don’t explain

Forgive me. I’ve been busy.

20. Why? – Alopecia

I’ve not been quite as taken with Why?’s latest album as the critics have, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good album. Definitely not something you’d want to relax to, Alopecia is a somewhat skittish, flamboyantly experimental album which further cements Why?’s position as more of an indie band that happens to incorporate a rap-like element than any sort of hip-hop group.

The most impressive part of the album isn’t necessarily the music nor the lyrics themselves, but rather how naturally the band manages to make all the capriciously assembled elements flow together, and how catchy each hook really is. While frontman Yoni Wolf laments a breakup or considers loneliness, he does so with a certain detachment from both the concept at hand as well as concept as a whole, which ties together somewhat the generally fragmented nature of the rest of the music.

All in all, Alopecia is a fantastic piece of work, but not necessarily a fantastic piece of music.

Key Tracks: These Few Presidents, Fatalist Palmistry, Twenty-Eight

19. Logistics – Reality Checkpoint

Logistics’ debut album Now More Than Ever was a somewhat bizarre release. While Matt Gresham’s musical talent was projected very obviously in the album, and it had a number of incredible tunes – most notably City Life – the album was simply too ambitious to be thoroughly good. Putting out 24 top-notch tracks, particularly your first time out, is a grueling task, and it was pretty clear that he wasn’t up to it at the time.

Reality Checkpoint is exactly that – a return to reality for the artist. At 14 tracks long, it’s a much better album as a whole, with quite a few more catchy tunes that move Liquid Funk forward in some direction or another. Sadly, there aren’t any remarkable or super-innovative tracks that really stand out, but it’s a much better series of songs in general.

Key Tracks: Reality Checkpoint, 96, Continuum

18. Pendulum – In Silico

Pendulum’s debut album Hold Your Colour was a monster hit in the Drum and Bass world. Packed with hard-hitting, catchy songs that endure to this day, the album really made a name for Pendulum a few years back. While some people complained at how commercial and uninnovative the tracks are, sometimes that’s simply not the point. When Pendulum announced a new album drop, everyone was pretty stoked.

In Silico is… different. It still sounds definitely like Pendulum, which is good, but it also isn’t precisely Drum and Bass. It’s a bizarre yet somehow delicious mix of Drum and Bass and Rock. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it hits hard, sometimes it pulls back for no apparent reason and for far too long. Sometimes it’s fresh and exciting, and sometimes you just want to turn the thing off. At the end of the day, a couple of the songs have earned airplay on the local alternative rock station here in Seattle, so perhaps it’s a good thing that Pendulum chose this direction. In my book, it remains to be seen.

Key Tracks: Showdown, Propane Nightmares, The Tempest

17. Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman – The Fabled City

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine fame made a name for himself by creating incredible, unbelievable sounds out of his guitar using just a toggle switch, four pedals, and a judicious amount of feedback. Perhaps this is why his first political folk rock album, One Man Revolution (which made number 14 on this list last year), was so incredibly sparse. Populated only by his nylon string guitar, his voice, his harmonica, and a smattering of other light instruments only occasionally, One Man Revolution was an incredibly successful exercise in minimalism. Stripped of his usual tools, Morello was forced to innovate and be extremely creative in order to form a collection of interesting, cohesive, pointed songs.

You can guess where I’m going. Given how he already proved himself with the last album, Morello decided to throw in a few more standard elements into his songwriting. A drumbeat and electric bass now populate most songs, and the songwriting is more conventional and repetitive. The lyrics don’t make as much sense to me. Everything is just a hair more trite. That doesn’t mean that the album isn’t still fantastic – it is, after all, on this list. However, it does mean that when choosing between the two, I would rather listen to the debut.

Key Tracks: The Fabled City, The Lights Are On in Spidertown, Saint Isabelle

16. Evol Intent – Era of Diversion

Evol Intent has long been an influential player in the Drum and Bass world. Tracks such as Call to Arms and Street Knowledge were seminal in their time and still among the greatest tracks today. Evol Intent’s record label has put out incredible artists like Counterstrike and Arsenic. But until this past year, they had never really put out that much material, much less a full LP.

