thing.

So, minus the pot smoke, I was feeling relatively up when Primus took the stage, Les in a top hat and rather into the music, Ler a little low in the mix but still doing his crazy thing, and, unbeknownst to us at the time, original original Primus drummer Jay Lane behind the set. They played a few lesser-known songs, opening with Pudding Time. About four songs in, they started to play American Life, the first song of Primus's that I really liked, the one that got me into them, and one with a bass line that mesmerizes me to this day. And that, unfortunately, is where the evening took its last and perhaps most devastating dive.

Halfway through the song, Les more or less stopped playing as the rest of the band kind of went on, and he said something to the effect of, "so, it appears the tiny-penised one among you has reared its ugly foreskinned penis head." I was confused and trying to figure out what was going on. "One of you has decided to throw a beer bottle at me," he went on - and these are vague recollections, not direct quotes, for the record. I groaned, and the audience booed, and Les ripped into the thrower, saying that he hoped someone around him who had seen him throw would have an sentimental discussion with his rectum. It was hilarious, and the crowd cheered, but the damage had been done, and the show was half-ruined.

This is a long-standing pet peeve of Les's, and for good reason. Personally, I cannot fucking fathom the mindset of the kind of jackhole who would pay money to go see a band that they presumably like, and then proceed to throw a bottle of beer at the lead performer, potentially injuring him and damaging his equipment, not to mention fucking up the song in progress. I suspect I'm not stupid enough to ever comprehend said mentality, but it, sadly, is quite common among Primus fans, it would seem. At the very first Frog Brigade show I went to, someone threw something at Les at some point - a cigarette butt, perhaps - and he responded similarly. I heard a few concert bootlegs of similar things happening, as well. At one Frog Brigade show a little further on, he remarked that he liked the hippie crowd, and he liked playing for the hippie crowd, because they danced, while Primus fans threw shit at him.

I think he handled it well, and he tore the man a new asshole (verbally), but I almost wonder if responding at all doesn't provoke more such incidents in the future. Jackholes often seem to do dickheaded shit just to get a reaction, and I wonder if that's not what's occurring, here. Regardless, I can't blame him for being pissed off. Les continued to say that getting beer all over his gear knocked him out of his head space a little, and that he took such actions as a sign that people weren't enjoying the song, so they stopped playing American Life, much to my disappointment. I felt pretty shitty for Les, really, and from then on I'd cringe and cross my fingers whenever I saw a can of beer fly into the air. Speaking of, the pit looked like a wasteland of humanity. Beer cups were being thrown on a minute by minute basis; I'm surprised more didn't hit him.

Primus picked up with a cover of an eccentric Police song, Behind My Camel, and an understandably pissed Les slapped his chords hard and perhaps even a bit off time. They continued to play a set rather heavy with odd favorites, eschewing most of the, uh, radio favorites from the Primus catalog. At one point he brought out the Whamola and jammed with Jay Lane, and at another point Eugene Hutz and a few other members of Gogol Bordello came out and helped Primus out with a cover of Tom Waits' Big in Japan. They played Harold of the Rocks, Here Comes the Bastards, John the Fisherman, Frizzle Fry, and even finished American Life. It was a loose, rocking concert, with the band jamming out all of their songs, playing nothing exactly like it was on the album. You could tell, however, that Claypool just wasn't into it anymore.

At another point late into the evening, he once again more or less stopped the music, and explained to us all that the beer thing was really bugging him still. He said that this seemed like a nice crowd for the most part, and it was a lovely venue, and a lovely evening, and that he shouldn't have to put up with this horseshit, and neither should we. "People keep asking me, 'when are you going to do some more Primus, Les?' 'When are you going to do more Primus?' And this is why I don't do it anymore," he continued (rough quotes, again). "People don't throw shit at me at my other shows. There's always someone with too much testosterone, so much that it creeps up into their brain and fucks the whole show up. And so, I'd say to those people: stop buying my shit. Stop listening to my music, stop buying my CDs, stop coming to my shows."

The crowd cheered wildly at that, and I suppose that was some consolation to him, but it was probably small consolation. The Primus crowd, eclectic as it is, large as it is, die-hard as it is, has a significant portion of fuck-heads in it. If there were any doubt, trying to get out of the parking lot and being aggressively denied any help in merging confirmed this. I wouldn't be surprised if Les gets hit with another bottle of beer on this tour, and I wouldn't be surprised if Primus doesn't tour again for a long while. One gets the impression, looking at Les's more recent work, watching and listening to him play live with Primus, listening to him rant at the assholes in the audience, that he has moved past this. Primus is in the past. It's not his musical future. It's over, he's not invested in it anymore, and sadly and ironically, it's the fans - or at least some of them - that have helped make that the case. I feel bad for him, really. It's the kind of show that breaks one's will to see shows.

