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Playlist: Catching up on all of 2011, pretty much

I haven't told the world what I'm playing, reading and listening to since March of last year!

Ack!

Let's get down to it:

Spotify

I should mention Spotify first, since the service is a decent music player but it's really an amazing platform for me to shout out my musical opinions and tastes to the people who may want to know about it. I haven't really been able to share music with my high school amigos since high school, thanks to the inevitable demise of our LAN parties, too much laziness to run FTP or other filesharing servers, and the increasing difficulty of using common desktop apps to send files back and forth.

Within a week or two of being converted to Spotify, Aroon, Alex and I basically got to play catch-up on several years' of diverging music collections. It's really good to be coming back together. If you're not using Spotify for its social features, it's because you don't have a taste in music.

All that said, I'm listening to:

Kenichiro Nishihara, Life - Mostly misses, especially compared to Humming Jazz, but don't miss Now I Know.

Funky DL, Blackcurrent Jazz 2 - DL's best since The 4th Quarter. Fantastic from start to finish. Don't miss Le Jazz Courant Noir. This is already the soundtrack to the rest of my time here in the US.

Nujabes, Spiritual State - You already know what I think.

Chris Botti Live in Boston - Sometimes you just need a little jazz.

Gaming

Forza Motorspot 3 (yes, 3) - So good that I switched away from GT5. Can't wait to get my hands on 4.

Yakuza 4 - I loved 3, so no surprise I enjoyed this one. There was less to surprise me in this one, and no new environments, but the enhancements over 3 made it worth the run.

Uncharted 3 - Personally, my Best Game of 2011. I started playing and next thing I knew Aroon was planted on the couch watching the action. Then, next thing I knew, we started over and Nick planted himself on the couch too. This is what a blockbuster - game, movie, whatever - should be.

Battlefield 3 - Actually really enjoyed the singleplayer campaign, if only because it's marginally less ridiculous than Modern Warfare. I really should've paid the $10 for multiplayer access.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Hats off to Eidos Montreal. They pulled off what every studio promising a big reboot promises, except they actually delivered. I adore the atmosphere, the world, the attention to detail. Looking at the augmentation, or the hacking mini-game, or the linearity, and it isn't classic DX. But the spirit of the narrative - the poverty, the paranoia, the way that globalization gives way to corporate rule - is completely and satisfyingly present. Can't wait for the inevitable sequel, and I'm just fine if it takes five years to execute again.

Donkey Kong Country Returns - As a trip down memory lane, certainly better done than most Nintendo platformers that aren't Mario. As a platformer, however, waggle controls are annoying and disappointing. And the cartoony, low-poly look that the Wii is known for doesn't do DKC justice. It's worth 2 or 3 hours, but from that you've scratched the itch and you can put it away.

Sonic Generations - I'd been hankering for a good Sonic so badly that I bought Sonic CD and gave it my first whirl ever since I never had a Sega CD growing up. Then along came Generations and - holy moly - it's good! A good 3D Sonic! Hallelujah!

Skip

Tropico 4 - Like a Zynga game but with a bad interface. Shudder.

Kirby's Epic Yarn - A game that showed incredible promise on its art style alone turns out to be a ho-hum platformer. I'd let my kids play it, if I had any. But I don't have kids, so skip it I did.

Final Fantasy XIII - Not worth the 60 hours it'd take to appreciate this game. After 5, I still have no idea what a fal'Cie is and I hate every character except the awesome black dude with the 'fro. Still, my hat goes off to the people who implemented the seriously beautiful motion graphics. Those little details were fantastic.

Reading

Steve Jobs' bio is worth the read.

Tears to my eyes

22 May 2011
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blake recommends music

This Shing02 performance actually brings tears to my eyes. It's from last summer's Nujabes tribute show, but it was also the premiere of part 4 in Shing02's collab series 'Luv Sic.' It's beautiful.

(the new track comes in after 6:00, but you really should watch the whole performance)

You know those really touching commercials Google is running about sending photos to your daughter and finding French churches to wed the life-changing Parisienne? This is my Google commercial. I couldn't be in Shibuya last summer, but the videos on YouTube let the whole world watch.

It's such a blessing.

