Monday, August 19, 2013

Now You Know: Ulver





Words.  Words help us to identify with everything around us.  We try to explain to others with our mouths the feelings and thoughts of what we see, to connect with each other and know that what we are weaved together within the fabric of mankind.  To relate.  The most feared form of torture in our society isn't waterboarding or the denial of freedom.......it's solitary confinement.  Isolation. We need other people, as much as some hate to admit it; we are nothing without others letting us know that our true ideas are not bordering the frayed edges of sanity.  Communication.

Sometimes, words as a form of communication can only relay so much.  Sometimes, you can't explain the sadness and beauty of the life around you, the unquenchable love and intense hatred that subsides in the heart, beating in rhythms.......the true fuel of our being.

There is no greater feeling than connecting a personal thought with someone else that you consider an equal. To know that you share something special.

Music is an idea in itself.  It is nothing without us, bringing these thoughts from within ourselves to be projected to others all in the hopes that there is someone out there that relates, that says "I understand". Notes can speak when syllables fail us.






Ulver has been around for a very long time.  They started out as a black metal band from Norway back in the 90's, and have progressed into one of the more interesting avant garde/psychedelic rock/experimental bands today. The song above is from their latest release, Messe-I.X-VI.X, and is a perfect example of their craft. Their music, like language, is not relatable to everyone.  It is a long, hardened road of huge atmospheric soundscapes, comparable to an oncoming storm that looks like it's going to destroy everything in sight, only to pass over without a whisper as it brings with it a kaleidoscopic sunset that brings tears to your eyes.







They have over ten albums now in their discography.  This is a band that is insistent on doing something different with every release, so it is guaranteed to be polarizing in certain areas. To listen to a single album by Ulver (Norweigan for wolves) and assume you have them pegged would be a pretty big mistake. While their music can be haunting and dark, it can also be very bright and uplifting as well.







Music.  It's the ultimate purveyor and navigator of an underlying feeling that we cannot express. When you find a band that you feel helps you understand this, you want to share it with others in the hopes it can do the same. These guys might not be for everybody, but if Ulver speaks to you, I'm thinking that you are going to want to listen.











Sunday, August 18, 2013

Sunday Sabbath Edition: God's Corner III

He's back, fellow brethren!  That's right, the big man upstairs is up in the hizzy to answer questions that are burning deep within your soul!  Take a seat, grab some communion wafers, and enjoy this third edition of God's Corner!



Hey everybody!  Hope you are all grateful to be alive for another glorious day on my watch!  Getting some great feedback about the column and it seems pretty much universal that I need to be a lot tougher on the people who I'm giving advice to.  I love too much, you could say.....it's probably my biggest fault by leaps and bounds.  You guys are my special little snowflakes, man.  I sacrificed my only child just so you guys can do horrible things and have them wiped from your conscience worry-free.  Unfortunately, sympathy does not make great dating advice when it's overdone.  I'm not foolish, and I'll try my best not to sugarcoat the facts anymore.

So with that, let's get right down to brass tax and start answering some questions....


Alicia
20 years old
lives in a cave

Dear God,
  My boyfriend is starting to get upset that we don't get intimate enough.  I'm still a virgin and plan to keep it that way until I'm married.  Are there other ways for me to take care of him without having full blown intercourse?  I don't want him to leave me because I don't cater to his sexual needs!

Dear Alicia,
  I think that you are basically asking me if there any loopholes in my unquestionably ironclad laws of man...............................

................and you came to the right place, is all I gotta say.  You two kids go crazy with anything that involves fingers, mouths or buttholes and I will gladly turn a blind eye (no masturbating each other though if you're Catholic).  Hopefully you will one day be married under my divine light, and then immediately stop having sex within a year of your union unless it's a birthday or the super bowl. That there is a real sacred union, my friends.




Michael
25 years old
still afraid of monsters under the bed

Dear God,
  I've started to notice that I can't have an orgasm anymore under normal circumstances.  Lately I've started getting into auto-erotic asphyxiation, and I'm scared that one of these times I'm going to end up in the hospital, or even worse.  I  don't want to keep endangering my life, but at the same time I feel as though I will never be able to get back to where I was before.  What should I do?