Era of Diversion changes that. Very much a Bush-era album, it draws a lot of themes from political anger. And anger is a very good descriptor: there is no mistaking this album as the product of anyone but Evol Intent. Most disappointing, I think, is the placement of nearly all their previous tracks in the album, meaning that the first half of the album is the only real material. Considering how long the group has been working on this LP, actively or not, it’s incredibly disheartening to see this little real product.

Key Tracks: Era Of Diversion, 8bit Bitch, Reality Check

What film studio has a 100% track record? Seriously, Pixar does it again and again and again, and they find a new way to delight their audiences each and every time. With the exception of a few minor complaints, Up is easily another perfect movie.

Pixar are always expanding their storytelling horizons. As heartwarming as Wall•E and Nemo were, there’s something new about how the story of Up is told. The first – largely dialogueless – fifteen minutes of the film are among the most poignant I’ve ever seen in a film, let alone an animated one, and convey a sort of humanity and depth that is an incredible achievement. That segment could easily have been a short film on its own merits.

And yet, somehow the movie manages to go from heart-achingly beautiful and emotional to one of the funniest I’ve seen in a long time without so much as a blink. It feels perfectly natural, when by all means it shouldn’t. Enough can’t be said about the humor and comedic timing, so I won’t try.

The movie stumbles a bit. I don’t want to give anything away, but while part of its charm is how unafraid it is to go over the top, sometimes it does go a bit far. And I thought that the climactic part of the film fell apart somewhat halfway through.

This is a pretty short review, because I don’t want to overanalyze a movie that’s simply pure fun. One final thing I will note that whereas from a technical perspective Wall•E explored and mastered cinematography, Up explores new horizons in lighting, to fantastic results.

Go see it. Go see it in 3D; they do it incredibly naturally and it’s a beautiful subtle enhancement to the film. Too bad it won’t be in 3D on Blu-Ray.

*****/5

I’m going to roll right past the fact that it’s been forever since my last blog post, and certain promises have been violated by several months. Except to say that I’ve actually had most of the top albums post series written for a while now, and I just need to pull some top tracks together and polish off a couple of the albums. Expect them mid-June, when school is out and I have time.

I’m sure others have noticed this already, but with all the talk about Twitter rolling out professional tools for upper-tier users, I thought that an observation I just made was pretty amusing:

It used to be that Twitter would send you plaintext emails when someone follows you, with a plaintext url to their Twitter profile page which would be auto-linked by most email clients. Around the very beginning of this month, Twitter switched to fancy HTML-based emails with chrome framing pretty much the exact same text. It turns out that the motive behind this wasn’t actually polish.

Check out the new URL that Twitter gives you to go to your new follower’s profile:

http://twitter.com/[username]?utm_source=follow&utm_campaign=twitter[timestamp]&utm_medium=email

With this tracking data, Twitter can tell their commercial users just how much that annoying followspam is helping them. I’m surprised that the avatar they embed isn’t itself a beacon tracker so they can get click-through statistics (Dear Twitter: that’ll be a $5k consulting fee, please— kthxbye).

I’m curious to see what other tools come with the professional package.

Speaking of Twitter, expect a “A year with Twitter” post soon. There are things about it that I want to say to naysayers.

There’s been a sudden and sharp increase in commotion in the past few days about the traditional media’s take on the Internets, and what to do with it. There has been a corresponding response from said Internets to the traditional media, which has been equally dismissive and probably far more angry.

The traditional media’s take on the issue could more or less be summed up by this statement made by Rupert Mudoch:

“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, “‘Thanks, but no thanks.’” –– Forbes

The Internets’ response is a bit more varied, but it tends to run along the lines of this Daily Kos headline:

In the wake of the newspaper execs’ hissy fit –– Daily Kos

So, who is right? The answer, as it almost always is (at least on this humble blog), is nobody.