Blake Recommends: the Lightning Round

Holy moly, school hit me hard. I haven't updated what I've been consuming since last summer. Well then, it's time to catch up, and to do so quickly, I'm going to borrow a concept coined by my dear friend and colleague Adam Wright: the Instareview.

The Instareview is almost like a haiku in that it conveys a lot of information, or one very poignant idea, using a minimum of words. Hopefully, it'll take less time than dilly-dallying in the details and the track listings and the analysis, but still give a good idea of how I really feel about something.

Let's get to trying this out!

Music

Cee-Lo Green, The Lady Killer - Good all the way through, not just 'Fuck You.' A classic? Maybe not.

DJ Deckstream, Deckstream Soundtracks 2 - Like a gourmet steak from a fusion place: weird first taste, but definitely meaty with a great aftertaste. On heavy rotation.

Jasmine, Dreamin - The only ever time I've 'pulled an Aroon' and played one song, on repeat, for hours on end.

Kenichiro Nishihara, Humming Jazz - In a post-Nujabes world, there's a gap in Japan's hip-hop, and Nishihara comes closer than anyone else to filling it. Don't miss the collab with Substantial.

modal soul classics vol. 2, DEDICATED TO NUJABES - Speaking of Nujabes, his old crew released an album to say goodbye. You can hear the celebration of life in some tracks and the hurt in others.

Kero One, Kinetic World - An album so DIY, you can hear the Garageband in it. (But I'm still psyched for his next one, or a live show).

Lupe Fiasco, Lasers - 18 tracks of some overproduced rapper (feat. Lupe Fiasco).

Passion Pit, Manners - I admit it. I'm hooked. Love these guys. Next thing you know I'll be driving a Volkswagen, using Apple products and watching comedies on ABC. Wait a second...

Think Twice, With a Loop and Some String - Half of Specifics does his 'own' album, half of which is collab with Specifics MC Golden Boy anyway. Who knew Canadian hip-hop was so consistently good?

Games

Yakuza 3 - Are you a Japanophile? Did you like Shenmue? Do you like some really good narrative in your games? The more you answered yes, the more you should play this game. I'm biased, but it was my game of 2010.

Gran Turismo 5 - It's Pokemon with cars. BRB, gotta keep catching 'em all.

DJ Hero 2 - Everything I, the boy who fantasizes of DJing, wanted 1 to be. Devastated there won't be a 3.

Halo: Reach - Bungie knows how to stay ahead of the curve.

StarCraft II - I'm too white to play this game. I'm also too white to play football. Doesn't stop me from loving watching either one as a sport.

You Don't Know Jack - Best trivia game ever gets best modern revival ever.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Mario game. What happened?

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Layton game. What happened?

Call of Duty: Black Ops - Now's a great time to sell your Activision stock.

Red Dead Redemption - Objectively, extremely well made, but I can't get it out of my head that this is GTA4 with horsies. Sorry, Rockstar SD.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - The cool kids call it AssBro for short. And they stick to the extremely addictive multiplayer mode.

Movies

The Social Network - This movie speaks my language: specifically, techie startup business technobabble written by Aaron Sorkin. If you're me, you'll love it.

Sucker Punch - What's the word for "a mess of messes"?

Pirate Radio - Every bit as cool as 60s/70s Britain.

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OK, so it's not as good as Adam's work, but man, I had a lot of pop culture to get off my chest there.

An old(er) man's taste in music

7 Sep 2010
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music

I noticed recently that my current listening habits are barely recognizable given what I listened to in high school.

Granted, that shouldn't be that much of a shock, but what surprised me is how little moved I am now by songs - some objectively good ones, even - that seemed to define big parts of my life at the time.

Take Incubus, for example. I had Morning View on repeat for at least an entire year of high school - and now it's been several years since I last heard it. The last album or two haven't been worth more than one listen.

Jimmy Eat World is a similar case. They were the soundtrack to my college life. Aside from a brief love affair with Chase This Light during the rock-bottom of my time in Japan, I haven't heard much out of them lately either (though that will likely change with a new album around the corner).

The same thing could be said for John Mayer, I suppose. I was a huge, huge fan in late high school and early college. Now, his live DVD following his third album appeared from Netflix, and after staring at the envelope for a week I sent it back without watching. Just not interested anymore. I don't think he's capable of moving me anymore. I couldn't watch that DVD, dated one or two years ago, and get past the subsequent crappy album or his impending collapse as a tabloid fodder kind of celebrity.