Dear Michael,
  This is obviously a tough situation that you're in.  Also, this is a great example of why I don't give every species thumbs because you'd all eventually end up just trying to find ways to play with yourselves to the brink of death.  I suggest that you seek out other people who are into this horrifying fetish you are into and try to network with them, maybe start a website about it or somethi........and disregard all this because Michael just accidentally killed himself.  Have fun in hell bro, you know I'm not too lenient with the suicide thing.  Sorry :(



Judy
23 years old
think ireland is an american state

Dear God,
  Why are there no good guys left out there for me?  It seems like all the men I'm attracted to already have girlfriends.  Why are you making it so hard on us single ladies, big guy?  Are you available by chance ;=)????

Dear Judy,
  If I had a dime for every lady that has wanted to shack up with your holiness, then I'd have an infinite amount of dimes because god is love, baby.  Unfortunately, you couldn't even gaze upon my feet without bursting into flames instantaneously, so that's out of the question.

The problem here is that there are plenty of great guys out there, but they see that you are a horned harlot of the night and wouldn't sleep with you for all the golden trumpets in god's kingdom.  You know how many golden trumpets I have?  Like thirty or whatever but in today's economy with gold prices going the way they are......that's like $30,000, which is a lot of money.  I'm sure if you were going to church every Sunday like I asked you'd be like "dear god, my model boyrfriend Balthazar is too fertile for my loins" and I'd be all "BURN IN THE PITS OF HELL YOU WINGED SUCCUBUS OF SATAN" and evaporate you or something.  I can get a little carried away sometimes when I've had too much sugar.



{Submit your questions in prayer before you go to bed tonight and maybe you will see your question in my column!!!  See ya later!}

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Video Spotlight: Buke & Gase - Hiccup







It's no secret to those within the circle of brothers rebel that I've been in love with Buke & Gase ever since I heard their debut back in January.  I even got the chance to see them, and passed on it because I am an insufferable asshole that hates myself to no ends. So, until they decide to tour again in the future, this is probably as close as I can get for now. Did I mention that I'm the mental equivalent of an eggplant?  Just want to make sure this is a well-known fact before I continue.

This song is great.  The entire album is great.  I mean, they invented their own instruments like the shoe bells or whatever the hell that thing is. Also.....

Buke = six-string baritone ukelele

and

Gase = guitar/bass hybrid

These guys are like the MacGyver's of music, dude. Speaking of, remember that MacGuyver episode where he's like in a casket on a boat for whatever reason, and the bad guys throw him overboard into the ocean, ONLY FOR MACGUYVER TO TURN THE CASKET INTO A JET SKI AND RIDE OFF INTO THE SUNSET????



Legend.




Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Kanye Quest 3030



I..........I..................I think this might be the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Have you ever wanted to play a 16-bit inspired RPG in which you play the role of Kanye West, savior of the rap game and time traveler extraordinaire? Me neither, or at least I thought I didn't until I saw the preview for Kanye Quest 3030. 

From watching it myself it looks like you will be taking on a clone army of some of the most well known rappers in the scene today. Why? Well, it's a video game so I'm going to assume that no one even gives a shit in the first place. Will Kanye at some point turn into a gay fish to save the dolphins from a 100-foot tall robotic Dr. Dre hellbent on destroying our marine life? Did I just come up with the most badass boss fight for this game or what, man?

Kanye Quest 3030 is available now FOR FREE at 


There is one stipulation, though. You will need the RPG Maker Runtime Package located here


After that, you have to look into your bathroom mirror at midnight and say the words "Bloody Kanye" three times without the lights on.  Then you can play to your hearts content (if Kanye has deemed you worthy of life and didn't devour your soul).

Go ahead and check out the trailer below and remember to wear a cap or something so your brain doesn't go flying off into space.






Sunday, August 11, 2013

Waxing Gibbous.





Luna: Band Loved, Record Bypassed 


Nirvana and more importantly Silverchair existed, but Luna, formed in 1991 by Dean Wareham after the collapse of Galaxie 500, is the greatest 90s band.  Their synthesis of rock’s hipster iconoclasts and pretentious know-it-all New York sensibility hatched something uncanny yet subdued, detonating with Bewitched’s title track and sustaining them through 2004.  

