8GR8 #04: Seiken Densetsu 3 (Supersized Edition!)

Time for another installment of 8GR8, the feature that takes eight awesome pieces of video game music that tie around a certain theme and put them together in list form. This time, we're looking exclusively at one game: Seiken Densetsu 3, the excellent sequel to Secret of Mana that never got released (officially, anyway) outside Japan.

Normally, in 8GR8, we look at a wide array of different games. But sometimes, it's fun and also timely to narrow the focus. Not only are we examining a single game today, but we're also looking at more songs from it—twelve, to be exact, rather than the usual eight. The game on the docket is Seiken Densetsu 3, an adventure in all ways superior not only to its predecessor, Secret of Mana, but to many (if not all) of the games in the series that came after it as well. Seiken Densetsu 3 claims the honor of being my favorite JRPG of all time, and the 20th anniversary of its release falls on September 30, and so there's no better time to take a look at its excellent soundtrack, composed entirely, like Secret of Mana, by Hiroki Kikuta.


1. "Little Sweet Café"

Kicking off with one of the town themes, probably the most relaxed one. There's a moment in games of this scope where you realize you're inhabiting a quaint little pocket of peace before some universe-bending stuff goes down, and it's tempting to want to stay in that pocket. And technically, you can—I mean, it's not like there's ever a time limit in these games, despite the pressing issues at hand. Sometimes, it even prevents me from finishing games. You could probably pipe this into a Starbucks and no one would bat an eyelash. Actually, how about you go save the universe? I'll just sit here nursing this venti caramel frappuccino.


2. "Nuclear Fusion"

I'll admit that Seiken Densetsu 3's oddball sound design is an acquired taste. The drums resemble nothing so much as a Street Fighter punch connecting with an opponent's jaw, and intense melee combat often sounds like jelly monsters having a slapfight. But if you can get past the former, you'll find it gives a huge adrenaline boost to many of the soundtrack's drum-heavy songs. This is one track I think benefits greatly from it, and it contains a callback to "Meridian Dance" from Secret of Mana to boot.


3. "Splash Hop"

Following the "bigger is better" credo, Seiken Densetsu 3 features not one travel buddy animal, but two. Flammie the white dragon shows up later in the game, but before he arrives, you get Booskaboo, a turtle in a snorkel summoned at certain shores by the Pihyara Flute. Booskaboo is a laid-back kind of guy, and his theme, a loping reggae tune, reflects that well. Back in the 90s, you couldn't swing a cat by the tail without hitting a VGM track with steel drums in it, but I love the bouncy breakdown featuring them here, as well as the effusive followup phrase that ends the loop. Few tracks in the game are as whistle-able as this one.


4. "Harvest November"

"Sultry" isn't generally a word that comes to mind when considering desert themes, except when playing this (and possibly a Shantae game). The heat of Navarre isn't of the oppressive variety. As deserts go, it's actually a pretty relaxing, pleasant, and fertile place. (The game saves its scary licks for the Valley of Flames, nestled deep within the desert.)


5. "Different Road"

The theme that plays while traveling the Path to the Heavens, a series of winding caves and rock bridges that culminates in both the meeting of Flammie and a view that by Super Nintendo standards is absolutely breathtaking. I like that Kikuta managed to bake such a sense of urgency into an otherwise steady-tempo'd track; it comes early in the adventure, but there are still things to be done, a world to save, and no time to waste.


6. "High Tension Wire"

Seiken Densetsu 3 has a number of different boss themes, many of which correspond to a certain type of boss or circumstance. "High Tension Wire", my favorite song on the entire soundtrack, plays during bosses that fly, like the harpy-esque Tzenker and one of the god-beasts[1], Dangaard, a two-headed griffin, whom your party fights while aboard a soaring Flammie. It's not enough to just post the song; this one has to be witnessed in the proper context. The first time I entered that battle, it literally took my breath away for a few seconds.


7. "Faith Total Machine"

Another boss theme, this one playing during bosses that are ghosts, like Gorva on the ghost ship and god-beast Lightgazer. This one was a grower for me, as I originally preferred the Dolan-battle-exclusive "Black Soup", but over time the arrhythmic drums of the intro to "Faith Total Machine" plus its overall tempo have given this one the edge over it.


8. "Three of Darkside"

Most of Seiken Densetsu 3's soundtrack either gets your adrenaline pumping or massages your brain, but Kikuta can unleash the creep factor when he needs to as well. I love it in RPGs when characters enter the void, and the party in this game does so in spectacular fashion, getting sucked into the nether to fight with the eighth and final god-beast, Zable-Fahr—a frightening jester-demon of two heads (later three)—after your ragtag group finds the fabled Mana Stone of Darkness just prior to its destruction. This is a song that makes you feel really hopeless—like no matter how leveled-up you are, the thing you're up against is just too big, and you're not getting out of the Phantom Zone alive.