Let’s look at the issue point by point. Be warned; there are many points that I’d like to discuss.

The Google –– and, relatedly, free access

On one hand, let’s examine the newspapers’ point of view. Like the RIAA, they’ve been looking at the bottom line and seeing it dwindle. The RIAA looked at reasons why, and it seemed like this file-sharing thing was a big reason people weren’t buying records anymore. So they went after file-sharers. Similarly, newspapers are seeing their profits drain away to the Internets: their subscribers are dropping in favor of online versions of their daily news, which are harder for the papers to pin down and tout to advertisers (hence why the New York Times requires registration on their site) – and their classified traffic is moving away to the cheaper and faster Craigslist. So, they’re rattling their sabers at the Internet. And who’s the biggest player on the web? Google.

Their fundamental argument at the moment is that the Internet is entirely too open and free. With aggregators like Google, it’s impossible to secure a loyal readership, as users can pick and choose what articles to read from a remote location. By cutting off Google from their material and charging users to use the online editions of their newspapers, they hope that they can regain some semblance of loyalty to their particular brand and thus constant and guaranteed revenue and readership, which they can once again tout to their advertisers. After all, whoever ordered two, three, or four copies of physical papers daily?

The converse is, of course, also true. Google, in the course of making hand over fist in advertising, is doing the web a sort of public service: joining the Internet together as one. By offering sheer choice and volume, Google enables users to learn and experience more than ever before, and lends information sources potential audiences they could never have dreamed of before. So on this point, there is no correct answer – at least not yet.

What is the role of the “media”?

Now, let’s take a look at what the Internet community is saying. Composited between a lot of the meaningless vitriol that is the lifeblood of the web, it’s easy to tell that there are two basic counterarguments, one of which is a more extreme version of the other. The first, which could be considered true at least in part, is the sentiment that “they just don’t get it.” Daily Kos followed up with an article discussing one particular example of how traditional media execs and reporters miss the point. And they’re not wrong – it will take a new breed of journalist and executive to get the traditional media to understand the information (and business!) market of the Internet.

But this sentiment is always stated with an air of dismissal, an air that exposes the more extreme reaction that the Internet has generally taken. “Look,” web users, evangelists, and enthusiasts say, “look at our blogs and our Twitters and our Googles. We don’t need you anymore. With the Internet, we can collect, distribute, and discuss information with far greater efficiency than you could possibly hope to!” There are several arguments and counter-arguments on both sides regarding this point.

Who can we believe?

If you ask the traditional media, their main response can be summed up in one keyword: credibility. “Without some journalist’s name backing up what you’re consuming,” they say, “how can you possibly allow yourself to believe anything at all?” I’m not convinced by this argument – and nor are a lot of other people. I disagree with this argument on two counts.

Firstly, when you know that the set of information you’re getting is raw and unfiltered (say, a Twitter Search on #Mumbai while the attacks were occuring), you naturally build your own mental filters on the information you’re getting. You’re forced to absorb data from a multitude of sources, to do the work of parsing and putting together the picture yourself. It’s more work, but it’s ultimately not only more intellectually stimulating and satisfying, it leads to a better comprehension of the issues at hand. Conversely, I’ve seen too many blindly trusting the traditional media’s news simply because it has a name on it, without putting it through any filters. And, as history has repeatedly shown, even with a journalist’s name, we need some filters on everything we read.

Second, I don’t think that the traditional model is the only way in which journalists can make a name for themselves anymore. I made the observation a couple of days ago that blogs are feeling less and less like “new media,” based simply on a passing gut feeling. The quantization of that train of thought, I think, is that blogs now have the potential for a wide enough readership that credibility matters for the authors behind them. The medium may be different, but when the usage is the same, the net equation ends up being the same.

Take, for instance, Dave Winer. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington pointed out (incidentally in a post about credibility in journalism, though specifically regarding conflicts of interest) in a recent editorial, Winer took a $10,000 bribe from the owner of a blog to surreptitiously insert it into the top content of a commercial news aggregator he was running at the time. Winer is still a prominent Internet personality, but those who remember this story will never quite look at anything he writes the same way again.

