Contentious C

Since now I know the latest Sleater-Kinney album isn't going to be it, I will throw Jade Bird (self-titled) into the ring.

The center already hasn't held. When Sleater-Kinney announced a new album this year, I felt pretty excited. After some reviews came in and made it sound potentially polarizing, I waited until seeing them live to pick up The Center Won't Hold. They played basically the whole album at the show, and, at least live, it was fairly good, but clearly not on the same level as their prior releases. Having listened to the album itself now a couple of times, all I can say is, wow, what a disappointment. Is this what a musical mid-life crisis sounds like? I'm not really sure what could have been done to avoid this, but there are any number of things wrong with the album. First, and perhaps most egregious, Janet Weiss' drumming, typically the stuff of legend, sounds practically neutered, which is a shitty, shitty choice to make (and likely had something to do with her quitting the band). Additionally, Corin Tucker never gets much of a chance to really belt out any songs here; she has fewer tracks overall than Carrie Brownstein, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, except that it means the band effectively sidelined their two strongest weapons, Corin's voice being the other one. It's hard to say if this is a product of Tucker being in a couple of other bands that drew away her attention, and maybe some of her better songs, or if they were all complicit in this decision. I recall Wesley Morris from Grantland leveling a criticism at The Woods that the album was a misstep because "ten other bands could do the same thing". I disagree with that assessment, largely because Weiss and Tucker never sounded bigger than they did on that album. This album seems to be an indicator of what would happen if those two aren't equal contributors, and the producer *is* actually interested in making them sound like everyone else. It'd be easy to lay all the blame on St. Vincent/Annie Clark, but she has other problems to answer for. Namely, the track arrangement and overall feel of the album is just an utter mess. There's one stretch towards the middle - "Can I Go On", "Restless", "Ruins" - that features 3 pretty good songs, if each one is heard in a vacuum. But, "Can I Go On" summons the bubblegummy days of "Little Babies" or "Oh!"; while "Restless" sounds like it belonged on the prior (outstanding) album, No Cities to Love; and "Ruins" drags itself through the same sludge that encapsulates this album's opening track. And yet, here these three songs are, one right after the other, as jarring as they could possibly be. Sleater-Kinney's stuff has often been something of an icepick to the eardrum, intentionally aggressive and challenging and uncompromising, but it's the kind you love and ask for more of, not one that makes you think they'd never walked into a recording studio before, or that they asked one of Tucker's kids to determine the track order (actually, I bet her kids could have done a better job). Or, maybe the biggest thing St. Vincent did wrong was to try to coat these songs with some veneer of new-wavey dance pop, like they were still worth the time to listen to them. They're not. The title track starts out great and unwinds into a John Mayer-like repetition that numbs you into not giving a shit; "Love" needs to time-travel and find the 80s John Hughes movie soundtrack it belongs to; and "Bad Dance" is just a waste of time. The biggest issue, when it comes right down to it is that this is the weakest batch of songs they've ever released, and it's not even that close. Even their debut album from 20+ years ago, borderline-unlistenable as it is, featured a couple of people who knew they had something to say and just didn't know how to say it yet. A good producer would have heard these songs and told them, "What the fuck is this? You're a better band; go back, cut the dead weight, keep 5 of these, and do it again." But, I suppose even they saw this coming: the chorus of "Hey Darling" said so. The only thing that comes from fame is mediocrity.

Carnival Row is just a really entertaining show, somehow. Orlando Bloom, widely regarded as the worst actor in the history of actors and worst things, is somehow entirely serviceable. Cara Delevingne will never win an Oscar, but she tends to just make things subtly better, not that the material required that of her, since it's well-executed and well-realized. Supporting cast is a good mix of familiar faces and newcomers who pull their weight. I had no expectation this would be any good, but now I really want another season of it.

I'm trying to read The Dark Tower. It's going as well as every other attempt to read a King book as an adult.

Who the Hell is doing the voice-over for the Apple privacy commercial that's been airing during the World Series? It's someone famous. I just cannot quite place the voice... And literally after hitting to post, I realized it's Rooney Mara. Duh. Oh well, now it's merely annoying for the usual reasons.

