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.

Having spent a week or so playing League of Legends, and given a chance to enjoy it and let the anger simmer down, I will now attempt to review it as a game meant for enjoyment, rather than a device of annoyance for left-handers.

League of Legends is a Defense of the Ancients clone, which entails the players controlling powerful heroes, while significantly weaker AI-controlled minions do battle, attempting to knock down the opposing team's defensive structures and eventually destroy its base. The game is purely online, and pretty much purely multiplayer (single player capable Practice games were just re-enabled a few days ago) team PvP affairs. Games are 3v3 or 5v5, and each character has one passive ability, three active abilities, and one powerful active ability that you can only get when you reach level 6. A slew of equipment is available, though everyone is limited to six item slots, and you can accrue experience and gold by killing minions, random stationary neutral mobs, and, of course, other players.

The Defense of the Ancients (DotA) genre is an interesting one to me. I mean, this is a genre that was created by a single custom map for Warcraft 3. It was hugely successful, and a number of clones have been made since then, with varying degrees of success. The only DotA entry I'm familiar with is Demigod, which doesn't hold a candle to League of Legends, despite being far more polished and costing full retail price (or at least it did on release), while LoL is free, and unfortunately carries a deal of the lack of professionalism that often goes with that tag.

There were two main problems with problems with Demigod, and they are ways in which LoL obliterates the poor game. The first is that Demigod games break within five, maybe ten minutes of the start of the match, despite the match going as much as thirty minutes or an hour if you let it. Something in the way the game's designed and setup makes the rich much, much richer, and poor much, much poorer. As soon as your opponent gets a couple of consecutive kills on you, it's over: you are doomed to be a walking meatbag full of money. You'll be lucky to score another kill, and will be slowly squeezed to death for the rest of the match. That is precisely as fun as it sounds, which is to say, not at all.

LoL, on the other hand, is much more anyone's game. Victories aren't random, by any means - a team of three good players that cooperate will always smack down three poor players who don't. But just because you get a little behind early doesn't mean that you can't come back. Smart play can counter an early advantage. This actually keeps games going all the way to the end, and I've been in plenty where the momentum shifted several times, and a come-from-behind victory was achieved. Part of this is due to the existence of gold mines in Demigod - which you'll quickly lose if you're on the defensive, which means more gold for your opponent, which of course means better gears, which means more kills, and the whole system feeds back on itself. Part of it is due to the fact that in LoL you're awarded significant gold bonuses for killing characters who have had a killing streak (i.e. multiple kills without dying). And part of it is the way items work.

In Demigod, there are lots of items, the good ones are really expensive, and you have a limited number of item slots. If you want the most expensive item, you either save up for a long time to get it - which might never happen if you're on the losing side - or you settle for something crappier, which makes your chances of getting said awesome item significantly smaller, since you're back to being broke again. In LoL, powerful items are built out of other items. In order to get the Archangel's staff, you first have to get the Blasting Wand and the Tear of the Goddess, which itself is made out of a Faerie Charm and Sapphire Crystal. What this means is that you're not stuck in a hopeless, item-less limbo while waiting for the gear that you really want. You can keep up with a player who's winning, even if you don't do quite as well. And if you have the cash, you can buy the end item without having to buy all the parts, too.

The second problem with Demigod is that there simply isn't much variety. Actually, this issue isn't as simple as "LoL has more of everything." Demigod actually has far, far more maps - in the neighborhood of eight, while LoL has two, one for 3v3 and one for 5v5. And heroes in Demigod have far more skills than those in LoL, and, in fact, have more than you can get in a game, even if you hit max level. In LoL, you'll have the same five skills at max level in every game with a given character. Instead, what LoL has more of is heroes: roughly fifty-five to Demigod's eight. Even with a generous three builds to a character for Demigod (I only ever used one, maybe two per), LoL still more than doubles Demigod's character count. And while, were I reading this, I might tend to favor Demigod's many-builds approach, in practice, I vastly prefer LoL's approach. You have a huge variety of characters who are very distinct, which is far more exciting than having just eight guys.

There are more ways in which LoL has more, though. As you play matches, you'll gain experience for your Summoner (i.e. you), and you'll gain IP, one of the game's two currencies. New levels will unlock new Summoner spells, which are abilities tied to the account rather than the character. You can bring in two per game, and they're utility abilities like heal, restore mana, make defensive turrets invulnerable for a short time, teleport, and so on. New levels also unlock masteries, which are akin to talent trees in World of Warcraft. There are three trees with six levels each, and putting four points into a level will open the next one. Those, too, are Summoner tied rather than character tied, and grant passive abilities to your Summoner or your hero, like reduced ability cooldowns, increased critical hit chance, and so on.

Lastly, but certainly not least, there are runes, a new slot for which opens with every Summoner level gained. There's a large variety of runes available for purchase with IP, and they add passive bonuses to your champions as well, but are tied to you on a Summoner level. One rune might provide an ability power bonus, another might provide a smaller ability power bonus per level, which adds up to more in the late game, another might increase attack speed, and so on. You're allowed two configurations for runes, in case you have two characters (or two approaches to the same character) that you play. As with Masteries, you can reset them and reallocate your runes at any time - though you can't sell back runes you've bought.

