The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’ve been playing Persona 3 Portable, so I was once again struck by the most amazing of battle themes. No, not Mass Destruction. After the Battle, the fight victory music. Maybe this sounds weird, but this is by far my favorite bit of music in the game. Give it a listen while I ramble about it for a bit.

I feel like this little song is a success on so many levels. It fits perfectly with the whole music themes of the game for one. It has the sort of hip, pop-y sensibilities of the rest of the game in the guitar bits that come in after a little bit. It’s also completely functional battle victory music. But I feel like it does more than that. I feel like it reflects the themes of the game in general.

Most RPG victory tunes are extremely happy. I mean, you know, like, the classics of Final Fantasy. These songs say, “We did it, we won, everything is awesome now!” It’s a celebration of an accomplishment. Ironically, any single battle in most of those games ISN’T an accomplishment, even though it treats it like one.

Persona 3 takes a more sinister take. It’s darker. There’s a bit of that “we won” excitement, eventually, but that isn’t where it starts. It starts with a very dark little melody and goes downward. While Final Fantasy is trumpeting the victory from the heavens, Persona 3 is saying, “This is only the beginning.” The fight is over, but the battle has yet to be won. It’s pessimistic, like most of the game it’s around. Because, let’s face it, there’s always going to be another encounter. There’s always going to be another fight. The game knows it. It uses it.

I just find that refreshing, I guess. It’s different. This is the track, more than anything, that sticks out and stays with me from that game. (Well, besides Mass Destruction. Nobody can escape the BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!)

I order Essner’s birthday present from Amazon I get this electronic mail that says that hey, I have $5 of MP3 credit for no apparent reason now! Therefore, I felt like I needed to go attempt to search for music. However, I’m horrible at such things. I ended up wandering around the site for a long time, but eventually I looked up My Robot Friend, and found their latest album, and… well…

Take a listen. And watch.

This song is amazing. It kind of sums up exactly what I love about Hot Action, their first album. It’s kind of creepy, kind of upbeat and kind of not, and it just hits all the important notes. The lyrics are just so awesome as well, and that video is kind of creepy.

Needless to say, that’s all I’ve been listening to since. Just that song, over and over and over again.

Fuck you, look at this cool song.

There was a metric fuck-load of hype and anticipation of MC Frontalot’s new album, Zero Day. Then they started playing tracks from it on the Jick and Skully show, and I was like “Man, that’s actually pretty fucking good.” I’ve always kind of liked Front in theory, but I’ve never been a huge rapping person, but every time I hear Front on a podcast or something he’s completely fantastic and entertaining. I also enjoy the tracks of his that I have in Rock Band quite a bit. After a little debate, I went ahead and threw him some money, and got the album.

It’s pretty amazing.

And at the tip of the amazingness is that song up there, Charisma Potion. It pretty well sums up everything I feel about this album. His previous songs were good, but were not… full. I know that’s a vague term, but you could kind of tell it was a one man show. It didn’t have all the oomph behind it that a huge, full production sort of song would. Or maybe I’m imagining that. In any case, the back beats and music in these tracks just really get me on their own. They’re energetic, exciting, and significantly less repetitive. I like that.

And, of course, Front’s lyrics are excellent. I mean, just listen to that up there. It’s completely geeky but also completely bad-ass. It’s pretty well perfect in this regard. I love it so much. I have to sing along with it. Of course, I am not a professional rapper, so it doesn’t go very good on a lot of tracks, but I try, dammit!

Yeah, I’m listening to this one over and over, and it deserves it. I’m glad I bought Zero Day. You should consider picking it up too. It’s completely sweet.

I’ve been wanting something new to listen to musically because… I dunno. I’ve been listening to the Presidents of the United States of America literally all semester. It was time for a little change. I was trying some Oasis, but it wasn’t working. I mentioned to my brother that I was looking for something new, and so he hands me a CD by a group (okay, actually it’s apparently just one dude) called Owl City.

I kind of love Owl City. He’s got this very poppy, synthy song, and all his songs are sugar sweet but genuine and emotional. I’m falling in love. But most important, I have gotten one of his songs stuck in my head horribly, and that song would be Fireflies.
Got a pretty good music video, yes? It also has a good beat. Mostly, though, what’s getting to me is the lyrics. They’ve just got this very strong emotion behind them that, for whatever reason, is really affecting me right now. I mean… “I’d like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly” is such a great line. So full of hope, and yet sad, a statement of trying to force will against the inevitability of time.

Things just slipping away, as you dream, and try to turn things into something you want, but everything is never as it seems.