Where does our information come from?

The argument that I believe the traditional media should be making as to why they are necessary is quite a bit more fundamental. They are a step in the process of information dissemination right now, and an extremely critical one. Look again at that Daily Kos article that I quoted the headline of earlier. You’ll see that same Rupert Murdoch quote I opened this post with in that article. If you trace the series of citations back, you’ll find that they took it off a post on Daggle.com, who in turn took it off of Forbes.com, which is who I credited above. Most people would consider Forbes.com a member of the traditional, mainstream media.

In fact, if you look at nearly all the information on a Daily Kos, or a Huffington Post, and trace it back far enough, you’ll find some mainstream news organization or another as the founding source. This has less to do with any sort of credibility issue, and more to do with the current flow of information. At the absolute least, the established traditional media organizations are at the moment information clearinghouses, a current necessary step in the flow of data from news source to consumer. In this way, the blogs do, in fact, need the established traditional media.

So is the flow of information the fundamental problem here?

I’m not sure that calling anything a problem is really the point.  Rather, any system that we attempt to build for information dissemination will inevitably involve some number of steps, each of which have their own problems.  Clearly, from a business perspective, information flow isn’t a very important topic.  But, looking philosophically at what we have right now, their step in the chain is one of the big chips that the mainstream media hold.  So, let’s examine this topic.

Exceptions: models for the future, or tales of warning?

There are, of course, exceptions to this observation. It would be tempting to choose the tech industry, with its wealth of gadget, industry commentary, and other blogs, but there’s too much muddle there – the business of tech is a bit of a spider web. My example is the games industry.

With rare exceptions, all information on the Internet on gaming news flows through the blogs, most prominently Kotaku and Joystiq. The entire games industry understands that its audience lives on the web, and thus by going directly to web publishers, they can reach their demographic efficiently. In fact, the web press surrounding the games industry has been so successful and effective as a result of this streamlined process that an extreme version of the same trend that has newspapers disturbed has already taken hold of gaming press: EGM, once a giant of the gaming world, lost too many subscribers to continue operations and folded.

There are, of course, problems with my argument. Foremost is that my earlier argument about the medium not being the important element still holds true: there are still information clearinghouses, they’ve just moved one step down the chain, and the new link is still not the end consumer. But, the ratio is at least somewhat greater now, and more people have control of the raw information with the current games industry model. Greater, however, is the set of problems that arises when “non-journalists,” as the newspapers would claim, are the direct recipients of raw information. I have two examples, and both have to do with the relationship between the reporter and the reported, when mixed with the volatile environment of the Internet.

Biting the hand that feeds, Internet edition

One of the prominent differences that still exist between even established blogs with a journalistic pedigree and respected names and traditional media is the prevalence of the unconfirmable. Perhaps it’s the need to fill up the day, perhaps it’s simply because they can, but blogs report on a lot of rumors. Unconfirmable information is always a controversial topic in journalism and journalistic integrity, and when you report a higher ratio of rumor material, you’ll encounter a higher rate of controversy.

Kotaku posted a rumor a while back about the now-[long-]announced Playstation Home before anyone really knew about it based on some tips it had received. Sony’s response pre-publication, publicly posted on Kotaku, was in Kotaku’s words to effectively blackball it from future direct information unless they didn’t run the story. They did. The gaming community, tight-knit group that it is, threw a bit of a fit and the issue disappeared without terribly much explanation as to what went on behind the scenes, but this is a frightening tale of what can happen when information is handed directly from sources with their own interests at heart and something as fickle, capricious, and wildly unpredictable as the Internet.

Refusing to bite the hand that feeds, Internet edition

My other cautionary tale of this model comes due to another phenomenon that is largely exclusive to the web: the ability of extremely niche outlets to survive. Because of the consumption model of the Internet, and the low cost of publishing to it, publications can last with far more niche topics and a smaller audience on the web than on paper. However, a side effect of having a niche topic is that to maximize income, advertising also becomes niche. This means that often times, the subjects that you write about will also be the ones paying your bills.