The store contains a few other things, like characters, which can be bought for a great deal of IP, or a small amount of money (somewhere between $2 and $9, depending on the character). There are boosts to experience and IP gain, and there are character skins - which are my main complaint with the store. Generally speaking, I like the business model. The game is free to play, with ten free characters available at a time and rotating every week. If you really want to save up to buy your character, you can do it, and if you want to spend real money to get him or her right now, you can. Skins can only bought for real money, which is great, as they offer no real benefit, but - and here's my complaint - they're fucking expensive. I bought my character of choice, Morgana, for something like $4. The second costume for Morgan costs roughly $7. That's fucking ridiculous. I mean, in the end, it doesn't matter too much, as I'm not losing anything by not buying it. That said, I'd be happy to purchase it for $2. I think Riot Games is losing out on a lot of potential cash by pricing their costumes way, way too high.

League of Legends is a lot of fun to play - as long as you're not getting your ass kicked in - and there are a lot of RPG hooks within the game itself and within the larger framework of the game that make me want to play more and more. That said, there is one rather large caveat: pickup games suck. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you're on a team with idiots, disconnecters, and homophobic racist bigots, and sometimes they're on the other team and you tear them up. More likely than not, though, you'll have at least one moron of some sort on your team, one guy kicking your ass on the other team, and no one on your team will have any interest in listening to strategy or coordinating attacks.

Playing with real life friends that you're on Teamspeak with, however, is an absolute blast. I think my win percentage is something like 40% in pickups and 80% in arranged games. When all five of us are present, we rarely lose. There is nothing quite like quickly putting together an ambush, surrounding the opposing team on all sides, pouncing on them all at the same time, and obliterating all five of them in the course of twenty seconds. It is extremely gratifying. And fun. League of Legends as a single-player game is good, and at $0, certainly worth the money to try. As a game played with friends, however, it is far, far better.

Sometimes it's difficult to find something to say about a game, and sometimes these reviews all but write themselves. When it's the latter case, it's usually not a good thing for the game, and unfortunately, such is true of League of Legends.

LoL is, as the game often makes apparent, a DotA clone. If you don't know what that means, LoL never takes the time - i.e. four fucking words - to explain it to you. For reference, it's Defense of the Ancients, a mod for Warcraft III that sees each player controlling just a hero. Each side has defensive towers and AI-controlled minions that attempt to destroy the other side's forces, towers, and eventually, base, but heroes are crucial to the offensive. You kill, gain experience, level up, gain gold, and purchase gear. The mod has since become a genre unto itself, containing games like Demigod - which, for the record, is far more polished and professional than LoL, but actually much, much worse as a game. LoL notes that it's from the creators of DotA All-Stars, which I presume is another fan-made mod. This is actually quite telling, because LoL - despite being a "professional" product, in that it's free to play but has features you can purchase with real money - feels very much like a fan-made mod. Which isn't really a good thing.

The first sign of this was when I booted the game up for the first time, and it asked me something along the lines of, "Have you ever played dota before?" Note two things: dota, all in lower case, and dota, completely unexplained. I guess the question answers itself - if you don't know what dota is, the answer is no. On the very next screen, it asked something like "How much experience do you have with games like DotA?" Note the capital-D o t motherfucking capital A. That is the proper way to abbreviate Defense of the Ancients, but it's also different from the first prompt, which asked about "dota", no caps. I know this has no effect on anything of any consequence, but that shit just screams unprofessionalism to me.

After that I booted up the game launcher, hit new game, and went to the tutorial. Let me stop to explain something here: I am left-handed. I have setup Windows such that my mouse is left-handed. Right click is left click, and vice versa. It's a Windows setting, and everything inherits it. When I play The Witcher, it's left-handed. When I play Sins of a Solar Empire, it's left-handed. So on and so forth, with a few very notable, very infuriating exceptions. When LoL told me to right click to move my hero, I left clicked, since that's what a right click is for me. Nothing happened. I did it again, and nothing happened. I have run into this before, so I sighed, hung my head, waited for the anger to die down (a little), and then right clicked. My hero moved. LoL has, for whatever stupid fucking reason, hard coded the mouse to be right-handed. This is amateur, hack shit, and it fucking sucks. I actually quit the game after the tutorial, telling it I didn't want to play a practice game, and left it alone for a day. I considered dropping it altogether, and were it not for my friends playing it, I would have.

Later, I decided to give it a second try, so I booted up the game and moused-over the practice game option. Nothing happened. I clicked. Nothing happened. I bitched to one of my friends, who told me that they'd turned off practice games for no apparent fucking reason. What the fuck. It's like the game is fucking trying to make me fucking hate it. Now I'm forced to go into a real game, where I will not only burden my unfortunate teammates with my complete lack of knowledge of how the game works, and how my character works, and so on, but I'll also probably get my ass slammed into oblivion by far better players. ALSO! I cannot change my fucking machine fucking settings unless I'm fucking in fucking game, which means I can't adjust my goddamn resolution or key bindings unless there's a fucking match going on! What the fuck!

