>>Nostalgia For Infinity

The peculiar USian shopping tradition of Black Friday (most famous in the UK for resulting in some poor Wal-Mart peon being trampled a few years back) has been leeching out into the wider world of digital distribution this year, and as a result I’ve acquired dirt-cheap copies of Aliens vs. Predator, Altitude, DogFight, Flotilla, Gratuitous Space Battles, Plain Sight, Galactic Civilizations I Ultimate, Machinarium, Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time, Eufloria, Iron Grip: Warlord, VVVVVV, World of Goo (already owned; part of a bundle), Beat Hazard (already owned on 360), Audiosurf (a-o), Rhythm Zone, The Polynomial, Gish, Jolly Rover, Puzzle Agent, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, And Yet It Moves, Batman: Arkham Asylum: GOTY, Deus Ex: Invisible War (already owned and sold on Xbox, but for £1 why not), Alpha Protocol, Sam & Max Season 3 complete, BRAINPIPE, GalCon Fusion, Gridrunner Revolution, ProtoGalaxy, and Quantz.

Astute readers will note that the majority of these are indie games, so yes, you can expect a bunch of indie reviews to appear as I dabble in them. I’m already enjoying GalCon Fusion (the best way to spend two minutes aside from a cup of Chai tea) and Recettear (the only time you will hear me utter the phrase Capitalism, Ho!).

(At some point I’ll join the rest of the internet in showing off my rubbish MineCraft constructions, too.)

Damn I love games, you guys. And I love digital distribution even more. All of the above probably cost about £30-40 all told, and there’s no annoying packaging or install discs at all. Just the costs of server hosting for the distributor/retailer, bandwidth for the both of us, and a little download and install time for me. The future is rad.

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Released all the way back in March, Daughters has already required a reputation – not only as a standout album but also as the record that broke the band which wrote it. After recording but before release guitarist Nick Sadler and bassist Samuel Walker left the band, leaving vocalist Alexis Marshall and drummer Jon Syverson with the name and a record that singer Lex claims to not be too happy with. Each member and ex-member of the band has their own take on the situation, and I’ve no desire to shit-stir, but the gist of the situation is that Lex felt that a lot of the material written by Sadler was too commercial – and once disagreements came to a head the band dissolved.

So, this album will never be gigged or toured, and wherever Daughters go from here it won’t sound like this. Which makes this album special, especially as it’s so very, very good. The first word to be used when describing it is “intense”. Some others that you might throw in are “big”, “brash”, “sharp”, and perhaps “borderline demented”. It’s a big shift away from the fret-spazzing technical grindcore of 2003′s Canada Songs and, to my ears at least, a huge leap into fresh new territory – there’s nothing I’ve heard that sounds quite like this record. Throughout, the colossal-sounding drums and the brutally low-end bass drive a rhythm that segues between the march of some sinister army and the one-two back and forth of traded drunken punches. The guitars shift rapidly between heavy chugs, squealing tremolo and high-speed fret-tapping. Topping it all off are vocals, typically delivered at a sedate pace, with a sinister edge that wraps this disturbing but brilliant package together into a ferociously weird whole.

With only eight tracks on offer it’s not a lengthy release, but all eight clock in at a decent length that’s a far cry from the one-minute blasts of Daughters’ past releases. Highlights have to include ‘The Hit’, one of many songs with a relentlessly pounding rhythm but also one peppered with sinister telephonesque voices buried in the mix of synth, squalling guitar and abrupt jerks back into chugging territory, and ‘Sweet Georgia Bloom’ which is about as close as Daughters are likely to get to writing a song you can dance to. My favourite, though, is ‘Our Queens (One is Many, Many is One)’, which boasts crazy handclaps, excellent runs along the fretboard and plenty of high-speed leaps between the top and the base of the guitar’s neck. I wish I could write and play songs like that.

I don’t know what you’d categorise Daughters as and I don’t care. It’s a superb record and you owe it to yourself to listen to it.

Official Site | MySpace | Hydra Head Records

A real short review for you all today, courtesy of the Border Surrender and their new single ‘Oh Mary’. It’s all a-side, in that there’s no b-side. None at all!

Fortunately the four minutes of ‘Oh Mary’ stand up perfectly well on their own. The London four-piece construct an elaborate song that builds up and pulls back with relaxed restraint, supported throughout by a simple hooky bassline and soft vocals. At times the song’s almost minimalistic, with everything bar the bass and vocals stripped out, and other times it leaps out at you with understated drums, deft mandolin picking and fuzzed-up keys added to the mix, combining into a busy but smooth whole.

According to the accompanying press release the band spent most of last year working on their songwriting skills and developing a unique sound, and on the strength of this single they’re capable of combining their respective musical talents into an effective song without producing something distractingly cluttered. It’s just as busy as it needs to be, retaining a deliberate yet laid-back air throughout. It’s on the basis of this that I’m reminded of the latest Black Keys album, but aside from the occasionally fuzzy sound and the general air of cool there’s not much in common there. Classic artists like Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield plus younger outfits such as My Morning Jacket and Built to Spill are hat-tipped as influences, but I’m not familiar enough with any of those artists to really comment (yep, even Neil Young… I apologise for nothing). Still, on the strength of this single I’m keen to see what the Border Surrender do next. Roll on the next (hopefully longer) record.

MySpace | Facebook | Twitter

Dude Trips collects up all of Bangers’ recorded output as of earlier this year, including tunes from their splits with Dirty Tactics and Brighton’s own Break the Habit among others. There’s 10 songs in all from this gruff pop-punk three piece who hail from Falmouth (oops, sorry guys, for ages I thought you were from Wales).