Looking back, I think those correlated much better with more topsy-turvy times. High school exists only to stress you out, and college just comes with identity crises and other such inconsistencies out of the box. The raw edge of the first two bands and Mayer's self-aware, moment-in-time mellowness were a good fit for those days.

Can I be moved anymore? Life is about as comfortable as it could be lately. I've spent the last couple of years enjoying pretty much everything. There's no danger, no topsy-turvi-ness, and stress is short-lived.

I went to concerts for all three of those artists when I was younger. Would I still go to another concert of theirs tomorrow? Hard to say.

In fairness, there are some things I've listened to ever since high school. Basement Jaxx seem to get better and better, for one. Daft Punk are established makers of classics by now. BT's latest rekindled something that had been neglected for years. And the hip-hop habit I was introduced to in mid-college is still going strong.

It makes me wonder how long I'll listen to what's on heavy rotation now. It's been a great four years of Nujabes, but since he's passed away he won't have any new works coming. iTunes tells me I'm really into Specifics and The Sushi Club - been listening for 1 and 4 years, respectively, and I have no idea when either of those guys will crank out anything new either.

Is it a sign that I need a new adventure? Another stress test in a foreign land? I can't kick my feet up forever, you know. Maybe Jimmy Eat World needs me back - or, more accurately, maybe I need them back and I don't even know it.

Blake Recommends: April Fool's edition

Oh, man. It's time to get caught up on some gaming action. This was originally the 'Valentine's Day edition,' given the timing of when I played all these things, but then school came along and decided to get all evil for a month and change.

Now I'm back to a reasonable everyday schedule, so it's time to share my thoughts on some games and music. I want to get on to new things, so I'll be making this quick.

Grand Theft Auto: Ballad of Gay Tony
The best GTA game made. Fascinating characters and a tight (but not short) storyline filled with high-octane action sequences. It's like playing a Michael Mann movie. Or a Michael Bay movie. But good either way. If you play one version of GTA IV, make it this.

Forza Motorsport 3
Truly a great racing game. Even feels good using the Xbox 360 controller, which is odd since it's a controller totally set up for action games. I think the great racing games are less about moving around the track and more about diving headlong into car culture. In this regard, Forza and DiRT have both been great recent games in the genre. I have to confess, though: I'm still a Gran Turismo man, and the only reason I haven't poured 100 hours into FM3 is that I know I'll put more than that into GT5. If Forza finally let its players revel in gearhead culture, GT5 will be the damned Smithsonian of car culture by comparison.

Brace yourselves for this one
I put a few hours into World of Warcraft.

Yes. I, the blakerson, played WoW.

The economics of this game are very different from my last foray into the game several years ago. Basically, back then it was "I'm paying for this punishment?" and then Blizzard spent years tweaking the psychology of leveling and loot accumulation and then gave me a year's subscription for free. So now, my experience was "Hey, this ain't bad.. where my friends at?"

To answer the requisite questions: Blood Elf Rogue, got to somewhere around 16-18 before play tapered off.

Perfect Dark
This one's a last-second addition. A wonderous HD port of the game was released on Xbox Live Arcade, finally sating the innate needs of former Goldeneye players who needed a re-release ever since games started getting re-released.

Good news: It's a 60fps, 1080p, re-textured redux of the original game, with tons of local and online multiplayer options including co-op and deathmatch modes.
It's got a throwback mode, which lets you play on the game's three redone Goldeneye maps using just Goldeneye weapons. It's still addictive well over a decade on.

Bad news: It's not Goldeneye. Between the rights to the game (which lie with Nintendo), the assets (which live with Rare, now owned by Nintendo's rival Microsoft) and the James Bond franchise (Activision), it'll never get re-released. You don't get to go back and run through the Dam and the Facility and so on in single-player, repeating all those missions that drove you nuts when you were thirteen. There are only three familiar multiplayer maps.

Still, well worth $10.

OK, time for some music.

Specifics - Lonely City and II
Two white guys from Toronto who've got their hip-hop down. I think I've heard "Take Me Back" a thousand times and it's still smooth.