9. "Angel's Fear"

If you listen to this one for even just past the intro, you'll recognize it as the intro theme to Secret of Mana, and if you know the names of songs that appear in video games, you might have even guessed that before you heard note one. This is a much more melancholy arrangement, however, plucked out on only a piano and an acoustic guitar, both samples sounding totally amazing on that Super Famicom sound chip.


10. "The Sacrifice, Part III"

The final final boss theme of the game, which comes roaring in after the most perfect pregnant pause where you're not sure if you killed it or it's entering its final phase. (Spoiler: it's the latter.) The major key ensures that you flex your muscles and give that boss—whether it's the Dragon Emperor, the Masked Mage, or the Dark Lich[2]—all you've got, while the minor bridge reminds you how far you've come and reins you in, making sure you give the battle the gravity it deserves. If this song doesn't make you fall in love with those wacky punch-noise drums once and for all, nothing will.


11. "Farewell Song"

Songs like this are why I hate beating long games that allow me to get invested in the fates of the characters. The first time I beat this game, I legitimately got misty the first time I beat the game and the Mana Goddess reveals that Mana will be disappearing from the world, but exhorts the heroes to "remember me ... [and] make sure your children remember..." because Mana magic will return to the world in a thousand years. Some of my not playing many RPGs is because I don't have the time to invest in them or I didn't get into them at the height of their popularity, but if I'm being totally truthful, a substantial chunk of it is I don't like saying goodbye to them.


12. "Return to Forever"

Despite the title of the track, this is unfortunately not Chick Corea and his band of jazz fusion masters sitting in for the final track. Nevertheless, it still makes for an excellent end to an incredible quest. Watching Booskaboo and Flammie travel the world thinking, "Well, what are we gonna do now? I guess just hide out for a thousand years" ties up a loose end I didn't know I wanted tied. What I like about the video for this song is that it allows ample playtime for the loop that "ends" the song. Almost half the video's runtime is devoted to that loop, and nothing says "it's over, man, turn it off, go do something else" like four minutes of that. Though I could sit and listen to it for much longer.

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[1] Or "benevodons", if you prefer the official nomenclature.

[2] The game gives you a different final boss and penultimate dungeon depending on which of the six playable characters you choose as your main one.

Oso Closo

Everyone has a band that they consider their little secret. In some ways the String Cheese Incident is mine; no one local to me knows who they are and they usually don't like them if I try to introduce them. But I have entire communities online that I can fellowship with if I want to feel the gouda vibrations. They have a sizable audience, just not one I ever see in person. My real musical secret is the best band that should have made it big and never did: Oso Closo.

Oso Closo hailed from the city I've lived near or in almost all my life (Denton, Texas), and comprised Adrian Hulet on lead vocal and keys, Chris McQueen and Danny Garcia on guitar, Andy Rogers on bass, and Ryan Jacobi on drums. I first became aware of them when they opened for Monte Montgomery at the Granada Theater in Dallas in 2008. I bought a shirt. I still have it. My favorite moment from their all-too-short set was the closer, a cover of "If You Don't Know Me By Now" by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes.[1] Apologies for the low video quality, but that's as good as YouTube videos got back then, and anyway it's the audio that counts. I don't think anyone's going to pretend it holds a candle to the original, but using rigorous scientific metrics, it is about nine billion times better than the Simply Red version.

Not long after that show, the band released their second album, Today Is Beauty's Birthday. I haven't listened to much from their debut, Rest, so I can't attest to whatever unappreciated greatness it might be tucked away on there, but TIBB is some of the hottest liquid gold I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. Beginning with the eponymous three-minute symphonic suite, it transitions seamlessly into "Anywhere You Want To", a song that will make you want to pledge undying devotion to your significant other all over again, or find a significant other to pledge undying devotion to if you don't already have one. In fact, the whole album is basically a paean to the deepest and most keenly felt of loves, and if at times it feels like it's broadcasting its dispatches from deep in the friend zone, it's only because it's one of the most heart-rendingly sincere musical documents of its kind.

There's another classical interlude at "Magnolia", at which point the album becomes decidedly more pensive and minor-key. The only unfortunate thing about "Photograph" is that it has to share a title with a far inferior Nickelback song. But "Bayou Girl" and "Le Désir de Nuage" both have largely superfluous codas, making the middle the most difficult stretch of the album.

The brightest jewel, however, in an album full of them, is "Back Is Broken", which borrows its squiggly synth from fellow Dentoneers Snarky Puppy for a ripping solo backed by a guitar sound that encapsulates all the pain of the song and the one before it, "We, Ours". The love the narrator insisted could survive anything doesn't last the whole album, but they do a good job of making you want to believe in it all the same.

They made waves elsewhere, too. I doubt you remember much, if anything, about promotional campaigns run by chain restaurants—although if you do, my apologies—but in 2009, Chipotle ran a contest where they asked users to submit video productions relating their favorite burritos to order at Chipotle. Amid thousands of other entries, Oso Closo took first place, which was $10,000 and a year of free Chipotle. There will never be an Oso Closo greatest hits compilation, but if by some miracle it ever happened, it would be an absolute crime not to throw this little 50-second ditty on there. It is charming as heck and it always puts an enormous grin on my face.