Speaking of key bindings, I got into a match and decided to rebind them from qwer, which is very cramped when your mouse is on the left side of the keyboard, to number pad 123 and so on. I clicked "bind alternate button" for my first ability, clicked number pad 1, and the game said, "nope, can't do that." I did it for number pad 2. Same response. At this point I was really wishing I had a physical copy so that I could break it over my knee and burn it - I guess the only saving grace of the game is that I didn't pay money for this amateur bullshit. Eventually I found out that the secondary binding doesn't work at all, the number pad keys don't bind at all, and sometimes the primary key binds don't bind on a whim. Press h to bind an ability to it! Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't! Next up, I bound my keys to nm,., and then played a game. Whoo, fine, it works, whatever. I got into a second game, and noticed that my third ability, bound to comma, no longer worked. I rebound the keys. Still didn't work. I cursed and told my friends that the game was a piece of shit. Eventually I rebound to jkl;, and that worked - though it took a few tries to actually fucking bind it.

At this point, I could talk about the game, which is fun enough, I guess, when you're (by which I mean I'm) not clicking the wrong fucking button because they're swapped and you can't change that, and when your key bindings work, and when you have some idea what the game is about and the character you have does, since you can't practice against bots, and when you're not getting your ass stomped by players that are way better than you, and when you're not getting your ass stomped by over-powered characters that literally kill you in less than a second despite you being max level and well geared.

I love LoL when I love it, and I hate it when I hate it.

You'll forgive me for not posting this week as I work on some updates for the site. I've coded up a new and improved comments system that no longer requires logging in or forum signups or anything like that. It's the system I should have had in place when the site launched, but you know how hindsight goes. Also: I'm a much better coder now than I was five years ago. Speaking of, maybe this will the unofficial commemoration of Why So Hostile's fifth year anniversary?

In any case, comment away. The old forum system will remain, for legacy purposes if nothing else, and the links will stay, too. I'll continue working on the back end of this comments system - and that platinum trophy for FFXIII.

I have finally beaten Final Fantasy XIII - or at least the game proper - and am currently deep within the post-game. The end of the game itself brings the question marks surrounding this game and this franchise into clearer focus, which is nice, but concomitantly puzzling. I just cannot wrap my head around this franchise.

I watched the ending, and without revealing too much, it wasn't bad. There was a twist, and there was a sacrifice, and things were not completely sparkles-and-rainbows happy at the end, which is something I like and appreciate. That said, I could not bring myself to care even the slightest bit. I might as well have watched a trailer for a game I'd not heard of for all the emotional investment I had in it - and it was a game I'd spent forty or so hours with. Part of this is due to the incomprehensible plot, which is ridiculously overwrought and spilling over with dumb, unnecessary, needlessly similar terminology. Luckily I had a friend on hand who had beaten it, and who I could ask "wait, now that's actually who?" and so on. Part of it is due to the fact that I never liked any of the characters in any fashion. Fang is kind of a badass, in a cardboard cutout sort of way, and Sazh is certainly the most human member of the cast, but that's saying very little. When it comes down to it, I just don't care. I wanted the cutscene to be done with so I could move on to the post-game.

There are two other things that bugged me as well. The first is that Square (Enix) has never been one to let plot continuity and world building get in the way of a pretty cutscene. If it looks really sweet to have tendrils of rainbowy doom shoot out of the main character's eyes, then that's what'll happen, plot holes be damned! And this, needless to say, bugs the ever living shit out of me. I was peppering the aforementioned friend with questions through the ending of the game. "Where did they get the power to do this all of a sudden? Why can't X do Y? Why do they need this to do that?" All he could really do was shrug. Square Enix does not let consistency and sense get in the way of constructing their overwrought dramatic showdowns.

The other matter that perturbed me was, well, the whole thing, really. How little it has changed since the first, er, "modern" FF I played, FFVII. They have the same plot - rag-tag band of adventurers thrown together by fate must take down an ancient evil bent on destroying the world in order to see it reborn - and the same character archetypes and the same dialog and the same conflict and the same emotions. Final Fantasy has not changed since high school. I have. This is a problem. It has grown up in virtually every other way, but the heart of it, the writing, has not matured. It's like going back to a high school reunion and seeing a girl you used to know and have a crush on, and she's a grown woman and she's beautiful and curvy and well dressed and then she opens her mouth and begins to talk and ohmydearsweetlord she's still a goddamn teenager. There's this horrible dissonance between the way the game looks and plays and sounds and the way it's written. One aspect - one crucial aspect that the game is all but dedicated to - has been stunted.

It's hard to say why this is. Maybe these games speak to the Japanese psyche, but not the Western one. I do not understand the motivations of half the characters in this. The bad guy makes absolutely no fucking sense to me. Most of the dialog and shallow grabs at philosophy are pathetic to me. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe Square Enix is catering directly to the teenage crowd, and I'm simply not the target market anymore. Maybe I'm an asshole. I don't know, but it bothers me.

And it really only bothers me because I really do enjoy the hell out of the game. I've put in at least as much time doing missions and exploring and item gathering and trophy acquiring as I have actually pursuing the plot. I have a checklist of things yet to be done, and I can all but guarantee that I'll get my third platinum trophy for this game. I love playing it, really. I just cannot find any interest in the goddamn plot.