There are recent examples in other corners of the web, such the bizarre reverse story of claims of extortion by Yelp – demanding that businesses buy ads or face ratings penalties. However, what I would like to point out is still within the games industry – namely, the dismissal of Jeff Gerstmann, editor-in-chief of Gamespot.

As one can imagine given my setup, this story hinges around an advertiser on a site. Gamespot allows for advertisers to effectively ‘buy out’ the site layout, taking over not only all the ads, but also the background image of the site. Eidos did so for their game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (a truly vile game), naturally with the expectation that it would help sales of the game. Of course, a well-justified negative review of the game on the site undermined that expectation somewhat. That review was written by Mr. Gerstmann, who was terminated rather abruptly shortly thereafter by execs in the business department.

A lot of rumors swirled in the weeks after the event, involving corporate politics and the usual mess, but the incident is a bit of a warning. The business model of the Internet can lead to fatally flawed situations. How do we deal with these issues? How can we expect newspapers to trust the Internet until these sorts of things are figured out? Jeff’s new site, Giant Bomb (full disclosure: of which I am a former content moderator), still contains a very modest amount of advertising as they attempt to figure out answers to these questions.

So where do we go from here?

The Internet is growing and regrowing upon itself by the week, and it’s a juggernaut we’d be hard-pressed to stop. However, we really need to stop and assess what it means for the flow and processing of information in both our country and around the world. We can’t do this, however, until all the variables in the equation decide to sit down and work out the problems in the system. That means that someone has to get the Internet and the newspapers off of each others’ throats and get them to realize that they need each other.

But then what? And what now? We still have no answers, not even particularly good inklings. And the newspaper companies aren’t about to discuss things with their perceived enemies any sooner than the RIAA.

So we’re at a bit of an impassé. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this brand of sabre rattling, and it won’t be the last.

The question is, when will it be the last, and what happens then?

(Except where marked, this is a spoiler-free review. Read with confidence.)

Alan Moore said somewhat famously now that he would never watch the movie adaptation of his very own Watchmen.

In retrospect, I can see why.

Not necessarily because it’s bad – in fact, it’s actually rather good. I think. More on that later. Instead, because of how incredibly well-crafted the original graphic novel is. Its pace is plodding, but that’s because more than anything Watchmen is a character study, not an action thriller. The most significant point of the entire story is the observation of six core characters and how their entirely separate – and separately, entirely valid – viewpoints on the world dictate their morality, their actions, and their ultimate fate. As such, the book’s structure alternates chapters between exploring backstories and pushing the main story forward, something which works quite well given that were one to simply explain the present-day plot of the story, it would not take terribly long at all. Every detail of the original graphic novel amplifies these discrepancies and reconciliations of viewpoints in subtle, intuitive ways – ways which take time to sink in and become a part of the mythos. In addition, the careful rate at which the novel proceeds enabled Moore to slowly immerse the reader in this world of Cold War paranoia on the brink, where everyone knows death is imminent and yet is so paralyzed by that notion that they don’t know where to begin dealing with it.

It’s in these details that the film ultimately loses. Unlike an adaptation of, say, Lord of the Rings, where many of the plot details are dispensable without loss of significant information, any adaptation of Watchmen short of a seven- to eight- hour drama is bound to lose these subtleties, the elements that made the original so precious. Personally, while watching the film, I found myself constantly second-guessing it, trying to piece together why this piece of dialogue or that bit of information was cut out in the attempt to streamline it. As such, I find myself completely unable to judge the film from an objective standpoint. I can’t tell whether or not the film is good on its own merits. Try as I might, it will always be merely a beautifully and lovingly crafted shadow of its source material, nothing more.