Yeah…

I thought I would elaborate on the throw-away line yesterday about the BlazBlue soundtrack. I’m really quite addicted to it, and honestly I don’t know exactly why. It’s completely the same sort of hard rocking crazy guitar solo stuff that was in Aksys’s earlier games, like, say, Guilty Gear. (Okay, maybe this is a more appropriate example, but, you know… Bridget. Less Than Three.)At the same time, I don’t know. I find it oddly compelling.

Granted, it meets my requirements for a good game soundtrack like this. It is incredibly upbeat, constantly giving off energy. I can totally picture myself playing the game the moment I hear it. It screams “action.” I’m moving about the campus, having imaginary fighting game battles all the damn time now. Which is fun enough.
It’s also just so… weird, kind of. I mean, it takes a song called “Oriental Flower” and it turns it into this. It’s almost humorous when it gets off of that opening and into the bulk of the song. It takes some really fucking weird kind of vision to create something like that. I don’t know. It just seems hard to imagine any sort of metal-y song having anything to do with a flower. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe flowers are really hardcore.
Maybe Brutal Legend has almost given me an ear for this kind of music. Or maybe it’s just the whole “fighting game battles in my head” aspect that cannot be discounted or belittled here.

Anyway, I’m listening to it pretty well non-stop at the moment. So I suppose I recommend it. It’s just kind of a weird thing for me to recommend, I suppose.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am an “endless repeat” kind of music listener. Some people listen to albums, some to random selections of shuffled tracks. Me? I’m one song, constantly, over and over and over, until my obsession gets to something else.

The current song? Froggie by The Presidents of the United States of America. (Please, don’t mind the odd “music video.”)

This one didn’t catch me the first time I listened to it like some songs. It was just kind of there, and I thought it odd, with it’s weird energetic crescendos and whatnot in between a fairly calm song for POTUS. (Pot Us!) Yet when I listened to it again, and soon a million, million times, it became exciting for just that very reason. There’s a constant expectation there. I know the part that makes me want to get up and dance like an idiot is coming. It’s always coming. But you have to wait for it. It builds and builds. That’s pretty fun.
Pretty, pretty fun.

One of the things that’s sometimes kind of nice about how I listen to music is the fact that I can “discover” something I’ve had around for like… years. Since I listen to one to two tracks on an album endlessly, forgetting all the others, I can sometimes stumble on a “new” track that I’ve had all along, but never actually gave much time to.

This happened recently, and I was pleased. Back on Election Day, when Rock Band put out it’s Presidents of the United States of America pack, I was like “Hmm, these songs are pretty good. I wonder what else they have.” And then I very quickly became a huge fan of the band. I devoured their work, eventually lingering on their last album, These Are The Good Times People, and mostly listening to that. But so much of their stuff was worth my time. It was exciting. It was entertaining. I was entertained.

The other day, I was preparing for my trip to the City Museum, which I told you about already. But, at the time, I was unsure whether or not I’d be driving up alone or not. So I felt it time to stockpile some podcasts, and that meant not playing podcasts while I played my games. So I dove into my library to try to find some music to listen to, and stumbled upon the POTUS (as hip fans call them, I guess) album, II. I had never really given this one a chance, so I put it on.

By the time the second track came on, I was in love with the band again. Man, they are just so good! They’re just the right mix of pop and odd and clever and rock for me, and I just love the crap out of them. I’ve been listening to that track constantly, but Volcano, Mach 5… the whole album is solid. It’s just wonderful stuff.

So huzzah for discovering music I already have, I guess! Huzzah!

I am not really a music person. My parents are the sorts that listened to Talk Radio when I was growing up, so I was never really exposed to music until I was introduced to They Might Be Giants during my high school years. Even then, I myself almost always listen to my generation’s version of Talk Radio, podcasts, and never really tend to attempt to broaden my music listening experiences.

Thus, it felt like kind of a big deal when, listening to this Radio Lab’s podcast, I got introduced to a musician that I have very quickly fallen in love with: Juana Molina.

Seriously, just take a moment, go to her website, and take a listen to the little player that plays, hm?

The first thing you might think of, if you know me, is that this doesn’t normally sound like the kind of music I listen to. I enjoy very quick, energetic, pop rock kind of music. Say, a little Franz or Flans-centric TMBG or whatever. But damn, I don’t know what it is about her music that really gets to me. I mean, it’s really fucking pretty. I doubt few would argue with that, but why do I like it?

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it does have a constant repetition and beat. This is due to the fact that all the songs are made with just her and her guitar, and then using this looping software where she plays a bit, clicks a button and it just loops, and then she adds another layer, and so on. So it has this constant beat I can get into.
That’s my theory, anyway.