At the end of Sigur Rós's most recent release, Heima, the DVD and double CD recording of an eclectic tour of their native Iceland, there's a scene showing a tearful parting of the band and their supporting string section, Amina. There are hugs and smiles and moist eyes and all of that, and at the time, I was quite confused. Perhaps it was explained a bit earlier in the DVD and I missed it, but I eventually picked up that the band was going on haitus after the conclusion of the tour. Given that frontman and vocalist Jonsi has released two albums in the roughly three years since Heima's release - both of them actually in the last year alone - I have to wonder if it was a band-consensus hiatus, or a the-frontman-wants-to-do-solo-projects hiatus, as I think tends to be more common, even if bands try to pretend it's the former (coughPHISHcough).

I think Jonsi's first semi-solo work, Riceboy Sleeps, written and recorded with the help of his partner Alex, is stellar. It's Sigur Rós gone ambient, and is one of the best ambient recordings I've yet heard. Jonsi's first pure solo effort - at least according to billing, as there are a few collaborators - Go, I'm not quite so enthused about. It's Sigur Rós gone techno-pop, and is to Sigur Rós what The Postal Service is to Death Cab For Cutie. It flitters around from genre to genre, but retains a Sigur Rós-lite sound while giving electronic drums and vocals more focus. The vocals are actually decipherable English at times, too, which is something of a change, and perhaps unfortunate. It's not that the lyrics to, say, Boy Lilikoi are bad, per se, they're just not very good, either. Much like the music itself, the lyrics are written more in tones and colors than in any concrete fashion. I suppose that's fine, and fits the music well enough, I just find that I prefer not having any clue what the hell he's singing about in his cracking falsetto.

The instrumentation plays out like a kind of condensed, high-speed version of Sigur Rós. There are the usual suspects - piano, bass, strings, vocals - and there are frequent appearances from lesser-used instruments as well. The flute chirps in pretty frequently, synths provide texture, and hushed horns appear on at least one song. Bite-sized Sigur Rós is really the theme here. All the emotional and instrumental granduer of an hour long Sigur Rós album are compacted into forty minutes of Jonsi; only two songs crack the five minute mark, and just barely.

The album's opener, Go Do is a bright, stomping piece that recalls Gobbledigook and Hoppípolla, and is likely my favorite of the lot. Animal Arithmetic may be the most "techno" piece on the album, and its fast-paced clickity-clacking instrumentation is something like a strobe light to my ears; it honestly makes me hurt a little. Tornado and Grow Till Tall are the album's mostly percussionless, vaguely mournful, vaguely triumphant pieces, in the vein of Andvari and Ára Bátur. Kolnidur contains the album's most full-on moment: halfway through the song there's a brief break, and then band comes back in, complete with distortion - which promptly fades within twenty seconds. There are no rock-out, wall-of-distortion moments on Go. That much, at least, is not reminiscent of Sigur.

It is perhaps unfair of me to constantly compare Jonsi's solo work to the band that made him famous, but the comparisons are inevitable. The similarities are even more prevalent here than on his Jonsi and Alex album; the distinctive vocals are there, the instrumentation is pretty similar, the range of emotions is roughly the same. Go is a decent album, and all, but I'll gladly take a Jonsi and Alex album or a proper Sigur Rós release over Go. If you're a diehard Sigur Rós or Jonsi fan, or if you've always kind of liked what Sigur Rós had going but thought they were a little too long-winded or self indulgent, Go is for you. Otherwise, I wouldn't be too concerned.

I went a fair while without getting any new CDs, and then a bunch hit at once. I've already said a few words about what is easily the most important, The National's High Violet, but I figure I might as well mention some of the others.


Gogol Bordello - Trans-Continental Hustle - I loved the hell out of Gogol's most recent CD, Super Taranta! - at least, for the first three months. After that, my interest dropped off significantly. Maybe I played it out, or maybe it was an album that was better on first impact. I've yet to figure out if Trans-Continental Hustle is the same, or the opposite - an album that grows on you. It certainly has not made the impact on me that Super Taranta! did, nor even that Gypsy Punks had. It's good, and nothing is bad, but there's no Wanderlust King, nor even a Start Wearing Purple. I know some of the songs, but none of them have really stuck. Maybe I'll get more into it later.


Band of Horses - Infinite Arms - Where Trans-Continental Hustle hasn't made much of an impact, Infinite Arms has completely failed to make an impact. To be fair, I haven't listened to it nearly enough. Still, as with Trans-Continental Hustle, in the times that I have listened to it, no songs have stuck out, and that's not because the album is amazing on the whole. It's fine, and none of it seemed bad, but nothing grabs the attention. It sounds pretty much like Band of Horses' first two albums, and while that's well enough, I think it's past time for them to evolve in some fashion. Infinite Arms is just retreading of the same ground which, given the album's lack of impact, has been tread bare.


Hammock - Chasing After Shadows... Living with the Ghost - Well, I certainly cannot complain about lack of change here. I had previously thought that Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow was the band's "sound", so to speak, and that Raising Your Voice... Trying to Stop an Echo was an aberration of sorts. Turns out I had it backwards. Chasing After Shadows sounds much more like Raising Your Voice than like Maybe They Will Sing. Maybe the ellipsis is the giveaway? The band moves away from pure ambient to a more pseudo-ambient, pseudo-rock sound. There are drums, and bass, and there's some song structure, and there are even vocals and lyrics. I must admit, I do not find that these are things that they do particularly well. While I'll take change of pace over a rehash (I guess), I find myself wishing it were more like their most recent album. This album, like the two others, isn't bad, but also isn't particularly noteworthy.