Sadly, Oso Closo were too beautiful for this miserable earth, and the group dissolved not long after TIBB was released. The founding members, minus Adrian, went on to form Foe Destroyer, now a trio, who released a self-titled album in 2013. They've got a much crunchier garage-type sound than Oso Closo did, but these days it's the closest to an Oso Closo fix one can get.

Oso Closo, and Adrian in particular, are everything that make me wish I'd learned a musical instrument as a child. They were capable of incorporating an orchestra into their rock sound without evoking the worst excesses of progressive rock. They could write an 8-minute song and make it feel like the most natural thing in the world. Their guitarist sounded like Brian May. Adrian's voice—my God, his voice!—somehow sounds golden and gritty at the same time. It can give you all the bombast of the most powerful arena rock, and it can bring the volume from that level down to candlelight intimacy in the space of a single heartbeat. It's a voice that can even lend gravitas to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, of all things. Oso Closo are the greatest band that ever came out of Denton, and I include in that assessment Bowling for Soup, Brave Combo, and one-fourth of the Eagles.[2]

[3]

You can go out and watch fireworks this weekend, or you can listen to them, by spinning Today Is Beauty's Birthday on repeat. (Yes, yes, Old El Paso girl, we know, we know. Just let me have my ridiculous binaries, will you?)

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[1] While we're on the subject of covers, "If You Don't Know Me By Now" wasn't even the best one played that night. That would be Monte Montgomery doing "In the Air Tonight", which I can tell you for a fact precisely zero people in attendance were expecting and got less excited for "When Will I" than they did for this. Luckily, the Granada also captured this song in glorious 240p video for posterity, and you should do absolutely nothing else before viewing the video below.

[2] Don Henley, ugh.

[3] Featuring a Shredder who actually shreds!

Dispatches from Couch Tour: Skrilled Cheese, or, It's Always the End of the World

Even though the String Cheese Incident gets top billing on this Internet writey page of mine, I started it up at a time when they had just recently wrapped up a tour, so there wasn't a whole lot of current Cheesy stuff to talk about, and for the most part I'm not terribly interested in the fart-sniffing of past glories. Today, however, we get to do both!

String Cheese kicked off their typical summer festival circuit on Friday night with the first of three performances at Electric Forest in Rothbury, Michigan. Since its inception, the festival has gradually given itself over to an increased presence of DJs and EDM acts, but SCI has always served as its anchor, headlining each night since 2009 (when it was still just "Rothbury") with multiple sets each night.

Once one of the elements that threatened to tear the band asunder, SCI are now no strangers to synths and knobs and laptops and wubs, though it's typically only a small part of a largely organic whole. In its current manifestation, it's less a means of brand growth than an occasional toy or tool, but last night it seemed the band actually maybe could have been viewed as extending an olive branch or two to the molly-gobblers, first in the form of a second set loosely themed around assorted candy connotations, then a Doors encore with none other than the mainstream face of dubstep himself, Mr. Sonny John Moore, a.k.a. Skrillex.

This took me literally two mnutes to make. Memes are a disease.

Ooh laws, and you thought the old-timers flipped their stuff when "Desert Dawn" got wompy.

I only listened on a Mixlr stream—big ups to Phishfiend for giving us couch folk crystal-clear Cheese straight from the soundboard—and later caught some 144p video on YouTube courtesy of the indispensable Martin Singer, and a couple of things seemed apparent to me. 1: Billy was flying first-class, which generally is his preferred method for convincing himself that this too shall pass, that this is sometimes the price of being part of a democracy rather than a dictatorship, and maybe if I put on some big goggles and a wizard hat and do a good enough job of pretending like I don't know where I am then maybe they'll let me bookend a set with "Colorado Bluebird Sky" tomorrow or the next day. 2: They were having fun (especially Travis), which in a live organic mode that usually requires the listener to endure and forgive occasional-to-semi-frequent musical and lyrical burps, warts, and/or flubs is in my opinion a slightly more useful rubric for determining the value of a performance than something strictly technical.

I'm the kind of person who derives nourishment from the schadenfreude of large-scale butthurt even when I kind of agree with it, so this sort of event rolls right off my back. But it's hard for me to see how this is anything other for a win for SCI. For one thing, how many bands could have the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Skrillex play with them in the same night? If you put together a list of some of the most high-profile acts that have sat in with SCI (which I'm not going to do right now because this has already taken me several hours to write), you'd get a résumé even the man from Moab would get Tex Avery eyes looking at. 