No matter what the reason, I love this stuff. After hearing the podcast, I went and grabbed her latest album, Un Dia, and have been listening to it constantly. According to iTunes, I’ve listened to the whole album… let’s see… at least 6 times. I never listen to music this much. It’s something special. And I feel like I need to share it with everyone.

I have big hopes for this album. I hope that I can write while listening to it because it doesn’t have lyrics I can follow. (I’m one of those people who can’t write while listening to music with lyrics, you understand. I want to sing along and it just breaks my flow.) But I’m listening to it while writing this blog post, and it seems to be going okay. Huzzah!

But yeah. Juana Molina. Awesome.
Yep.
(I will end every blog post with “yep” now. Yep.)

I could talk all over the place about what I love about Klonoa, but I’m only going to do one more. The point of this post is this: Klonoa has some of the best video game music I have ever heard.

First off, I mean… just listen to it. Here, try one of my more favorite tracks, Count Three. The mixture of orchestrated sounds with more classical, video game-y sounds throughout the soundtrack just works so well to make music that is definitely for a video game, but is beautiful in its own right. Both major Klonoa games use this same kind of music, and oh, it is so wonderful. I am so glad it’s untouched in the remake.

But mostly, the reason that Klonoa’s music is so wonderful is its use of Leitmotifs. Every physical area in the games has its own musical theme, and that theme is twisted and played with to set various moods depending on what is happening and the plot. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take a listen.
One of the clearest ones in the original game is that of the original piece of music you hear, The Windmill Song. This incredibly happy piece of music is the first you’re hit with when you start playing, in the first level, and it sets the tone of the game as being a happy one, a fun one, a cute one, devoid of any sort of worry or anything of the sort. Then, later in the game, you are rushing back to your home in a race against time to prevent bad things from happening. The song playing then is The Ruin’s Air. Now, when you first listen to this piece, you may not immediately notice the connection, the Leitmotif between them. But eventually, it gets to a very clear melancholy rendition of The Windmill Song, and then you can’t help but hear it within the entire piece. The corrupting of the original song sets the mood strongly. It’s completely awesome.

It’s not always so dramatic, but it’s still constantly used to great effect. In the second game, you find yourself in the amusement park town, Joilant. The theme is happy, and reminiscent of an amusement park, easily. Later, when facing the boss of the place, you hear a mix of the Leitmotif set by the original piece in Leptio, The Flower Clown. The original song fades in and out of much more intense horns and drums, setting the tone for the battle.

I could give examples all day, but hopefully I’m making my point here. Klonoa’s music is good. So very, very good. There are few video game soundtracks I listen to, outside of stealing some boss battle themes, perhaps. I listen to the entire soundtrack to both Klonoa and Klonoa 2 on a regular basis.

I love Klonoa so much! I promise to shut up about it, though. Tomorrow: Something not about Klonoa! Maybe!

So, Franz Ferdinand’s new album, Tonight:Franz Ferdinand, finally hit. They’re one of bands I actually follow and actively search for, so I was happy to snap that shit up using the amazing powers of Amazon Prime I now possess.
I’m really not that impressed.
I mean, it’s all solid. The vast majority is very listenable, and I’ve been enjoying listening to it on shuffle the past few days. But I have yet to find one song that’s especially memorable in any way. Their initial self-titled album had many, such as Take Me Out, Dark of the Matinee, Michael… the majority kicked major ass. The second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, was less filled with hits, but still had some great, clearly standout hits, such as the title song, and The Fallen…
I have yet to find a song on Tonight that makes me want to put it on constant repeat, and honestly, that’s kind of my criteria for a good song. I listen to songs I love constantly, over and over, endlessly. Nothing has really made me want to do that. I mean, their single for this album, Ulysses, is pretty good, but not like… amazing? I don’t know.

A lot of talk was made about how they were going to mix things up a bit with this album, and use more electronic influences and whatnot. You can certainly hear it, and several songs just have these long, pointless, electronica finishes to them? I like that kind of music, but I’m not especially a fan of it mixed with my Franz. Still, it’s not BAD? It’s just not stand out and doesn’t excite me.
The songs are also, on a whole, much slower than previous albums. The first had like… no slow songs. The second had like two. This one feels like it has a whole lot, but the problem might be that shuffle is hitting them a lot? I don’t know. There’s certainly not any especially fast songs. I like my fast songs.

So I guess I’m underwhelmed. Not as underwhelmed as I was by, say, The Else, which was just… completely forgettable, unfortunately. But underwhelmed. Still, if you’re a Franz fan, this is still an album worth owning. If you haven’t really listening to the band, you should probably just pick up their first album, though. Cause that one is just golden, and awesome, and why I love the band so.