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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Battle Tapes – Texture

    2023 has, no joke, been a great year so far for new music. We got new material from some of my favorite current acts, such as Mono Inc and VNV Nation. We even get a new Garbage EP. (I might cover that at a later date.) Never mind Peter Gabriel and his “one new song per full moon all year” thing, because he’s such an utter nerd.

    This, though. This album. I’ve anticipated this release the most since singles started dropping for it last year: “If Only” in July, “In Too Deep” in September, and “One Night in Burbank” just a couple months ago. Not a dud among ’em.

    So obviously one of my first tasks this morning was to pick up the full album (oh 7Digital, I like your service but hate that you’re PayPal-only) and dive in. Right away I noticed a couple of things, though.

    “Weight of the World” is here, and that single dropped in 2019. It was used in the first season of the gen:LOCK animated series and appears on that show’s soundtrack as well, along with “Syntax,” which is… also here.

    So out of ten songs total, two are a few years old and three more are lead-off singles. That’s not a bad thing! I’m glad those two particular songs have escaped cartoon-soundtrack obscurity if nothing else. It just leaves me only half a record of new material to dig into, that’s all. (Not that I avoided the singles and older material while listening to all of Texture, because they’re all very good.)

    Luckily the first brand new song to get my attention was, ah, “Brand New.” Right at the start of the album, how convenient! As for the rest, not all of them are as strong as the singles but only one (“Back In The Game”) actively annoyed me. (Look, even Daft Punk could only barely get away with using one short string of words as the entire repeating lyric for a dance song.)

    Is Texture going to be my top album of 2023? Hard to say, honestly. I feel like being made up half of songs I already liked from months (and years) ago is a bit of a handicap, but on the other hand… I really like those songs. It’s a solid contender if nothing else.

    But we’re not even halfway into the year. Have we already heard all the good new records we’re going to get? (I mean, other than Peter Gabriel’s slow-drip album release project.) I couldn’t tell ya; I’m infamously bad at predictions. I look forward to finding out, though.

  • I just wanna rock thru paradise

    (Look, the last songs I listened to before starting this post were all by Midnight Oil and I couldn’t resist mangling the first line of “Pictures” for no good reason whatsoever. Deal with it.)

    If you’ve known me for a decent number of years, you know I can’t resist making a “living room multimedia” setup. The most recent rig is an Intel NUC that I planned to run Kodi on, since it does a decent enough job at reading ratings & other tags from my music library files. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t do is offer much in the way of remote controls anymore. The product’s always been more focused on watching videos than listening to music anyway, so I suppose it was inevitable that I’d eventually tire of its shenanigans.

    So today I tried switching to Mopidy. Basically, it’s a service-level process which provides access to your music library and will play whatever you select through the local machine’s audio hardware. Perfect!

    Only. Well. Not actually perfect.

    For starters, Mopidy and Pulseaudio had to be made to talk to one another. (I goofed the first time I tried to follow the instructions to make this work, because of course I did.) And I needed a front-end. (I’ve gone through several, none of them particularly great.) And then I ran into the biggest, most annoying problem: Mopidy and its available front-ends don’t care about tags (other than artist, title, album, and maybe artwork).

    I need the ratings, and I also need the Mood tag. Oh, and I want to be able to make smart playlists. That, at least, Kodi could do!

    I’m afraid I’m going back to the drawing board. Again.

  • VNV Nation – Electric Sun

    After a two-week delay (I originally thought this album was due on the 14th, but when I bought it on 7Digital they said it was a preorder and I could download on the 28th), I finally have my hands (virtually speaking) on the new VNV Nation album, Electric Sun.

    And it’s pretty good!

    Look, I’ll keep this brief: There are no bad songs here, and a few really good songs. This is a very iterative album, which is to say it’s building solidly & steadily upon the records which came before it, with no wild departures or groundbreaking experimentation. And that’s fine! Sometimes a band just wants to show up, do their thing, and speak their mind. (VNV Nation in particular has always been a band with things to say, after all.)

    Highlights? My favorite songs so far are “Artifice” and “Wait,” with honorable mention for “The Game,” “Invictus,” and “Sunflare.”

    Electric Sun has a good chance of being my favorite album of the year… though one should keep in mind that the new Battle Tapes is due next week…

  • Workflow Wut

    We had a weird problem with one ticket that wouldn’t stay closed.

    Yes, this is about the ticketing system workflow shenanigans I wrote about a couple of times earlier this month. Yes, there were more shenanigans.

    (more…)

  • Eh? Aye.

    We live in the future, and it’s both awesome and horrifying.

    Collectively, many of us have spent the last few decades adding data to the Internet. Words, pictures, sounds, and so forth. And now, people with lots of money to buy lots of computer equipment are going to use what we’ve made to make themselves an even bigger pile of money.

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory – New Clear Power Plan

    Post tagged:

    In the co-op Satisfactory game with the kids (look, I get to call them “kids” even though they’ve been full adults for over a decade now, it’s my parental privilege) we’ve finally reached the point where we need to consider actually doing the thing we only really joked about early on: Tackling nuclear power.

    (more…)

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