Jam band fans pride themselves on being open-minded and accepting folks, but events like this reveal what a wet-paper facade that often is. It takes a lot of guts to cast aside your long-codified musical preferences and prejudices, even more so when you're doing it on stage in front of thousands of people who know very well what they like and what they don't like and don't mind telling you either way, and yet still String Cheese manages to frequently lead by example. It's an incredibly hard thing to do. It would be easy to keep inviting the same Keller Williamses and Warren Hayneses to sit in and stay snug in that comfort zone, and not many people would complain if they did. But they stretch out, they expand, and they, and ultimately we, are better for it. They play with the likes of Dierks Bentley and Lauryn Hill. Does it really matter, in a macro sense, if the performance is bad? Does it matter more that it happened at all? Who cares if Skrillex can't hold a candle to Kang or Billy on the guitar? He's much more theatrical with his body than they are, but he had fun with them and he hyped them up to the crowd and he repped them to people who normally would never have had the pleasure of having them in their lives. He's a friend of Cheese, like it or lump it.

The more puritan fans do have some options for consoling themselves. First of all, it was night one of three, and if you want to tell yourself that maybe they're just getting the Madison House promotional stunt out of the way early and gearing up for something a little more traditionally heady, then by all means, vaya con Dios. You can consider that they spent 13 minutes jamming with freakin' Skrillex and only one of those minutes comprised predominantly EDM elements, therefore it could have been much worse. But if nothing will salve your wounds except some aged gouda, you're still in luck, because yesterday marked the 13th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite incidents: the band's performance at erstwhile concert venue Barton Coliseum in Little Rock, Arkansas.

*  *  *

2002 was the year I discovered SCI by downloading "Texas" at four kilobytes a second on good old spyware-infested Kazaa Lite, so right away that puts it somewhere among at least the top three years of my life to date. The On the Road archival series was just beginning to take off, and even with the existence of the Live Music Archive and the file-sharing flavor of the month, $20 for 3+ hours of unimpeachable live music was a steal even then. This was the second OTR package I bought, and it took me straight from appreciative neophyte to devoted disciple.

Despite being straitened by a curfew and the package containing only two discs as opposed to the normal three, the band packed more energy into any given song of this show than they do into some shows' entire running times. Usually the first song or two or three can be written off as a warmup, but here "Cedar Laurels", so often accused of overplay in those days if I recall correctly (along with "It Is What It Is" and "Joyful Sound") comes roaring spotless out of the gate; it's still my definitive version of the song. Speak of the allegedly overplayed devil, "Joyful Sound" is next, and segues into "Orange Blossom Special", forming a sly setlist reference to none other than the vaunted "Incident in Atlanta"—of which of course there have been many, but you know, the Incident in Atlanta—though there's a sinister bite to the playing here, especially in the jam leading into OBS and the first few minutes thereof, that makes me give it the edge over the November 2000 versions.

"Ten Miles to Tulsa" will have you longing for more appearances of the sort of material Billy pumped out when he was collaborating with Liza Oxnard, and a shorty in the middle of some extended jams is always a nice treat, especially when it ends up serving as an amuse-bouche to the 1-2-3 punch of "This Must Be the Place", "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", and a set-closing "Shine" with just the right amount of ramshackle.

What's going to catch most people's eyes here on paper is the second set, one of those beautiful unicorns that appears maybe once a year, if even then: the all-segue set. In this case we get back-to-back rarities mixed in with indisputable classics: "Johnny Cash" kicks things off, followed by a cover of Yes's "Roundabout" that starts off in recital mode but finds that essential String Cheese ownership during the jam. The next 30 minutes of the set find the band alternating between "Sand Dollar" and "Texas". Neither gets its traditional ending, but the interweaving of the jams more than makes up for that. "Texas" crashes into the end of "Johnny Cash" to bring everything full-circle, bringing one of the tightest (in many ways) sets the band has ever played to an exhausted close.

If you think an all-segue set is rare, then prepare for the breach of an even bigger white whale: an audience request! Unfortunately, they weren't able to fulfill the original request of "Pirates" (an idea that was completely alien to me at the time—how do you forget a song you've performed hundreds of times?), but they encore with "Howard" instead, a more-than-acceptable substitute and a perfect capper to a crazy night.

The show is available as a digital download on Live Cheese; if you've never listened to it and you dare to call yourself a fan of String Cheese, you owe it to yourself to add this notch to your belt. Here's the "Roundabout" cover from that show, to give you a small taste of what went down that night.

5 Songs I Wish Were On Spotify

It's my deeply held hope that some day every song I like or could ever think of will be available on Spotify. I've subscribed to Spotify Premium for 3½ years, and in the event that the ship goes down, I intend to go down with it. Yesterday I went idly looking, and lo and behold, a song I love finally made its way on there:

I realize there is a preponderance of funk on this list. Not that there's anything wrong with that; we could all certainly use a little (or a lot) more down 'n' dirty funk in our lives. Maybe that's just where my headspace is at right now. But these are just personal wishes, not necessarily endorsements. (Although, incidentally, yes, I do endorse every one of these songs with great gusto.)

Connie Price & the Keystones, "The Buzzard"

It's amazing how far that Quincy Jones "Streetbeater" "fwah fwah" sound will carry you. Just one of those every few seconds, and you'll drift along like you're riding the lazy funk river. Really helps you ease into it when that trumpet starts gettin' super-widdly in the back half.