I am, unfortunately, having some mysterious coding issues at the moment that are preventing me from posting in the normal fashion. I have a post all written up and everything, but it simply refuses to go through. I'm going to take some time to try and get that figured, as well as put in some work on a new comments system that won't require registering. Hopefully I'll have everything back in working order shortly.

I dare say that that The National is one of the very best, if not the best, rock act around at present. Their first self-titled album was pretty good, but they really hit their stride and found their sound with the follow up, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, and everything since then - including the two EPs - has been golden. It makes me wonder if each new album can match the previous one, if they can keep finding something new to say, musically or lyrically, if they can continue to maintain such a high level of quality. High Violet is a solid yes to each of those statements; it sounds different from the previous albums and is incredibly good. It's getting harder and harder to recommend just one National album to someone who hasn't heard them before.

High Violet kicks off with one of the better songs on the album, Terrible Love. The low-fi distorted guitar and drum lines contrast with the clear and clean vocals, both from Matt and the backing band. It seems a quiet enough start, but by the end of the song it's pretty intense; only the presence of the vocals higher in the mix makes the instrumentation seem subdued in any fashion. A few times when I started the car with the CD in, Terrible Love came on and was in the last portion of the song, where it's just guitars and drums and bass. It was loud enough and distorted enough that I thought for a few seconds that I was listening to Mono. The centerpiece of the album is Blood Buzz Ohio, a long slow build that recalls Fake Empire and Squalor Victoria. The drums and bass drive the song, and the guitars, horns, and piano bring everything to an anthemic climax by the end of the song.

A very different song, Lemonworld, follows it, but it's probably my second favorite behind Blood Buzz Ohio. It's quieter, more subdued, and more contemplative, but the vocal line is perfectly evocative. It's subtly morose, and the lyrics paint the picture of a tired, worn-down man in need of distance from life. Conversation 16 is another highlight, and is a bit darker and more self-eviscerating. Matt broods over his own shortcomings in the song, and if I'm not mistaken, that's Sufjan Stevens in the background, providing some atmospheric wordless vocals.

It took me to realize it, but High Violet actually strays pretty far from guitar-based rock. You could certainly make the case that that's hardly anything new, as a song like Fake Empire might well be considered piano-based rock that has guitars in it. There are even more songs along those lines on High Violet, which makes me think that Padma Newsome is the most important member of The National who's not actually in The National. On Little Faith, for example, you have to try to find the guitars in most of the song, as the majority of the instrumentation is left to drums, bass, and strings. Conversation 16 is a dreamy haze of piano, synth, wordless vocals, with the guitars only floating to the top of the mix in a few spots. England starts with guitars, but is soon embellished with piano, strings, and horns, and the guitars sit as equal partners with them in the mix.

High Violet is an example of a band at their peak, both exploring new sounds and staying true to their core. Some of the songs on the album are among the best The National have ever written, and the worst songs are still solid. It's rare to see a band as consistently superb as The National, but with five albums behind them, and the last three of them spectacular, they've established themselves as the best rock act going. I dare say High Violet is a contender for album of the year, as is virtually everything The National does.

I have been to lots of shows over the years, and none of them - including Wesley Willis, Buckethead opening for Primus, and an extremely high and vaguely belligerent Tim Reynolds playing in front of footage of the vaginas of African tribal women - have had quite the weirdness factor of June 3rd's This Will Destroy You show at the Southgate House. Or, to steal words from a friend, This Will Destroy Your Opinion of Us. And, to be fair to Wesley, Buckethead, and Tim, the weirdness of the TWDY show didn't come from from the show itself so much as the aftermath, which carried on through the next afternoon. It was vaguely surreal, really, and a part of me was hoping it would keep keeping on, because it was so morbidly fascinating and entirely outside of my expectations. I only paid $10 for a concert ticket, but I got oh so much more!

As I'm sure I've mentioned many times, the best shows are ones that will make you appreciate material that you didn't care for before. The first Silver Mt. Zion show I went to was a shining example of this. The worst shows are the ones that will make you lose your appreciation for music you thought you liked. The Flobots show I attended a couple years back was one of these. I heard a song or two, thought, hey, these guys are interesting, and in town soon, so maybe I'll head to the show, enjoy it, and pick up the CD. Not only did I leave without buying the CD, the show was so bad I actually never listened to their music again. I've never had such a precipitous drop in my opinion of a band as I did for This Will Destroy You, though. I own both the albums. I own the split with Lymbyc Systym. I ordered a T-shirt through the mail. I proselytized about them here and elsewhere. Now I'm on the other end of the spectrum. The albums and shirt are in the trash, the mp3s are off the hard drive, and I'll gladly tell anyone just how terrible they are.

It all starts at the show, of course. To sum it up - and I'll give you the details in a second - the sound was awful. The drums were loud and clear, the bass was heavy but muddy, and the guitars were inaudible. I probably do have higher standards then most, but I heard people next to me making the same comments, and all four people I went with felt the same way. It completely ruined the concert for me. I was so pumped about the show and so let down about how it sounded that I actually did something I have never, ever done before: I talked to the sound guy about it. I probably weighed this decision for ten minutes. I moved around the venue, trying to find a better spot. I looked at the booth, and back. I'm not sure why I was so anxious about telling him that I thought the mix was sub-par. Usually when someone isn't doing their job well, you complain. It's not that abnormal. But I was really hesitant to say anything. I guess the result of my talking to him confirms the fears I had at the time.