I can, however, offer critique. Foremost is the observation that perhaps the sheer reverence with which Snyder and Hayter treated the original source is as well its downfall. There are a million tiny character arcs in Watchmen that are haltingly and haphazardly included in the film, making it busy without substance. Some bits are included that vanish without explanation in the film – Laurie’s dislike for the entire ‘hero’ing lifestyle, for instance, or the life and death of Bubastis, which is reduced to a contextless (and therefore confusing to the uninitiated) easter egg in the film – which are neatly tied off on the comic. Other details are lavishly expanded upon while perhaps more important ones are left in the dust – there is a dream sequence which takes a whole minute or more of screen-time which could be adequately and poignantly summarized in less than fifteen seconds, leaving more time for some of these other conversations to breathe a little.

Which is another problem. In their streamlining process, a lot of things were changed, but ultimately it felt like the characters had no room to breathe. Extreme stereotypes they may be, but they are all still people, and at times this fact didn’t carry well in the film. Especially Veidt – the story of his past is just as important as the other main characters, and yet very little time is devoted to it.

Another victim of time was atmosphere. The impending doomsday and the resulting paralysis was a key element in setting a context for the original. I mentioned that it’s a character study: it’s a study of how these characters react in the face of armageddon; in the face of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. This overbearing sense of dread is critical to understanding these characters and understanding why Watchmen is such an incredible work. Whereas the book reinforces this sense by exploring the world through the eyes of a number of ordinary citizens, in particular a news vendor on the street who appears in the film for a number of seconds, the movie does it rather bluntly – with President Nixon in his war room. While I very much appreciated the Dr. Strangelove reference in the design of the war room, this blunt approach ultimately fails at its task. With the film’s approach, the fact of Armageddon is delivered to the audience; in the original, the essence of it is instead conveyed. In a sense, the lack of knowledge of what the governments were really doing throughout the novel only reinforced the Cold War paranoia which pervaded so well throughout.

And then there’s the ending. For those who don’t know, the ending of the film was changed. For the better? I do not know. The original was rather difficult to swallow, but perhaps it was this indigestibility which made it such a viable means to the end of the story. I don’t know if the new one is better or not.

Nits to pick – Spoilers be here!

One of the absolutely most poignant moments of the original to me was when Veidt, near the end, appeals to Dr. Manhattan, reduced to a mere human, his intellect useless, asking him if what he did was right. This was left out. Also, on the subject of Veidt, and due to the victimization of his origin story as I mentioned earlier, he seems simply evil at the end of the film rather than the justifiable sum of his viewpoints and convictions. There are more, these are the ones that bug me most.

End spoilers

So, ultimately, should you go see this film when it opens tomorrow? For both the fans and the uninitiated alike, yes, yes, yes. As a fan, it would be doing yourself a disservice not to see the sheer visual lavishness of how the book comes to motion. As a newcomer, perhaps it will convince you to read the novel – if nothing else because of how incredibly confused you are after watching it.

I hear it’s confusing.

I’m painfully aware of the fact that a number of my posts just resurfaced on Google Reader and probably other aggregators earlier today – as far as I can tell this is a side effect of the Feedburner move to Google’s servers, and should not happen again.

Top albums countdown should begin in proper this weekend.

Alternate title: Come on, Adobe.

Having once had serious issues with filename capitalization in a Java project that resulted in a lot of headache and a small army of mv’s, when I reformatted my computer with a new hard disk two months ago I chose to use the case-sensitive version of the HFS+ filesystem.

And besides one trivial and easily-fixable issue with an AdiumX theme package, all was fine.

That is, until I tried to install Adobe’s CS4 suite just now.  Instead of the friendly OS X installer app, I was greeted with the following message:

So.  Now I get to reformat my entire hard disk again.  Just because Adobe is too damned lazy to get with the standard that every other OS X developer – even Microsoft, which didn’t officially support case-sensitivity as of a year ago and typically produces the shoddiest OS X applications; even the free software Indie developers who toil for hours without pay on their works – has flawlessly followed.  This is unbelievable.

What’s worse, apparently this happened with CS3 as well, and even after a small riot about it on their blog, they still couldn’t be bothered to fix it for CS4.  The difference between CS3 and 4 is small enough that I already couldn’t believe CS4 needed to exist; could they not be bothered to fix some filenames?

