>>Nostalgia For Infinity

It was going to be a bit of a Holy Roar week, but it’s actually turned out to be a bit of a quiet week. That’ll be work keeping me busy plus the lethargy of self-inflicted exhaustion. Reviews of Throats and Antares should go up sometime soonish.

My pre-order copy of Mass Effect 2 arrived yesterday, so I spent the evening in the company of its occasionally plastic-faced charms. I enjoyed the first game a great deal despite its flaws, and am happy to find that thus far the sequel has addressed most of these – although it has introduced its own foibles in so doing.

I probably won’t bother writing a review since it’ll be several weeks before I’m in a position to do so, and by that time what would be the point? But here’s an excitable little account of a gripping experience from last evening, which I shared with some friends this morning:

I experienced a genuinely affecting moment in ‘Mass Effect 2′ last night, where I thought an earlier action I had taken – not murdering a thug in cold blood in order to disable some military hardware – had later resulted in the death of a comrade I was very fond of. He was torn to fucking pieces. I was actually horrified that I might have been responsible.

As it turned out, he survived – but his face was half torn off and he’s permanently scarred. For the rest of his life.

I was relieved when he didn’t hate me. It was a gamble – when I met him after he was patched up I risked making a joke – a sort of macho camaraderie thing – and when he laughed it was just, wow. Thank fuck. And yet I still felt so sorry for him. I wondered if the game would let me tell him that I could have spared him that tragedy. Would I tell him if I could? Should I tell him if I could?

I can only hope the game is full of more moments like this: moments when you come face to face with the unintended consequences of actions you chose to take, moments where regret or horror or shame are the emotional responses not demanded of you, but drawn out of you. But I’m already impressed that the game made me care enough about one of its characters to make me feel this. That is special, particularly in a medium where a derisive blasé attitude is more than most titles’ stories and characters deserve.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of the world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

(From You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, via SW’s obit.)

It’ll be a bit of a Holy Roar-themed week as I’ve decided to review a few of their recent-ish releases – although this first one is a co-release with Hassle. I mentioned this 7″ in my 2009 Best of the Year round-up among the “hon. mention” EPs. It’s clearly not an EP, though, offering just two tracks even if one is a medley.

It’s a split based on the classic concept of two bands covering songs by each other. There’s a risk of these records becoming an exercise in pointlessness if bands sound too much alike, or their covers are too slavishly devoted to the original, but this is not the case here. Rolo Tomassi’s stop-start dynamics, creepy and distorted keyboards, and dirgey feminine roars, set them apart from the unstoppably brutal hardcore onslaught of Throats’ crushing, riff-heavy approach.

Both bands approach one another’s tunes determined to imprint them with their own personality. Rolo Tomassi combine ‘Headclouds’ and ‘Reign of Low’ (both from their split with Maths) into a single track. It starts similarly to the original version with loud and low distorted strumming, but soon kicks into something more Rolo-flavoured with staccato keys and dual vocals from Eva and James singing and chanting respectively. From there it launches into a comparatively clean lead guitar riff with guttural growls before seguing into the brutal drumming frenzy of ‘Reign of Low’. The heavy metal riff that sees that song out is mostly unchanged, which is no bad thing.

Throats, for their part, cover ‘I Love Turbulence’ from Hysterics. The sinister synths and keys are gone, retained is the breakneck pace and violence – ramped up to 11 in Throats’ inimitably aggressive, confrontational style. The guitar lead at the end is a nice change from the original, and I’m not usually much of a fan of widdling; elsewhere Rolo’s haunting electronic breakdown is replaced with a guitar-based segment. It’s a more faithful cover than their counterparts went for, but hearing a Rolo song played entirely on strings and skins with everything sounding louder and heavier is impressive in itself.

Rolo Tomassi | Throats | Holy Roar | Hassle

Del.icio.us links for January 20th through January 21st:

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We seem to have been reviewed over at my friend Fran’s new music blog, Between the Music & Me.

Possibly a bit nepotistic as she used to drum for us and is friends with the two original members of the band, but she’s no bullshitter and notes she was “very pleased I didn’t have to lie when Ben and Shanu asked what I honestly thought!”