Yeah, I have to say I'm the lone oddball who really, really, really liked Origins out of the whole series. The complaint about "too big for one night" thing is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If it were "the right size", you'd have 7 hours of gameplay and feel shafted that you paid what you did for it, so...of course it's not going to be like that. And Origins definitely had the best boss fights, and the crime scene reconstructions were so much better and more thought-provoking (if, again, a little far-fetched) than the prior 2 games' excuses for Detective Mode. I'm glad some of those made it into Knight, now that I'm far enough along in it. I was also happy to have done the entire set of achievement progressions in Origins in a single play-through once; it takes some glitching of the Predator stuff in outdoor locations, but it's doable (after you grind the "KO 3 people with a gas can" thing for 2 hours...). But goddamn, am I sick of chasing APCs. This also reminds me I have to get back to the Mordor games, since I'm generally pretty aces at the combat style WB put into both series. I'm somehow considerably worse at Knight than the other 3 games, though (probably due to the Medics and extra unblockable attack modes).

Arkham Knight. Well, this is a video game. But goddamn, is it an unnecessarily complicated one. I can get the mindset of, "Well, the last two were very similar, and all we did was expand the map and tweak combat," but...ugh. AK may as well be Grand Theft Gotham for how much dumb-shit Batmobile stuff you have to do, and adding all the dipshit racing/Riddler car crap/everything else that has basically nothing to do with The Fucking Batman into a Batman game is such a waste of time and space. It'd be fine if it were just significantly less essential, but instead, no, you have to be in the damn thing so much. I'll probably beat this once and then maybe never play it again, because it's not remotely worth the effort to try to actually get good with the dumb vehicle enough to 100% it the way I did the other 3. The combat seems way too overblown, although it's also a little tougher, which, frankly, it needed to be. The Predator sequences, such as they are, on the other hand, feel better and more believable (like guys hearing you clomping around in a metal grate like they're supposed to fucking do!).

The Giants may want to go back to Eli just so Jones doesn't end up as shell-shocked as the David Carrs of the world by the end of the season.

Well, BoJack is wrapping up, too, so Aaron will have time to do what he wants. It's a good thing, after all, that he didn't get typecast as the bumbling sidekick to a complicated everyman. Wait, what?

I don't see how John Cena preventing kids from having sex requires a whole movie. Seems like it'd be effectively achieved by kids talking about John Cena for more than 3 sentences.

And is less likely to kill you.

A what?

I guess Justin Houston *can* stop the run. The Chiefs still can't.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is my favorite Christmas movie. Look up "Christmas movie" in the dictionary, and you know what you'll find.

Here's a little ditty from some friends of mine about the joys of courting a foreigner.

If Counting Crows played any kind of role in anyone's childhood, it's safe to say it was already ruined anyway.

I started watching Fleabag alongside a standard re-watch of the entirety of BoJack Horseman. This was probably a really, really shitty idea. So many sad belly laughs. At least now I know there, at minimum, two shows I can tell people to avoid for being depressingly real.

If by 'wild' you mean 'depressingly self-inflicted'.

Unbelievable was...exactly as fucked-up as expected. And as good. *shudder*

It's funny people thought that of Culkin at the time, since he's a charisma black hole as an adult. Maybe the universe's way of balancing the scales?

They're going to reboot that by stealing BoJack plots? Booooooo.

Wow, the Dolphins are putrid. 3 quarters with 1 drive that wasn't a three-and-out, and as many drives with zero/negative yardage as positive. I mean, NE's defense is good, but they aren't actually *that* good.

I'm calling Patrick Chung, "Yayo" for the rest of the year. Why not.

Dear mother of God, I have to listen to 5+ more months of those idiotic "we ready" commercials...

A couple of thoughts: 1. Tetris 99 is ass-flavored fentanyl. 2. Recently, a few of us talked about Kingdom of Loathing, and how it's still around. It's questionable how much longer that will be, because allegedly the game creator did some awful stuff to his ex-wife. I'll leave it to you to find the Reddit links, since it's some screwed-up shit. But, a lot of people, myself included, canceled subscriptions. 3. And Jebus, I've been out of touch. Fucking Jeremy Soule was accused of things, too. Motherfuck. The music to Morrowind is so tied up in the atmosphere of the game that it's...ugh. I mean, really? Ugh.