He was rude to me (more details below), and I left the conversation so angry I was shaking. So now I was not just heartbroken about how bad the show was, but also quite mad. Mad enough that I stayed up long past when I should have gone to sleep so that I could type a veritable essay to the band on why I was no longer a fan. That's something else I've never done. I consider it a sign of how vested I was in TWDY - I cared enough to complain. What comes the next day is what's interesting, though, and while this is all hearsay anyway (you'll just have to trust my honesty), it would be very, very much hearsay if I didn't include the actual email. So here is what I sent to the band's email address, available on their MySpace page (their only page, really):


Hi Alex, Jeremy, Chris, and DONO,

I just got back from your June 3rd show at the Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky (right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio), and I wanted to let you know how disappointed and angry I am. In the fifteen years I've been seeing shows and of the hundreds of shows that I've seen, this is the first time I've ever actually emailed a band to say that. Part of why I'm making the effort is because I love you guys and your music. I discovered Young Mountain by way of an Amazon recommendation in June of '06, and fell in love with it. I bought a shirt via the mail, I bought the self titled album, I bought the split with Lymbyc, I blogged about the band, I posted on forums about the band, I told my friends about the band, and I forcibly made people listen to the CDs. I've been waiting for four years for a tour date within a three or four hour drive of Cincinnati, and I was extremely excited when tonight's date was announced a few months back. I bought a handful of tickets, eventually convinced some friends to go with me to the show, and drove the carload of us all down to the show. Every one of us went away disappointed and unimpressed.

The main problem was the mixing. I'm not a professional mixer, or anything, but I am a musician, and have done a fair bit of playing out, so I'm not talking completely out my ass. The drums were nice and clear, and the bass was loud, but it was muddy and mushy and extremely-low end. The notes all ran together, except when the distortion was on, and the low end of the mix in general was so high that my ribcage was rattling constantly; I couldn't really make out what the bass was playing. The electric piano was much the same - muddy and extremely heavy on the low-end. The guitars, however, were completely inaudible. The guitarist on the left - the one sitting (sorry, I really don't know who's who) - was barely audible, but I could sometimes hear him. Mostly on the songs that I knew (i.e. not the new ones) and mostly if I really strained to hear him. The guitarist on the right, the one standing, I never heard at all the entire night. At all. I know that there were mics put up against their cabs, but I honestly do not think they were being run through the PA system at all. Really. I stood front and center, I stood middle center, rear center, in front of the mixing booth, and up on the second floor balcony. I never heard the guitars. All I heard were drums and an extremely muddy low end.

I couldn't pick out the guitar at all on the new songs, and on old ones I strained to hear it, and most of the time couldn't. It robbed the songs of all of their emotion and impact, since all that was left were bass and drums. It was so bad that midway through the set, I did something else I have never, ever done in all the shows I've attended: I actually mentioned the problem to the sound guy. The sound guy in question (in case there were more than one) was a black man with dreadlocks who was probably in his early thirties. The conversation is quite fresh and my mind, particularly because it made me so mad that I was shaking. It went like this.

Me: Excuse me... I don't mean to be a dick or anything, but I'm having a really hard time hearing the right guitarist.
Sound guy: What?
Me: I can't hear the guitars.
Sound guy: How do you know that?
Me: I can't hear them.
Sound guy: How do you know how it's supposed to sound?
Me: I have the albums, I've listened to the songs, and -
Sound guy: I've been touring with these guys for over a year.

At this point he was getting kind of hostile, and I was getting angry, so I just left rather than have it turn into a fight or argument while the concert was going on.

Maybe he's been touring with you for a year, but I've been listening to the albums quite a bit for four years. I consider it a slap in the face for him to tell me that I don't know how the music should sound. I do. That's insulting. He doesn't know anything about me, but he does know that I'm there, which means I'm probably a fan, which means I probably do know the music. I don't think being a dick to fans is a winning strategy. There are plenty of ways he could have responded that would have been better. Almost any way would have been better. As it was, I left mad enough that I was shaking, feeling insulted, angry, and like I wasn't much of a fan anymore after all. Far be it for me tell you how to handle the people you work with, and I certainly don't know the man beyond that encounter, but he was virtually the entire reason why I was disappointed with the show. The mix was terrible, and when I said something about it as politely as I could, he was a condescending dick to me.

I went to the show stoked, and with the intent of picking up the new CD and a second T-shirt. I left without even seeing the merch table. I was disappointed and angry. I still am disappointed and angry. I considered stopping by to tell you all of this in person, as I have no way of knowing if any of the four of you will even read this email or care at all, much less make it this far in it, but I was pretty mad, and my friends wanted to leave, so I left it at that. The best shows I've seen have made me a fan of music I didn't like prior to the show, and a very few of the worst have made me stop being a fan of a band I liked. Not to be all melodramatic or anything (too late!), but this is one of the latter, and is the biggest case of it in my life by far. I really loved you guys, and your music meant a lot to me, but I'm afraid I'm no longer a fan.

Not sure why I'm writing you all this, except that I suppose it makes me feel a little better when I'm feeling really shitty, and because I thought maybe you should know. Thanks for reading if you've made it this far.