It’s New Year’s Day, and so it’s time to begin the annual music wrap-up for 2008. Hopefully this year it will be done before April. In a fresh and innovative twist, today I present a new feature: the top 5 most disappointing albums of 2008, in order. Partially because I haven’t yet pieced together how to rank top albums number 20 through 5. Enjoy!

5. Children of Bodom – Blooddrunk
It’s an unfortunate fact that from the point when you first fall in love with a band on, that irresistible urge to constantly reinvent will cause them to drift slowly yet inexorably away from what you loved so much about them to begin with. Whether or not this is acceptable depends on whether their idea of “new and improved” is in alignment with your own.
I never really loved Children of Bodom, but I thoroughly enjoy their earlier work, in particular Follow the Reaper. At least, I enjoyed them enough to sit (actually, stand) through Between the Buried and Me (whom my good friend Dylan and I have seen more times than bands we actually like by kismet) and (groan) Black Dahlia Murder to see them live. Follow the Reaper was a fairly ideal blend of influences and styles, much like the incomparable Paradise Lost from Symphony X was last year.
Unfortunately, Children of Bodom are going places that I simply don’t enjoy as much as their earlier work. While technically proficient and well-written, Blooddrunk simply wasn’t the album I was hoping for. Thrashier and angrier, it’s not the type of metal I normally listen to. It’s just a classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.”

4. DragonForce – Ultra Beatdown
Let’s face it, Dragonforce has had their day of glory. Through the Fire and the Flames has been played to death and then some, and while their other material is certainly more diverse than that one song and no less noteworthy, that composition represents a sort of culmination of what DragonForce has stood for these past few years. Beyond that quintessential song, most of what you’ll find are merely bits and pieces which are ultimately hard to distinguish from that image.
They really needed something fresh, a grand reinvention, to really capture the world’s attention again – and here they failed to deliver. Sure, Ultra Beatdown has its moments, but they’re fleeting little bits that are easily forgotten when all is said and done. At the conclusion of the album, the only thought I had was, “that’s it?”
Amusingly, nearly all the professional reviews point out this flaw of this apparently critically acclaimed album, and they all hand-wave it away, claiming that lack of innovation is a hallmark of the power metal genre. This is, of course, ludicrous, considering that DragonForce’s modus operandi of speed was in itself a revelation, if nothing else due to how incredibly flawless their execution was (at least, in a studio environment). More of the same isn’t going to cut it for a band that everyone seems to have seen enough of.

3. El Ten Eleven – These Promises Are Being Videotaped
After discovering El Ten Eleven’s wonderfully cathartic take on post-rock on the Helvetica soundtrack, I fell in love with Every Direction is North, their 2007 LP release. A beautiful mix of light electronics and post-rock guitar lines reverberating away into the ambient synths in the background, Every Direction is North would have made a serious run at my top 5 of last year had I known about it then.
Thus, I was excited to see that they were releasing yet another album already this year. I hoped that the transgression of not putting them on my list last year could be made up with the release.
Sadly, this was not to be. Elements of the previous album are still here, but they lie buried amidst an alien and alienating chaos of jarring electronics, beats, and lines so abrasive and repetitive that they would make tracks from C-64’s Transitional Days feel unwelcome.
It’s not without its moments, but the album completely shatters that which I loved so much about El Ten Eleven’s music to begin with: that same time-melting hypnotic sweetness which makes Explosions in the Sky so beautiful, but with a bit more drive. Instead, it seems like the duo have chosen to go all drive. And it’s a pity, too, since the album art is so nice.