Wareham’s acrine vocals juxtapose the quiver and punch of Sean Eden’s guitar licks, winding together like cursive.  If Wareham is Luna’s head, Eden is the blood squirming through sonic veins trying to reach it.  That might make Luna sound active but their most daunting works are the attic sleepers that accompany their hits, like “Kalamazoo” and “Freakin’ and Peakin’.”  The collection containing these works, Penthouse, remains my favorite record by this band.  Luna belongs to a very labelcentric era of music and they never really broke through.  The canonical Penthouse should have been the album to achieve this task, at least letting them the exposure of let’s say, Wilco, or more recently The National.  

But Luna kept solemnly obscured by the coolness of their shadow.  In hindsight, does this implore their meaning?  Is their timelessness preserved by the measure of their intangibility?  In a time when contracts were being overthrown as the sole portal into American sub-mainstream and acoustic bedroom machines like O.A.R. and Dispatch received the Napster bump, Luna remained sectored to their record store domain, thrilling those who were lucky enough to stumble upon them while wrapping their love affairs with The Velvet Underground.  

To meet a Luna disciple is an unlikely occurrence, a magical encounter.  If they’re committed their knowledge comes across deeply encoded and rich.  Obsessive even, the way a Phish or Norwegian metal fan will hold to a slim trill of notes, or bend, or lick like a bible, isolating their self through commitment.  Luna devotees pinpoint the tiny variances in a song that make it eccentric.  These particulars are especially apparent on the Slide EP, an effort driven by covers with unanimous praise and Penthouse, a satire of New York City life so relatable it makes the Lower East Side feel like the entire eastern seaboard.  

After Penthouse, Luna’s best gambit for a magazine editor’s standing ovation and swaths of fans, Luna surrendered to whimsy.  They regained footing at the turn of the century with their antepenultimo release The Days of Our Nights.  Eden’s guitar work echoed Australian outfit The Church and the sway of song progressed in a graceful cantankerousness.  “The Old Fashioned Way” spreads out like police enforcing a post-apocalyptic curfew.  “Math Wiz” captures regretful hearts puffing a spliff in a blue-collar basement and composing an R.E.M. b-side.  Everything on The Days of Our Nights is a placebo to something idealized, perfectly captured in the album’s cover art, a portrait of newfound bassist Britta Phillips, soon to be Wareham’s wife.  

Like Luna’s flagship sound, these works impact softly.  When Wareham says, “Your dopamine receptors, Are shot to hell, Your thoughts are spongy, You don’t seem well,” he’s being earnest yet manipulative.  Wholly boring in the key of unified tongue and cheek.  But Luna can’t stop shimmering.  They’re a reflective puddle in a bustling nighttime city.  Now step in it. 



Between The Days of Our Nights and Rendezvous, the band’s farewell that occupied my headphones through my time in Oxfordshire, along with A Grand Don’t Come for Free and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Luna released Romantica.  I think last night was maybe my first listen to it in 10 years.  It never landed for me.  As an artifact, it’s an electrified piece of tissue that links The Days and Rendezvous, but I still question whether it holds up.  Well, it doesn’t.  It never held in the first place.  Romantica is a body of work exemplifying exactly why Luna never connected.  It’s the tragedy of the band that deals in songs but can’t appeal to a song-focused audience.  

Luna traced a scalene trajectory and Romantica is the turgid side of their career.  But no one can miss “Lovedust,” the album’s opener, a 4/4 playground blooming with major chords and fish-in-the-barrel lines like “I set a trap for you, But I’m the one who’s all caught up.”  Shrug of shoulders inevitability realizes Wareham’s narrator’s slip-ups.  “Lovedust” acts as a bookend to “California (All the Way),” Bewitched’s entry track, only the orator implies nothing and bangs out direction like a GPS.  Subtlety is lost, but at least there’s no fumbling with buttons.  Romantica contains Luna’s most dynamic drums, especially within “Black Champagne,” which sounds like a The Soft Bulletin b-side for good reason; the record was produced by Dave Fridmann.  Where Penthouse succeeded in being a paced, coherent narrative, Romantica is front-loaded like most of Luna’s works.  A lot doesn’t seem to happen, at least in context, on Romantica’s backside.  Ultimately though, the nuance of Wareham and co. make tracking Luna’s pearls a scuttle.  But you can always count on them for a last song.  “Orange Peel” is as uncontrived and “it just came to me” as anything Justin Vernon does.  But with less patience.  Maybe even less control.  But then it’s those disciplines Luna lacks that make them my band.  It’s through deep listening—and the fact I happened to pluck Penthouse off the rock/pop shelf at Coconuts—that they ascend.      