The Whatnauts, "Help Is On the Way"

See, this is why I can't appreciate what passes for Christian rock. Why shovel that thin gruel with a smile when you've got a beat this rock-solid, silky-smooth vocals, and a bass line so deep in the pocket it's breathing lint? I could listen to this ten times a day, which just isn't as easy when I've got to be tethered to YouTube to do it. I need it on my Spotify!

Liquid Soul, "Threadin' the Needle"

It's hard enough to find this particular Liquid Soul on Spotify; most of the search results are gunked up with nondescript New Age instrumentals. You have to actually know what you're looking for to find this, and even then, my favorite album of theirs, 2002's Make Some Noise, isn't on there. As long as I care to look, you could at least make it worth my while, Spotify.

Let's be real for a moment: if that saxophone squeal at 2:04 doesn't leave your jaw hanging off your dong, because your jaw fell off at the same time that you got a massive erection, then I don't even know what we're doing here. Mars Williams for president of music.

J. Geils Band, "Must of Got Lost"[1]

Let's just get it out of the way up front: I practically have a grand mal seizure every time I say or type the title of this song. How simple grammatical errors and typos slip through all the cracks from conception to publication is a feat of institutional oversight I'll never understand. But I'm not going to harp on it, it is what it is, and there's nothing to be done about it almost 40 years after the fact.

What makes this one extra-baffling is that Nightmares...and Other Tales from the Vinyl Jungle is available on Spotify—but when you click on the track on the album page, you still get the 2:58 single edit! In fact, as I search the usual channels—even Amazon MP3, where I once bought the track—it seems the 5:05 album version has been all but scrubbed from existence.

I can see why a single edit might have been thought necessary—that second verse is a bit of a hot mess, and five minutes is longer than most singles yet also nowhere near "deejay bathroom break" territory—but to deny the world that coda from 3:29 on is just about a war crime. The Blow Your Face Out live version provides a decent fix sometimes, but I'm rarely in the mood to hear Peter Wolf talk about Rapunzel and "Woofa Goofa" for two minutes.

Leahy, "B Minor"

My wife introduced me to Leahy when we were still dating; she saw them in concert at her school (the University of Central Arkansas) and passed a recommendation along to me, thinking I would like them. And thus began a long tradition of getting into things I never would have found on my own without her.

This video is better quality than the one I was initially going to go with, though I'm not sure why the guy who posted it felt the need to pepper the image montage with a "just because it doesn't have lyrics like your precious pop rock doesn't mean it's 'weird'" diatribe. Another reason this song should be on Spotify, because then I could listen to it without the condescending lecture. (The album in the thumbnail is on Spotify, but "B Minor" isn't on it. Very misleading and disappointing.)

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[1] You'll have to be patient with the video, it's kind of hinky. It hangs up at the 0:09 mark, but if you set the dial past that and wait a bit (like, go make a sandwich or something), it'll kick in and go to the end without incident.

What I'm Blanking: Up in Smoke Edition

At any given time, I'm absorbing works from all over the cultural spectrum. What I'm Blanking is a neat summation of those moments in my cultural journey.

What I'm Reading: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I kind of had a sneaking suspicion when I read the description on the back cover, but at just over 100 pages in, I can confirm it: this is, I hate to say it, a White People Problems book. You know, that kind of Jonathan Franzen middle-class ennui type stuff.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad book, and it's peppered with similes and passages that win my approval (e.g., "tender as a change purse"), but the older I get, the less time I have for stories like this. I'm committing to it, but I have to say, it's slow goings right now.

Brief plot summary: at a summer camp in the 70s, five or six kids fancy themselves the kings and queens of irony and wit and form an Algonquin Round Table Lite, christening themselves The Interestings. Once camp ends, they go their separate ways and on to varying degrees of success and/or failure, with animation wonk Ethan Figman hitting the jackpot with an autobiographical, vaguely Simpsons-esque animated show called Figland. Great, now that you're asleep, I can sneak off and get some Taco Bell.

I'm trying to finish this before the S-load of books I have coming in from Amazon arrives, but prospects currently look grim.

What I'm Playing:

Secret of Mana

Now that I'm officially not recording Let's Plays for the foreseeable future, I can feast upon any dish the gaming world has to offer and not worry about subconsciously vetting it for series potential. It may not reflect well on me, but my first choice was straight-up comfort food. I have a great big soft spot for the once-amazing Mana series, and while I enjoy the sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, a lot more (it's my favorite RPG of all time), I'm saving it for that space between the end of summer and the start of autumn, since September 30 marks the 20th anniversary of the Japanese release of SD3.