I signed with my name and my phone number, in case they wanted to get a hold of me to discuss it, disagree with me, get more details, put my word against the sound guy's, whatever.

So, the next day, while out to lunch at a busy and noisy restaurant with some coworkers, I got a phone call from a number and area code I didn't recognize. My memory is really very fuzzy at this point, as I'm typing this a few days after it happened, and there was a lot of noise and plenty of "what?"s at the time anyway, but the beginning of the call went something like this:

Me: Hello?
Caller: His this is [missed his name], the sound guy from This Will Destroy You?
Me: Yes?
Caller: Well, your email just got me fired. I hope you're happy.

I was pretty shocked about a couple things. One, that they read my email before noon the next day. Two, that they cared enough to fire the sound guy over it. Three, that he was actually calling me (they fired him but gave him my number?). I can't remember what I said, exactly, but the conversation came to a few points. He said I had been rude and hostile. Despite the name of this website, I was actually not hostile at all. If anything, I was a little flustered when he started in with the "how do you know how it should sound?" line of questioning. He also asked if I knew how much it sucked to be fired on tour - now he was stuck in Cincinnati. He asked if he could stay at my place. He seemed very displeased that I had described him as "black" in the email. This is hardly the place for a discussion of that term versus others or racism or whatever, but I find that notion a bit ridiculous. He was black, I described him as black. I don't know if he was expecting "African American," which I find a silly term because it does me no good when I'm outside of the country, and god help me if I were ever in South Africa and trying to describe a black man there without saying "black." Maybe I should have ignored his race. I don't know.

He asked if I had been to the Southgate house before. I said yes. He said, oh, so you know how hard it is to mix there, how prevalent the bass is? I said I'd honestly never heard another band have trouble with the bass. I also said, hey, that's something you could have told me last night. If you had, I would have walked away unhappy but not angry, and we wouldn't be discussing my email, because I never would have sent it. He asked if I had ever had a bad day. I said sure, but having a bad day doesn't mean you can take it out on other people, especially not those who are, effectively, your customers. He asked what I did for a living, and I said software. I forget where that line of questioning went, precisely, but I told him that if I ever responded to my users the way he responded to me, I would be fired on the spot - which is entirely true. At some point my coworkers (including my ride) started to leave, so I had to get in with them, and was loathe to converse with him while in the car with them. I said I'd call him back later, and I was in a bad spot to talk, or perhaps he could call me. Then the reception gave out, and I said, hey, I've lost you, call me if you want. And then it dropped all together.

So this is where things actually start to get weird. I was actually unfailingly polite throughout the entire conversation. I can be that way. He was actually pretty civil, too, if a little upset and a bit accusatory, and really seemed to want to argue his side of the case to me. It felt like he was trying to guilt trip me, but I didn't really go in for it. My response was usually "sorry, but I didn't fire you," or, "sorry, but you should have said all of this to me last night." I never heard back from him. I was, however, quite anxious to check my email when I got back. The reply from TWDY's email was:


what black guy??


This threw me for a bit of a loop. They cared enough about my email to fire him... but not enough to say anything more like that? Something suspiciously similar to a complaint from the sound guy's conversation with me? Bizarre. So I responded:


Hi,

He was a tallish black guy with fairly long dreadlocks (who just gave me a call - unexpected, but that's why I included my number).

Thanks for reading my email, and I hope the rest of the tour goes well,


I was really at a loss for words, but you've got to say something, eh? This is what I got back:


Oh, that "black" guy. Yeah, we fired him. Can he stay at your house?


What now? You were angry enough at him to fire him, but now you're trying to guilt trip me and are saying the same things that he was? These things do not add up. My response:


I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of extra room at the moment, and can't accomodate him. If I had known ahead of time I could have made arrangements. Sorry.


I never heard back.

So at this point I am scratching my head. The emails do not gel with the reported outcome of events. My first thought was that maybe he was the one sending the emails. That would explain them. On talking to a few friends, however, we settled on something else: the band, as a whole, and including the sound guy, was fucking with me.

Yes, that's right, I, as a fan, complained to the sound guy, who acted like a dick and treated me with contempt, and then I complained to the band, and their response - to a (former) fan - was to act like unfathomable dickheads and treat me with contempt, effectively prank calling me. What a winning philosophy. You don't send emails like the one I did because you're vindictive, you send them because you're reaching out and hoping they can right what made you angry. Costumer service at any company in the world knows this. That's why they offer you a free meal at a restaurant you just told them was shitty - because you want to like them again, and they want you to like them again, and everyone wants to be happy. Not TWDY, though. If you dare to complain, they will treat you like shit. And, hey, if you want a phone call from the band, just include your phone number with your complaint.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. Let's go down the logic trail so we can discuss this conclusion myself and my friends came to regarding them fucking with me, on which my judgment of them rests. I could be wrong; for all I know they did fire him, and he did hijack the email, or maybe they did fire him and still responded to me that way. I doubt it, though.

The first option is to take everything at face value. I complained, they fired him. This, however, requires that they care enough about my email to actually fire their sound guy mid-tour, but not enough to send me anything more than passive-aggressive guilt-trippy emails. This does not make any sense.