I have long been a fan of the turn-based empire-management genre. Games like Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Orion, and, most recently, Galactic Civilizations 2. There's a wonderful, horrible, addictive component to them that taps directly into the pleasure cortex of my brain. "Just one more turn, just one more turn, just one more turn..." has kept me up long past when I would otherwise go to bed far more times than I would like to admit. I guess I just love managing the shit out of empires, and I love the ability to make time leap forward and interesting things happen with the press of an "End Turn" button. Thus, when Sins of a Solar Empire came out, published by Stardock, who are all about being DRM-free, and who produced and published Galactic Civilizations 2, my most recent turn-based addition, I took note. Sins received near universal praise, and could best be described as a real-time empire-management game. When it was put on sale for a couple of dollars via Impulse a few months back, I finally bought it.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a sci-fi themed real-time turn-based empire-management game. It's essentially everything you've come to know and love about the turn-based empire-management genre - planets / cities, research trees, armies, culture, trade, resource management - except that instead of having an "End Turn" button, the game's time slowly creeps along, giving you the chance to respond to what's happening without having to do so frantically, while still maintaining constant forward progress. Sins has three resource types, three races, three primary tech trees, three types of planets, three classes of ship, and maybe three of some other stuff there. If you know the genre, you know the drill. Sins certainly has its own take on research and planet building and all of that, but none of it is incredibly innovative or unusual. What is innovative and unusual is the fact that it's a real time game with a rather enormous scale. Zoom out far enough and the 3D ship models turn into little 2D icons, the 3D planets become 2D icons, and the little details like floating debris, swarms of traffic around planets, and ship wreckage disappear.

This seems like precisely the game for me. Turn-based empire-management! Except in real time! Why not try something new, right? How could a game that's in one of my favorite genres and was roundly praised fail to disappoint? Unfortunately, even when everything seems aligned to produce a sure-fire success, things can still go wrong. I do not enjoy Sins of a Solar Empire at all. It is only vaguely more fun to me than work. All of the addictive joy that comes with the turn-based version of the genre has been sucked out. I have spent a couple weeks slowly plinking away at my second mission - I aborted the first mission after learning some of the basics of the game and getting brutalized by the game's merciless learning curve. It is on the smallest system possible, something like a size 1 out of a possible 5. I do not think that I will ever finish this mission. If I do, I doubt I will ever start another. I do not like Sins of a Solar Empire.

It's a little difficult to pinpoint what went wrong. I think there are actually a number of little things, rather than a host of big ones.

The first issue came during the four tutorial maps. They throw a lot at you. The interface isn't really overwrought, and I imagine it conveys a lot of information when you know what everything means. That said, it's entirely overwhelming when you're new to the game. There are all these different windows and numbers and graphics, and hovering over anything will tell you something, and clicking will tell you something else. Every planet in your tree on the left will show you your ships, and defensive structures, and logistic structures, and enemy ships, and whatever else. I had no idea what was going on in my first game. Part of this was due to the fact that I was drowning in information, and part of this was due to the fact that the tutorials left out some rather critical information.

Specifically, they failed to mention pirates. I didn't understand pirates until I Googled a wiki on the game and read up on them. Normally when you start a turn-based empire-management game, shit is overwhelming. But that's fine, because usually you have your little corner of the world, and you can start to build and learn at your own pace, without being threatened by other empires, at least for a time. Not so in Sins: you have to deal with pirates. The basic gist is that every so often, you'll get word that a pirate raid is forming. If you enter the black market screen, you can see how great the bounty is on each player, and you can anonymously increase the bounty on other players. When the pirates launch a little later, they'll go after the player with the highest bounty, sending a rather massive fleet of attack ships at one of his systems. Of course, the tutorials mentioned nothing of this, so I simply got blitzed with pirates several times early on, fucking up plenty of my structures, diverting my resources to half-assed defensive efforts, and otherwise ruining the game for me. I didn't know that they'd be coming, didn't understand why they were coming, and didn't know how to deal with them. I still barely knew how to play the game when hostile forces were flying at me. I do not fucking approve.

The problem of early-game assaults was perhaps exacerbated by my choice of map. The game sort of recommends a small system, which I can understand to an extent. Less planets, less to manage, less overwhelming. Of course, the downside of this - which might not even be corrected in larger maps, I don't know - is that not only are pirates breathing down your neck from the get go, your opponent is, too. Soon after barely fending off the pirates, I was hit with an attack by my enemy. Lovely! Wonderful! I'm scrambling to learn how to get a fleet together, trying to figure out how to setup adequate defenses, and then my planet is under siege. Not frustrating at all.

When all the dust had cleared, I simply started a new game, with hopes that my new found and hard earned knowledge of the game's mechanics would let me suck a little less fatally. And that did, indeed, happen. Sadly, once I left those problems behind, I ran into a new one entirely: the game moves too slow, and quickly becomes boring. Without the "End Turn" button, you cannot artificially speed up time during those lulls where you're waiting for resources to accrue or a fleet to mass. Instead, you simply stare at the screen and wait. I found crystal, which appears to be the game's bottleneck resource, quite scarce. Often I would just sit there, waiting to get more so that I could start research on a new technology, so I could in turn then wait for that research to complete, so that I then could start building a structure, and then wait for it to complete building, too.

Sins of a Solar Empire isn't a very interactive game, really. You don't really do anything in combat. You don't really do much in times of peace, other than click a few buttons to spend resources every now and then. I suppose this is, at heart, no different from turn-based empire-management games, but the key difference is that turn-based games are constant action and constant reward, with minimal waiting. Sins of a Solar Empire flips the equation, making it a game of near-constant waiting, with minimal interaction. Between that and the sometimes overwhelmingly complicated interface and gameplay, as well as a horribly steep and punishing learning curve, I find that Sins of a Solar Empire is really not much fun at all.