Though I'm admittedly starting it off very Mana-heavy, I've been wanting to take a journey through some of the RPGs that either I loved in their prime or missed out on in their initial run, but playing SoM I've found that a huge roadblock to that journey might be grinding. Secret's grinding can be significantly reduced by keeping it down to one weapon per character and only leveling up essential spell elementals (Undine, Lumina, and Dryad for the girl; literally all of them for the sprite). I already barely have time to maintain a little-read blog; grinding levels in video games is waaaaaaaay low on the list of "things I want to do with what little free time I have". I currently have to get the girl's and sprite's spells up to level 7 before I move on with the story, and the feeling of dread that washes over me when I think about tackling it is honestly not that far removed from the one that accompanies the thought of doing laundry when the dirty pile is up to your waist.

This is also my first time playing Secret of Mana with the "Enhanced" patch, which changes the fixed-width font to the variable-width Chicago font recognizable from Chrono Trigger and 90s Macs, allowing for less stilted dialogue. To be honest, the dialogue doesn't have noticeably more pop with the patch than without—a testament to what Ted Woolsey was able to accomplish with significantly reduced cartridge space and virtually no time—though there are some amusing Easter eggs hidden here and there.

Chip's Challenge 2

I'm about a third of the way through this game, but I'm stockpiling my thoughts on it. I'll write a full post about it after I've completed it.

What I'm Listening To:

Keller Williams, Vape

Keller Williams has been semi-unifying his studio albums around single-word themes for so long now that, given his jam scene cred, it's kind of amazing it took this long for him to get around to one about getting high. It's a dangerous road to walk—hippies love reminding people how much they love to get high, yet there's nothing more boring than listening to hippies talk about getting high. After an instrumental opener, the trifecta of "Mantra", "The Drop", and "She Rolls" hits hard, fast, and often. Unfortunately, the rest of the album can't match that early energy, though it's nice that the hypnotic "Donuts"[1], which has been floating around by itself on Spotify for two years, finally has an album home.

John Hartford and the Dillards, "Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown"

You know how sometimes, there are certain people that you'll listen to talk about anything, either because they're so passionate about it or you love the sound of their voice? That works here as a corollary to the hippies-talking-about-getting-high thing. This song is ridiculously catchy. It's like some strange hybrid between a railroad chain-gang song, an old-time gospel hymn, and one of those kind of reggae-lite 10cc-type songs, and I don't know how it works, but it works. This gets stuck in my head all the time, especially at work, where I'm not often in a great position to be singing it out loud.

What I'm Watching:

Whiplash

Finally got the opportunity to Redbox this one. I'm not going to talk much about the nuts and bolts of it, just that 1) I loved it, 2) J.K. Simmons earned that Oscar, and 3) more than anything, it made me want to watch Glengarry Glen Ross again. The two movies seem very thematically similar to me. They ask a lot of the same Big Questions, like: What lengths does a person have to go to in order to be "great"? What is "great"? Who does that matter to? Is a desire to be a legend a sociopathic quality? If not inherently so, at what point does it become one?

Whiplash is also one of those heightened experiences movies are great at offering up. It's grounded in reality, but there is a faint patina of slight inauthenticity that reads more as a next-level magic that only a cinematic experience can provide. Naturally, movies that do this well often end up becoming my favorite movies.

Big Wind-up! (Ookiku Furikabutte)

Do you like Dragon Ball Z? Do you like the long, protracted battles that span multiple episodes? Do you wish those battles were baseball games? If you answered yes, especially to the last question, you're going to love Big Windup.

In a nutshell, Ren Misashi transfers to a new school after being humiliated by his old baseball team, having only been made the ace pitcher due to nepotism. When he arrives at the new school, he attracts the notice of catcher Takaya Abe, who sees that he has excellent pitch control but needs to be brought out of his sniveling, whimpering shell. It's kind of a Bull Durham-type relationship, only if the pitcher had absolutely zero ego instead of way too much.

I've only watched seven episodes, and it's been a while since I checked in with it, so I may need to start over since every player on every team has a distinct personality and the show does keep up with it. My forays into anime are rare, but this is a good one, and I should really get back into it.

The entire single season (26 episodes) can be watched on Hulu, either subbed or dubbed. Typically I prefer subs but in this case I went with the dub, and I'm actually not regretting it.

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[1] No relation.

What's Gonna Be on the Next String Cheese Album?

The String Cheese Incident's Winter Carnival wrapped up in Las Vegas this past weekend, and the next closest Kangfirmed appearance thus far is their annual Electric Forest run at the end of June. Four months is a long time to have to wait for more heady gouda, but in the meantime, we can occupy ourselves with a little unscientific speculation about the band's possible studio adventures.

Ask any jam band fan what they think of the studio albums and you'll get opinions, sure, but not without a generous side of eye rolls and out-of-hand dismissals. The consensus view is generally that the studio output of any jam band doesn't tell half the story, if that much. I might be a bit of a heretic in this regard, but I confess I pull up the studio tracks a lot. Like the band themselves, my main reason for enjoying the studio product is that I like retracing the chronicles of where they're going and where they've been, so when the band books studio time, my salivary glands kick into high gear. The fact that nine whole years passed and Song in My Head turned out as good as it did should be all the more reason for future studio excursions to become appointment listening for fans.