Courtesies, 
The Brothers Rebel     

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Speed Runs Live!



I'm sure you are sitting there, getting ready to read this post and asking yourself what in the hell this could be about?  What in the world could possibly be behind these three words brought together?

The answer is both more nerdy and geeky than showing off your Thor costume for the upcoming comic con.

Stop me if you've ever heard of this, which I doubt you have.  A group of people come together, and these people have a love of classic video games.  They love these games so much that they have played them countless times, and know most of the tricks and glitches that would make your lady parts tingle at the sight of them.  The thrill of victory barely even registers in their brains anymore.  It isn't about winning, it's about how fast you can win.

I bet you were proud when you played Zelda's Ocarina Of Time and you finally got past the water temple.  Hell man, took me close to four hours the first time I played the game.  Now imagine watching some Korean guy beat the entire fucking game in under three hours. How about Final Fantasy 7?  Remember putting 80 hours into a single playthrough? The world record is eight hours.  Eight.  Hours.  I'm pretty sure the cutscenes alone take up at least eight hours themselves.

Sure, they use every trick in the book to make it happen.  You'll watch guys jump into a wall four hundred times until he's magically glitched into a fight with the final boss of the game.  It might not be pretty all the time, but I would have never imagined even a month ago that I would be the type of person to watch other people stream video games over the internet.  Even as I type it out the premise sounds ridiculous to me, yet here I am seeing if this guy zoasty can beat Metroid in under 45 minutes or not. I'm not even going to try to explain it, because you'll understand once you start watching.

http://www.twitch.tv/team/srl

There are seriously people that are streaming speed runs 24/7, and there's always multiple options of streams.  Last I checked there were at least 5-10 people streaming their runs so it's easy to find a game that you played and gave up on as a child be beaten in the time it takes to make a pizza.

For the ladies in the audience, I provide you with this picture of a robot unicorn as consolation for having to deal with this post.






Godspeed.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Split Arrow.






The Annals of Lit Versatility 


I recently learned that Pablo Neruda is a pseudonym.  Residence On Earth, a book that will probably be packed into my ramshackle, carry-on coffin with me when I ship off to Heaven was written by a man who was not actually surnamed Neruda.  Boo hoo.  Poets working in elusiveness yet again rain on this Rebel Brother’s parade. 
Of course I love all that shit.  Like Banksy status, right?  Except Chilean, dead, and slightly less anonymous.  I’ll never forget finding the phrase “muzzle of bees” in Neruda and never being able to forgive Jeff Tweedy.  See: he takes all his words from the books that you don’t read anyway.  
Poets are tanglers of labyrinthine reference.  I believe all the great novelists are really poets.  Most likely they’re South American too.   Or Russian.  Or white North American women; your Joyce Carol Oates’s, Jennifer Egans, Mary Gaitskills, Miranda Julys, (thought that was a pseudonym for Gaitskill awhile—right, a "real person" named Miranda July, though she is and probably questions her own inherent realness).  Then you have your Spokane master of the literary universe: Sherman Alexie. 

Alexie, who resides in Seattle and was born with water on the brain.  Alexie, who wrote the troublingly effective pulp-pastiche Indian Killer and beat the piss out of conceptual writer Saul Williams in the 2001 World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout (kidding, actually a nail-biting match).  Until powerhouses George Saunders and Roberto Bolaño completely hijacked all collective cognizance of accessible short story writing, his 2000 collection The Toughest Indian in the World was undoubtedly my favorite.  Now it’s “basically” my favorite.  Alexie forms armistice between humor and heartbreak, making friends, metaphorically or non, between the magician and the businessman, the hitchhiker and the territorial. 
I often like Alexie’s work.  His short stories are a great diving board into his fold which encompasses poetry, shorts, and novels.  Indian Killer is the great contemporary American novel.  “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church” and “The Sin Eaters” are variances in tone and pacing in Alexie’s short story wellspring.  This link is an Alexie poem.  It's an observance of the social networking mud we're Facedown in: 


Thanks, Mockingbird.

Courtesies, 
The Brothers Rebel