Funky DL - The 4th Quarter
A brother with American-sounding rhymes from London's East Side.

Utada - This Is the One
A J-pop star tries to make it in the US. She's been huge in Japan since her youth, but like many Asian pop stars the transition hasn't been easy despite her native English. Going full-blown slut on her first English-language album didn't seem to work, so she hunkered down and tried harder and came away with something better the second time around. She's coming on my Internet radio pretty frequently, and I can't seem to turn her off. Honestly, who can say no to a line like "chemistry like apple and cinnamon"?

Hey, want to share some music?
Join Dropbox and let me know you've joined.

RIP Nujabes :(

28 Mar 2010
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music

I randomly checked Twitter two weeks ago to find that Nujabes was a trending topic worldwide.

Upon checking it out, it was an explosion of posts in Japanese - not surprising, considering the hip-hop producer born Jun Seba is big in Japan. But the odd short post in English - 'RIP Nujabes' - hit me harder than the wall of Japanese condolences.

Nujabes, to the American audience, is best known as the mastermind of the super-popular Samurai Champloo soundtrack. I found him that way too. But I quickly branched into his releases from his label and found some of his best stuff.

That was 2006. I'm still listening to Nujabes' tunes and those of his collaborators, ranging from jazz musicians like Uyama Hiroto to Western MCs including Substantial, Fat Jon, and Funky DL.

Nujabes' tracks kept my blood pressure down through a hellacious senior year of college. They comforted me as I went to and from Japan and adjusted to cultures twice. And even today they're my best background music when I'm working away.

Seba died in a high-speed car crash as the clock struck his 36th birthday. He had a long and prolific career ahead of him, as evidenced by mountains and mountains of messages left by his collaborators around the world. His fans, likewise, have left a pile of comments 250-deep as I write this.

I think that as we grow, our tastes in music change. I've grown up, and as such I'm no longer listening to The Offspring and Blink-182. But Nujabes and his family were something closer to constant in my life. I feel like my growth will always be, in some little way, stunted with a stunted body of work from someone who tapped into my musical soul so well.

If any friends in Japan are reading and are as disappointed as I am, please search out his record store Tribe in Shibuya and let me know what comes of it.

Photo: Koji Ohta

Super-late photos: Sir Paul

2 Feb 2010
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life music pics travel time

This is the fourth activity I referenced after my London trip.

Sir Paul McCartney. Fifth-row seats.

The man can play a show. An entire section of seating was set aside for his friends and family (it was the last stop on his tour, and the only one in England). Two-and-a-half-hours-plus with no breaks. So much heart.

As excited as I was to see the legend in the flesh, I was more excited for my mom. She is to The Beatles as I am to games. She knows every factoid, every detail, every ounce of their personal history. She spent her youth following them from the great Internet-less distance of rural Oklahoma. She never saw a Beatles concert, but I was going to make damn sure she saw the closest possible thing during her lifetime.

And she did. That box got a big, fat check mark put in it. For her and for me.

As miserable as the rest of the trip was (Mom + jetlag + British food = not fun), she was beaming for a solid 48 hours (before she caught swine flu on the way home and became more miserable). "We saw Pauuuuuul," she'd coo. During those 48 hours, miserable British food, or having to ride the Tube, or the weather became non-factors. We did what we went there to do, and it felt great to do it.

Indeed, we did it. We saw Pauuuuuul.

(download)

Blake Recommends: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2.

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.

Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?

Dear West Coast...

2 Nov 2009
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music stupid

[this post is best read to the tune of Ice Cube's "Today Was A Good Day"]

So here I am in sunny San Diego,

Thinkin' 'bout when I'll be on that payroll

And here every other car's a Ferrari

It makes you start thinkin' that money's so godly

And you'd be forgiven to think

That life's just bling and bitches and weed

So please don't shoot me ('cause your gangstas are hard)

But your coast's own hip-hop is really sub-par.

Music post: Get the new Basement Jaxx

8 Oct 2009
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blake recommends music

After a grueling 3-year wait, the new Basement Jaxx album is out. It's not as amazing as the 2006 one, but it's still solid stuff - and undeniably the sound that these guys are known for.

It's called Scars - and be sure to let me know if you come across the extra track from the Japanese release. I love these guys, but 1500 yen for one track is a push.