The well of new tunes didn't dry up with the release of Song in My Head; the boys are still on a creative tear and still debuting new original material, as well as reworking some older chestnuts. They've expressed interest in getting back into the studio as soon as possible in interviews, and they've already got at least a few nuggets stored up that I think have a greater-than-99-percent chance of making the cut.

There's still time for songs in the works we haven't heard yet to debut, but for now, let's fiddle around with what we've got. Knowing what we know about them, we're going to take seven songs (technically eight, but seven numbered) currently in mostly heavy (sometimes occasional) rotation and rank the likelihood of them being on the next studio album on a painstakingly calibrated scale of one to five pixelated cheese wedges, one indicating a slim chance and five being a mortal lock.

Songs are listed alphabetically.


1. "Beautiful"

Co-written with Chris Berry of Panjea, which is important because it always brings Kang's game up a notch when he works with a collaborator. "Beautiful" hasn't gone anywhere since it debuted 4/25/14 in Oakland, and I would imagine it's probably on for the long haul. One of the few songs in the SCI catalog that sounds better the dubbier it gets. My guess would be it turns out to be the "Rosie" of the album, that one track where they all agree to go all in on the crazy noises and knobs and wubs that used to make them fight with each other.

Rating:

2. "Bollymunster"

In case you're not aware, "Bollymunster" takes an old Irish melody called "Star of Munster" and puts it in a blender along with about five minutes of Indian and electronic canoodling. It's not the first time String Cheese has pulled a stunt like this; "Valley of the Jig" is basically "Red-Haired Boy" with a thick layer of trance on top. The difference is that "Valley of the Jig" is a good song that actually evolved over the course of several years, whereas you can pretty much pull any given performance of Bolly out of a hat and know exactly what you're getting.

Often referred to pejoratively as "Mollydumpster", because the only people who really like it a lot tend to be wooks. If you ask me, the band needs to either defibrillate this song somehow or shelve it. But, it's been in heavy rotation since it debuted, and they seem to like playing it, and it knocks out a lot of birds with one stone—it's electronic, it's grassy, it's got fiddle, etc.[1] "Bumpin' Reel" is much better but, I hate to say it, less likely to make the studio cut, if we're being honest with each other and ourselves.

Rating:

3. "Here to Stay"

I'm not going to pretend I ever understand what Travis is talking about in his lyrics. Straight up, I don't. His songs never last long enough in the rotation to get really acquainted with them anyway. But, sometimes they'll throw him a bone and put something he wrote on a studio album. It's a slick move: they get to add one more author to the list of people who have material on the album, and they get to play up the ensemble aspect some more. It's a bit hard to gauge this one. It's only been played three times so far, but I'm going to be optimistic about it. It sounds really cool at least, so I'm pulling for it.

Rating:

4. "I'm Still Here"

This song's only been played five times so far but it's come around pretty well in the ten months it's been around. I wasn't a fan at first since the way it's sung is WAY outside Billy's vocal abilities, but they seem to have rectified this by having Travis sing it in the most recent performance (Eugene 1/19/15), which is a much better fit for the range and style involved. This is a really weird song, almost in some ways very un-SCI-like. It almost seems at times like it could be a Honkytonk Homeslice[2] song, until they get to the really crunchy stuff, like after "yes it could", and then who knows. It feels like it could have been on Untying the Not, which is a compliment. It's hard to say at this juncture where it fits into the overall Cheese mythos, but if they keep developing it, it could be a monster in second sets when they bring the tempo down in order to create a mood. Whatever happens to it, I hope they treat it better than "Cats".

Rating:

5. "Just One Story"

Kang relied on old material for his contributions to Song in My Head. "Betray the Dark" got its rightful proper treatment after the disgusting limp noodle version that appeared on One Step Closer, and "Stay Through" debuted in 2005, though that can be hard to remember since it only got played three times before it got shelved, seemingly for good, before reappearing suddenly in the lead-up to the new album, since which it's been played at least semi-regularly. If he repeats this move for the next album, I think this is the one that'll make the cut—yes, even over "Desert Dawn" (I think the window on hearing a studio version of that song has shut, though I could, and always hope to, be wrong). I realize this is a bit of a stretch, but we're all just spitballing here, and good luck ever getting "Tamba" or "Solution" on a record.

Rating:

6. "Sweet Spot"

The number one definite gotta-be-on-there so far. If this doesn't appear on the next album, I'll eat my SCI bucket hat, especially since the only Moose-led track on Song in My Head was on the melancholy "Struggling Angel". Moseley isn't the most prolific member of the group, but when he sits down to write something, he makes it count, and the fan response to this song has been nothing but positive. You can hardly go wrong when SCI starts going deep in the pocket. 