Read the review here.

(I reviewed the first day of Offset way back in September, but the other half of the review got delayed for familiar reasons. Here’s a vague round-up of who we saw on the Sunday and, er, who we didn’t. Disclaimer: my festival reviews are always kind of vague and anecdotal. I’m there to have fun, not to review, and alcohol tends to addle my poor memory yet further. Expect no setlists here.)

A lesson is learned: I am probably too old, or have developed too strong a tolerance to intoxication, to drink several crates of extremely cheap dry cider and expect to get up the next morning and run around in the freezing cold after a sleepless night in a tent. Yeah, yeah, I need a waaahmbulance to get me to the party.

I wake up about half an hour before Crocus play but it’s all I can do to inch half out of my tent and breath in some fresh air; anything more might lead to explosive vomiting (or, worse, dry retching). Bleeurgh. Some hours later our campsite is awake and there’s solidarity in suffering. We miss Holy State. We miss Brontosaurus Chorus – an extra shame since I’d previously persuaded everyone that the best way to deal with a hangover was to listen to a man playing twee pop songs on a ukelele. We miss KONG.

Eventually we drag ourselves out to see young screamo noisemakers Maths. » Read the rest of this entry «

The gig on Friday went really well; about 70 people down there in the end, maybe half of whom watched us. It’s the first show we’ve played where I was happy with my performance (I always play worse live because of nerves; anxiety?! What anxiety?) and where I believed everyone who said we played a good set. My sister and her boyfriend came up from Southampton to see us, which was super cool of them, and plenty of other friendly faces were there too. Probably my favourite remark was being told that we reminded someone of As Friends Rust and Grade. I fucking love As Friends Rust but have never consciously tried to imitate them.

Houston Has A Problem and Another Day Lost also put in storming sets; a privilege and a pleasure to play alongside ‘em.

Anyway, aside from the possibility that we’ll have another show on January 30th – a Haiti benefit at the Hare & Hounds – our new plan is to get on with writing some new songs. Watch this space. Or our MySpace.

Del.icio.us links for January 11th through January 15th:

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So here’s a post I wrote half of last October (Hub is now up to #108). The fact that I didn’t find the time or inclination to finish a short and simple review of a short weekly SF e-zine for three months pretty much sums up the creative death that was Q4 2009 for me. Thanks a fucking bunch, my life last year.

But it wasn’t all bad, particularly if you’re not me, because British SF & fantasy e-zine Hub Magazine published its hundredth issue. If you’re not in the know about the general life expectancy of magazines built around genre fiction it may not be clear what an achievement this is, particularly given that Hub boasts 10,000 subscribers (or, at least, is sent to 10,000 email addresses, which is not quite the same thing) and thanks to sponsorship deals with publishers is both solvent and a paying market for writers.

I’ve written about Hub before (#12-18 here, and #35-38 for The Fix Online) and have generally found it an entertaining if hit and miss read since then. So, as a landmark issue what does #100 exemplify about its run to date and what does it indicate for the future?

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So, postmodernism. Here’s a thumbnail definition, in case you’re interested: you know that musical flourish, duh-duh-durr!, those three doom-y crashing chords? Once upon a time they worked in context to send genuine tingles of dread through a cinema audience. Now to hear them is to think inevitably of the Dramatic Chipmunk half-turning to look at the camera over his chipmunky shoulder, eyes wild. Which is to say, that musical flourish has lost its original affect; it has become a depthless quotation in a shifting network of signification. It is now comic-bathetic instead of actually thrilling. That, to deploy the technical term, is what we call ‘postmodernism’, and one little-remarked-upon consequence of this state of affairs is the elevation of Godwin’s Law to an aesthetic benchmark.

An amusing and illustrating aside from Adam Roberts’s blog, in a post about John Meaney’s latest novel. I wouldn’t normally quote-and-run but this made me laugh, so ENJOY.

(In response to the last line I wanted to post a Futurama video clip; a Twilight Zone spoof where a man is trapped in a horrible nightmare. He pleads to someone for help: “why would I help you? You’re Hitler!” But alas, I cannot find it online.)