Bangers took a while to grow on me but now that they have I’m really into their style of earnest and honest punk rock. Their lyrics sound heavily autobiographical, which ranges from being surrounded by fashion-focused people (“Show me anyone whose priorities aren’t fucking dumb and I’ll show you five who’ve all got love affairs with clothes and hair”) to drinking all night with friends (“Home’s just where you stop when comfort outweighs your sense of adventure”). They’re a three-piece but thanks to some good guitar lines it’s easy to think that there’s a second six-stringer. I actually thought there was until I caught them live. Yep, I get things wrong a lot.

‘Excuses be Damned’ is one of my top picks from Dude Trips, an anthemic opener with the chorus “We’ll make the next one better!” which I think is about fucking up arrangements with friends or dates, but which works fairly well if you apply it to playing shows and going on tour. “We got held up on the way up, but we’re here now so could you please cheer up now.”

It’s a shame that Dude Trips wasn’t issued as a vinyl release, since all of the tracks on it are available elsewhere, a lot of them on other vinyl records, and collections always feel a bit more special on the bigger format. Still, it’s a good CD that collects some great songs from one of the UK’s hardest-working and touring punk bands, and despite their disparate origins the songs fit together perfectly as an album. Plus, you can download the songs free from Bandcamp if you don’t want to buy it. There’s no excuse not to do one of the two.

MySpace | Bandcamp | Twitter | Facebook | Flix Records

I suspect that almost everyone reading this has, at some point in their lives, played a tower defence game. They’ve become hugely widespread, especially online, and they’re the ideal sort of game to play during a lunchbreak at work or when killing time on a laptop – being fun and immediately accessible. The problem is that most tower defence games are much like another. Where do you go now, between the classic Defense of the Ancients experience (currently being revisited by both titans of PC gaming, Valve and Blizzard), the high production values and diversity of Defense Grid, and the genre-crossing ideas of Toy Soldiers – which allows players to hop directly into gun emplacements and aircraft, and indeed makes it an integral part of the experience? Not to mention the huge number of titles that can be found on any Flash game website like Newgrounds?

DeTweet offers one answer – it integrates social networking directly into its gameplay. The idea here is that each of the tiny blue enemies that hop along the path you’ve lined with turrets is a unique message pulled from Twitter. When you start a game you enter a keyword which the game will search for and organise whatever it finds into waves of enemies. Speech bubbles pop up above the occasional enemy – sometimes cute, and sometimes depressing, depending on the content of the message, but you can always hope for the stupid and bigoted ones to get gunned down first. Any tweets that escape your killing zone appear on the left of the screen, along with their author’s avatar and a link to their profile – which adds a bit of personality to the end-game experience. Because you will, inevitably, lose.

See, as an idea DeTweet is great, and I’d rather play it than most other tower defence games. The downside is that as a tower defence game it’s not that great. This is partially down to the game’s funding model, and partially down to its design. The former, first: it’s a donation-based game, with its creator promising to create more content, chiefly gun turret types and maps – of which there’s currently only one of each. It’s a good idea but does run the risk of people not wanting to invest in a game which is presently underdeveloped. That said, its creator is currently working on full versions for mobile stores, so the funding model may yet change.

As for the latter issue of the game’s design – tower defence games are easy to put together in principle, but hard to balance – they can’t be too easy or too hard for risk of putting players off, but working out how to strike that balance – particularly when the game’s enemies are being drawn from social networking content – is a tricky proposition. I might also take issue with some design decisions like making initial tower construction very slow, but upgrades much faster and range increases instantaneous. The game’s visuals are also very crude – it would benefit from the work of a dedicated artist – and there are little issues like the ‘expand range’ upgrade button not updating, so you can only see that more range upgrades are possible thanks to the cost going up. Further, on my first game it took me a while to realise that all towers have a minimum as well as a maximum range – so placement becomes extra important. Relatedly, the game limits you to tower placement in certain pre-defined areas, but the way these areas have been chosen seems partly by design and partly random.

Overall DeTweet is a good spin on the tower defence concept and is fun for a few blasts with some current buzzwords, but I’m concerned that the lack of content and unpolished nature of the whole package may not bode well when combined with its funding model. Still, work is ongoing so it’ll be worth checking in occasionally to see if any new content is available.

Play DeTweet

This won’t be a glorious retrospective or even an excoriating rant about British pop music in the 1990s. I moved to Essex in about 1993, and my enduring memories of the Brit music for the ensuant 7 years are BritPop (which I never really took to bar Suede and Blur’s mid-to-late work), the shudderingly awful ladrock of Oasis, awful meat market dance tunes – this was Essex, after all – and of course the cancerous polyp upon the anus of humanity that was UK Garage, and subsequently Craig David’s stupid chinstrap. I wasn’t much of a fan of what I heard at the time. But hey, your mileage may vary. I once read that the guys who pioneered UK Garage were working underground with little recognition for many years, so at least they were genuine at the same time as being terrible.

But the point of this post isn’t too reminisce about times past. It’s actually to make cheap fun of the elements of British pop culture that just don’t seem to be able to move on. Let’s start with the slightly tragic: recently ’90s two-hit wonder Republica (you know them, your mum probably likes ‘Ready To Go’) reformed for a tax write-off reunion show. Loserville was in attendance and reviewed what was, by all accounts, the most significant musical event of 2010.

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