Rating:

7. "Until the Music's Over"

Before this winter, this song had been played live exactly one time since appearing on One Step Closer in 2005. Then, it showed up pretty much out of nowhere during the 2014 New Years run with a fresh coat of paint and a jam space you could fit a Carnival cruise ship in. Could another polish job á la "Betray the Dark" be in the pipeline? A lot of songs from that black sheep of an album, e.g. "Give Me the Love" and the title track, have made triumphant returns and significant evolutionary strides post-hiatus, and the Barefoot Boys have shown they're not afraid to re-record material. (See also the Honkytonk Homeslice cut of "Just Passin' Through", which restores the crucial instrumental coda to its rightful prominence.) Of all the tracks from OSC to poke their noses out of hibernation, this one's quickly shaping up to be the most exciting, and if the band stays committed to it, this one's got a puncher's chance.

Rating:

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[1] Plus it's got some semi-nonsensical Jason freestyling, and every good Cheese fan loves that!

[2] God, I hate saying/typing that for any reason.

The Werks - "Duck Farm"

I have to be honest: I didn't expect a song called "Duck Farm" to be the most poignant song I've discovered so far in the still-young 2015. Frankly, I think it's asking a lot for a song with a title like that to meet a baseline minimum of "good". It sounds like a lesser Weird Al original. I reserve the right to continue thinking the title is stupid until I discover or am told what it has to do with the song, but despite the strange name, the song manages to get to the heart of something I consider essential for living a happy life.

In the liner notes of the String Cheese Incident's 1996 album Born on the Wrong Planet[1], the song of the same name is described as a "misfit's anthem". The word "anthem" seems to suggest something slightly more soul-stirring than the shoulder shrug it turns out to be. I love "Born on the Wrong Planet", but overall it's a somewhat noncommittal, even at times glib song. "I guess I was just born on the wrong planet." Oh well, what can ya do, right?

"Duck Farm" is of a piece with that song, but it's much more keenly felt; both the highs and lows of being that eccentric person and having that off-kilter taste are captured in both the music and the lyrics. The first verse evokes the melancholy that one can often feel living in that misfit skin: "One of those days that kind of fade / wishing I could hide away". It's not a sadness or a depression, per se, but it's a feeling familiar to my heart. When I was discovering jam bands throughout my senior year of high school, I was exploring new musical territory alone, in the midst of a family that shared neither that interest nor my interest in that interest. I got told to "turn down [my] dirty hippie music" a lot. Many's the day it would indeed have been "so serene to wake up / in a dream". Living a sustained existence outside a consensus view of "normal" is a hard row to hoe sometimes, and the song doesn't shy away from it.

There's a bit of a musical sigh after that first verse, a short period of cool-down before things start to get a little happy again with the guitar. After that's when things start rippin'. "Exuberant" isn't really a word I feel most people would associate with the general vibe of synthesizers, but I feel confident saying that what follows the guitar solo is the most exuberant synth solo I've ever heard. It's the other side of the coin; the happiness you can't contain after setting foot on that journey. It all builds toward the words that finally come in and hit home for me:

When the moon shines on the disco ball

We gather 'round and we get that feeling

You feel the love no matter big or small

Why would you stop if there is no ceiling?

The hate is gone, there is no wrong, you are in paradise

I think it's the message in those lines that's important. The "Born on the Wrong Planet" narrator is content to be who he is, but The Werks elaborates on that ownership of self with a crucial call to action: find your people. There's strength in numbers, and that strength is the happiness that comes from finding those kindred souls and feeling the energy of a moment in fellowship with each other.

I love the last line as well. "The hate is gone; there is no wrong; you are in paradise." I think "the hate is gone" is more a specific feeling endemic to the jam scene and the vibe they cultivate than something that can be applied generally; I've counted myself among a few communities where the hate wasn't gone just because everyone was united under a common banner (looking at you, gamers). The real liberation is in the fact that "there is no wrong"— once you embrace your truest self and cast your lot with it, you arrive at paradise, where there is no wrong way to manifest the way the belonging makes you feel. The Hammond organ hits the highest highs here, sustaining the ecstasy with the perfect tone for the mood, carrying it to the end of the song.

When I first started getting into these sorts of bands and songs, the initial draw was the training of the self to think of a 20+ minute jam as a journey rather than as a very long way to a destination and to lose myself in the groove. What kept me around was the people—unfailingly sweet, kind, and never living anything less than their truest selves. I could enjoy my Cheese and my Phish and whatever all else in my own private sphere, but it just wouldn't be as good or as fun as communing with others who get it, who know exactly what the moon shining on the disco ball means and why it touches and nourishes the soul the way it does. It's good to have a song within my reach that helps me remember what that's all about, to remember not just that you were born on the wrong planet, but that plenty of other people were born on that same planet as well.

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[1] To this day, my favorite liner notes of any album ever—beardless Billy posing with a cardboard cutout of Miss New York; the band's own description of their sound as "Afrojazzadelic funka-Latino bluegrass"; authorship of "Johnny Cash" attributed to "it wasn't me"; and so on. It seems weird to mention him in passing in two different and totally unrelated ways, but it was a different kind of weird than someone like Weird Al Yankovic, an important distinction for me to have to learn to make, where the weirdness came from the truth inside rather than from a carefully cultivated persona.