The second option is to assume that they did fire him, but that he hijacked their email and sent those short emails that were so similar to his complaints on the phone. This makes more sense... until you realize that for it to happen, they'd have to trust him enough to give him the password to their official email address, but have so little trust in him that they fired him over my complaint. Also, they haven't followed up with a "hey he hijacked our shit, sorry" email. And he'd have had to respond before they did. Very unlikely.

The third option is that they trust him, and they have his back, that they take his word over mine, and that they were so pissed off by my email that they decided to fuck with me and guilt trip me. Adding weight to this notion is that the phone call I got was from the 773 area code. TWDY is from San Marcos, Texas, and I would assume a sound guy touring with them would probably be from Texas, too. But hey, he could be from lots of places. What's interesting is that the 773 area code isn't from Texas, nor is it from Cincinnati: it's from Chicago, the location of TDWY's June 4th show. Strange that a man just fired by TDWY and stuck in Cincinnati was calling me from the location of TDWY's next show.

Option three is the only remaining explanation, as far as I can see, and has the most logic and evidence behind it. It's pretty unbelievable, just the same, but a number of other people besides myself agree that it's most likely, and thus, I am rolling with it.


So: everything I say from here on out presumes that's true. If it's not, maybe the below text applies, maybe it doesn't. I have no reason at this point to think that I'm wrong, though. If I ever get any other word from them regarding this whole thing, perhaps I'll change my judgment. But I doubt I will.


The sound guy, when I talked to him on the phone, kept mentioning difficulties with mixing, that he was having a bad day, and all of these other excuses for why the mix was bad and why he acted like a dick to me. There is a thing called professionalism, and it is something he, and TWDY, would do well to become acquainted with. I know the world of rock and roll isn't the world of offices, cubicles, and neckties, and I know that they basically have no bosses, no one to be accountable to, but that doesn't mean that professionalism shouldn't be there. Just because there's no one that will fire you when they're as grossly unprofessional as they've been doesn't mean that you should take that as free reign to be an incorrigible asshole. I'm as in love with the idea of not having a boss as everyone else, but I think having a superior would actually benefit TWDY.

Professionalism means that when you talk to the people who are paying your salary, directly or indirectly, you don't treat them like shit. It means you don't get immediately defensive, you don't get offended, you don't react in the worst way possible. If someone complains about your work, you listen. Even if you think they're a complete idiot who has no idea what they're talking about, you listen, you nod and look contemplative, and you say something to send them away happy, while after the fact you laugh about it with your coworkers. At work, when a user suggestions something stupid or downright harmful to me, I still listen to them, still respond politely, and I either explain to them why it won't work well, or I tell them that I'll bring it up in the next meeting with my boss. They go away happy, feeling like they're valued and that they've been heard out, and I don't make their ill-advised change. Sure, everyone has bad days. And guess what? Everyone understands that, too. It is amazing how much latitude a simple "I'm having a bad day" will get you. And if you actually are not doing your job that well, just apologize and try to fix it. I've done it plenty of times.

TWDY's response is some sort of bizarre case study in the exact opposite of professionalism. I couldn't have come up with a worse response if you had given me a day to do so. Honestly, I expected to be ignored. As I said in my email, I did it as much so that I would feel better as anything. They could have just not responded. If they were pissed, they could have printed my email out and thrown darts at it, or read it and made fun of me on their way to the next show. They could have said that they stood by their sound guy. They could have emailed me a simple "fuck you." They could have called me and yelled at me. I think even the last option would have been better than what they did. Their response betrays them as thin-skinned, immature, socially maladjusted kids who treat their (former) fans like shit.

I was in a band once that was criticized in a similar fashion. We played a show that, honestly, was pretty disastrous. Half the band members were in various states of inebriation, and as a result missed queues, played some bad solos, and let jams go on way too long. A number of people came up to us after the fact and said hey, that was great - as will virtually always happen. There were people applauding and buying merch at the TWDY show, too. It will always happen. Most people don't have a trained or experienced musical ear. That's fine. But some people do. The sound guy working with the venue came up to our lead singer after the show and said to him, point blank, that we were one of the most talented bands he had ever seen roll through, but that we had just put on an absolutely fucking shitty show. He was right. The lead singer relayed that information to everyone else, and everyone took it to heart. Everyone went home feeling shitty about the performance they had just given - and no one was mad at the sound man for making that comment. The band agreed to stop drinking prior to the show, to practice more, and to never put on another show that bad again. TWDY, on the other hand, decided to prank call me and send me bizarre passive-aggressive emails.

The sound guy failed at mixing the show well. He failed at responding to me well. The band failed at responding to my email. They failed at trying to prank me into thinking I had gotten someone fired. They failed at trying to make me feel bad for getting him fired. They failed at trying to make me feel bad for describing him as black. They failed at winning me back as a fan. They failed at making my complaint go away. And, hey, while we're at it, given the new material I (sort of) heard at the show the other night, it sounds like they failed at writing a decent new album, and they certainly failed at putting on a good live show. They also fail at being decent human beings, and at interacting with other human beings in a fashion not marked by social ineptness, stunted emotional and mental growth, and immaturity.

This Will Destroy You's music sounds like so much hollow noise, now. They will be wiped off the list of bands I like, and I'll never listen to their music again. They are a terrible band made up of terrible people playing terrible music at terrible live shows, and I will gladly explain to anyone who is at all interested just how terrible they are, and why.