2. Bloc Party – Intimacy
Bloc Party has had quite a welcome to the music industry. Silent Alarm was received with boisterous enthusiasm – for good reason – and A Weekend in the City was met with tepid response, followed by cautious embrace. Now, with Intimacy, it seems like the band has gone in yet another radically different direction – or have they?
Much of the initial response to A Weekend in the City was simply shock at how completely different it was from Silent Alarm. While people eventually accepted the second album for what it was, it seems like this reaction went straight to Bloc Party’s collective heads, and they sat down to try to write a proper followup to their debut album.
However, that sophomore album came into existence for a reason, and the band was not about to let go of their desire to write another Weekend in the City quickly.
And as well, being one of the few “it” bands of the moment means that they must have felt the need to innovate and reinvent their music on the new release.

The new album sounds like all of these things.  At once.

Simultaneously and alternatingly aggressive, placid, capricious, and altogether schizophrenic, Intimacy seems to be the direct result of exactly such a tortured writing philosophy. No two songs sound like they belong next to each other, and few of them sound like they even belong on the same album.
The primary appeal of Silent Alarm was, for me, the pure, raw energy that it had. The writing wasn’t anything terribly special, but there was something attractive about the conviction and spunk with which it was performed. On the other hand, A Weekend in the City represented a fresh aspect of the band – relatability. Suddenly, the music itself had something to cling to, rather than simply the gusto with which it’s played. It seems that with Intimacy, Bloc Party picked the writing of the first album and the enthusiasm of the second to mix into its new bastard child, and it just doesn’t work.

1. Junkie XL – Booming Back at You
What happened here?

I should be more specific. Junkie XL’s previous album, Today, was a delicious mix of Big Beat, Trance, and Pop sensibilities into a wholly… whole album. Lush production, good songwriting, and well constructed lines made Today one of my favorite albums to this day.

Booming Back at You seems to be the antithesis. Never mind the fact that it sounds like it was written in 1985, the album is dry, electronic, repetitive, and simply unpleasant to listen to, as if writing it was a chore and the listening experience needed to be a chore for the spite of it.
Bloc Party was probably the biggest letdown of the year, but this album takes the cake in how simply atrocious the actual album is for its own merits. What happened here?

I guess the common theme among all the entries here is change. After all, you can’t have disappointment without expectations, and you can’t have expectations without history. For all I know, all of these artists will blow me away in the next two years – for now, it’s hard to say.
Look for my top 20 album list (that’s right, going for broke this year) in the next two to three weeks. This time, that’s a promise.

Following Sunil’s lead (after Kottke’s lead), here is the list of cities I visited in 2008, in order. I only ended up flying 15183 miles, but I visited 2 countries I’ve never been to before.

• Bothell, WA*
• Seattle, WA*
• San Francisco, CA*
• Foster City, CA
• Amsterdam, Netherlands*
• Den Haag, Netherlands*
• Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
• Mazatlan, Mexico
• Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
• Inglewood, Los Angeles, CA

One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

I keep repeating the words “President Barack Obama” in my head.

And every time I do it, it sounds yet better.

Thank you, America.

That’s not the only victory we appear to be on track to win tonight.  It looks like Gregoire will be our Governor of the state of Washington again, without a doubt.  Good: I don’t want someone running our state who has insisted repeatedly that he has “better things to do.”  We’re on track to reject Tim Eyman’s terrible transportation initiative, and accept a real solution in SoundTransit.  Darcy Burner, bless her, is winning by cascades in Congressional District 8.  The death with dignity initiative appears to have succeeded.

There are also losses.  It looks like Proposition 8 is winning in California.  This is quite a blow on such a historic night.  To take away a right that so many people finally and blessedly enjoy should be criminal.  Similarly, a measure appears to have appeared and passed in Arizona banning unmarried couples from adopting children.

These losses are a reminder to us that our job is not done tonight; indeed, our job is never done.  In President Obama’s own words:

For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how theyll make the mortgage, or pay their doctors bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

Obama is not the solution – he is a remedy.  The Senate and the House majority is not the answer – it is a solace.  We must never rest, we must never cease to question.

I leave you with perhaps the most powerful words Barack Obama has spoken in these extraordinary 21 months:

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one thats on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. Shes a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldnt vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that shes seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we cant, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when womens voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that We Shall Overcome. Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.