Music
So, yesterday I went on a little musical trip …
I started in the Devil May Cry 3 OST. A good place to start … memorable themes, good arrangements, aggressive beats, angry and nearly indecipherable smack-talkin’ lyrics, and hard driving guitar punctuated by occasional piercing vocals.
And as I fell through that, I decided to go something else that had driving guitar and smack-talkin lyrics, so I went to Rage against the Machine. And after 2 real albums and a few live tracks of that, I realized “damn …. no wonder all of these radical reform movements get blown off by the mainstream”. He comes off the same way that Bobby Fischer in his recent arrest and near deportation from Japan did… “crazy guy”. It’s like the fucking X-files crowd on politics.
So, anyway, after Rage, it fell through to Rammstein, and “Amerika”. And I was like “whoa … that’s weird”. I’m not sure what Rammstein was saying, but they sounded only slightly angrier than Rage.
From there, I decided to jump to something else dark and angry … so I went to Fear Factory. And I came to an important realization…
Compared to the DMC3 ost, Rage, and Rammstein … Fear Factory completely fucking blows! I mean …. such petty, trite lyrics, such lack of intensity … they’re like Rage turned inward and on barbiturates.
I decided after 3 half-tracks of that to go to something else entirely. And I ended up on Guster, of all things. I decided that’s where I’d leave off…
So, I woke up this morning (well, evening, whatever) and revisited Guster for the first time in like 2 years. And unlike Fear Factory, they’ve aged remarkably well. The lyrics, the vocals, the clean crisp sound all carry the same impact as when I first heard them. 2 albums worth carried me through making food for myself and washing up some neglected pots and pans in my sink. Then I went to work.
At work, I did the usual … started some updates, started a winxpsp2 format-install on a p2-400, read the entirety of HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds” cover to cover while those things were happening. Basically I went in for a timecard booster, and that’s what I got. Tacked on an extra near 7 hours.
Damn …. that’d mean it took about 5 or 6 hours to read 200 pages of interesting (though somewhat old-style) scifi. I guess that’s not too bad …. a comfortable pace to digest the stuff … quick enough to finish a reasonably small book in one determined sitting. I’ve never really paid attention to how long it takes me to read something …
Well, I came back, and picked up filtering some of my “unfiltered” music directory. I decided I don’t particularly like Deep Purple … their lyrics are pretty sophomoric, and while classic, the music itself is somewhat bland. That got caught in the filter, and scraped off. I recently grabbed a bunch of game music from a sweetass ftp I found (same place I got the dmc3 ost) … so I went through a bunch of that. Actraiser orchestrated is remarkably good, which is impressive considering the game soundset is excessively reused, and identical to 4 other games I can think of off the top of my head.
That got me going through the game music on the fileserver, which naturally segued into the anime music on the fileserver. I probably deleted 500 megs of unwanted game music, and probably closer to 3 gigs of unwanted anime music. My collection is all the better for it. Goodbye Kimagure Orange Road collections. Goodbye Kodocha OST’s. Goodbye a few other generic, cheesy series osts and singles.
Well, I ended up on Xenosaga. And finding that the theme in Xenogears “Omen” track is one note off of identical to a theme that appears in Xenosaga both around the Zohars and around the Gnosis.
Which reminds me …. Xenosaga episode 1 was disappointingly short. I beat it at like level 40, and I wasn’t really trying! That’s not terribly leveled up or anything… considering xenogears naturally carried you to at least level 70ish. Xenosaga was like 35-40 hours.
After the end of the semester, I’ll pick up xenosaga episode 2, and see how that goes.