Elvenking – Reader of the Runes: Divination (2019) album review

Track listing:

  1. Perthro (1:24)
  2. Heathen Divine (4:58)
  3. Divination (3:11)
  4. Silverseal (3:40)
  5. The Misfortune of Virtue (5:18)
  6. Eternal Eleanor (4:06)
  7. Diamonds in the Night (1:22)
  8. Under the Sign of a Black Star (4:13)
  9. Malefica Doctrine (4:58)
  10. Sic Semper Tyrannis (3:55)
  11. Warden of the Bane (4:43)
  12. Reader of the Runes – Book I (10:44)

There are only a few bands out there that can still get me consistently coming back to power metal, as cheesy and predictable as the genre has become after all these years. Italy’s Elvenking is one of those bands.

I attribute this to the fact that Elvenking is not your typical, run of the mill power metal band. Yes, their music is melodic, epic, and mostly sticks to standard song structures and more old-school riffs and tunings, but they’re also a folk metal band, comparable in several ways to the musings of Eluveitie, Korpiklanni, and Borknagar. They have even been known to incorporate some death growls here and there, particularly on their 2007 album The Scythe, which remains their heaviest work to date and among their most divisive albums as a result. Their discography has seen some meandering, some sudden left turns and unexpected choices, such as the acoustic album which followed The Scythe and the dewy-eyed romance and almost pop/metalcore of 2010’s Red Silent Tides. However, since their exceptional 2014 album The Pagan Manifesto, Elvenking has come around to recognizing what made them unique and special in the first place; they were folk and power metal, and their interpretation of it on their early albums like The Winter Wake and Heathenreel has a certain mystical woodland whimsicality to it which fit their name rather well. Thus Elvenking has made a return to their more pagan elvish roots on their newer albums, and with 2017’s Secrets of the Magick Grimoire, it appeared the band was on a winning streak, and I couldn’t be more excited to hear where they would take their sound next. They were getting more adventurous, adding backing vocals and folk instruments like Celtic pipes and strings in addition to the electric violin which has been part of their signature since the beginning. Their songs were sounding bigger and more densely packed, like a whole tribe of forest-dwelling pagans was taking part in the ritual of the music. Surely King Thranduil himself would be proud.

It was not far into 2019 when Elvenking announced their follow up to Secrets was going to arrive this year, and it was to be their first concept album, and one that would be the first part in a series of albums called Reader of the Runes. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Elvenking going the conceptual route, given that they never really struck me as the kind of band to construct a large narrative throughout one of their albums, but I’ve been surprised before, and that besides I was more than happy to get more of their music so soon. This excitement was diminished, however, once singles started to drop, beginning with “Under the Sign of a Black Star” and proceeding with “Silverseal” and lastly the song “Divinations”. Now, I’m an experienced enough music lover to know that generally speaking, bands don’t release the strongest material on their upcoming albums as teaser songs; actually, that would kind of defeat the purpose if they did. And yet, Elvenking has been very solid with their singles in the past, even on their weaker albums, and especially on their most recent records. I mean, “Invoking the Woodland Spirit” and “The Horned Ghost and the Sorcerer” are among Elvenking’s finest tracks to date, and both were singles from their previous album. But with the first three songs, Elvenking just wasn’t coming out swinging. Every song technically sounded like Elvenking, but deflated, predictable, and not really offering any new tricks. Almost like the new Tool songs, except considerably shorter. I do like “Silverseal” well enough in its own right, but the main melody feels a little too eerily close to the Game of Thrones theme, and like the others, it just didn’t feel as adventurous or as powerful as Elvenking had shown themselves to be in recent years. The title track likewise has a catchy enough chorus and rattles along with pretty solid energy, but it just wasn’t enough for me. I wasn’t assured of the strength of the concept behind this album, but I hoped the album’s longer tracks, particularly its nearly 11-minute closer, would be the sorts of knockout punches I had been holding out for.

But I won’t beat around the bush here: Elvenking’s new record is an all-around disappointment. I’ve heard more than I care to admit of records this year which fit the description of “wheel-spinning: the album” perfectly, but I never expected Elvenking would fall into that category with Queensryche, Sabaton, and most recently Tool. And it’s hard to pinpoint any specific aspect where the band is failing here aside from songwriting in general, which is as standard for them as it gets: the production is fine, the instrumental performances are pretty flashy (especially the drums this time around), the lyrics are as mythical and ambiguous as they should be, and even the artwork, though it evokes a 90’s/00’s Helloween album, is fittingly dark and mysterious. But man, songwriting just isn’t an area you can skimp out on, especially in power metal, no matter how confident each individual member sounds. I would say that it’s another case of a band’s conceptual ambitions getting in the way of quality song crafting, but the thing is, Elvenking don’t really sound held back by extended spoken word passages, sweeping instrumentals, or any of your other regular concept album trappings. The only song I’d say that really fell victim to this sort was the 10-minute “Reader of the Runes – Book I”, the album’s biggest heap of nothing and thus its biggest disappointment. It isn’t just here, though, that I find myself trailing off in boredom: “Sic Semper Tyrannis”, “Warden of the Bane”, and “Under the Sign of a Black Star” just feature pretty lazy attempts at folk melodies and mostly at the same pace and dynamic level. There’s far too little experimentation or variety on this album, and what little there is can’t really shoulder the burden of ordinary sameness the majority of the album suffers from. As far as the album’s concept itself goes, it’s not the kind of thing the listener can discern just going by the lyrics unless you have the album booklet on hand to follow along, which makes the songs seem tied together in theme rather than by a narrative. I have no issue with this in theory, but I do find a lot of conceptual records these days a little too muddled and enigmatic lyrically to be worth the trouble of deciphering, compared to an album like The Wall or Operation: Mindcrime where the music followed the narrative just as crucially as the lyrics.

I will say that “Malefica Doctrine” is perhaps the most surprising moment on the album, sparking into blistering speed with blast beats and aggressive riffs and vocals to match, but even for all its virtues, it’s like a moment of desperation from the band, like they’re checking to see if you’re still paying attention because there’s still 1/3 of the album to go. “Heathen Divine” is also an admirable opener, warming up from the instrumental folk melodies of the short and sweet “Perthro” before launching into a confident pagan anthem, though it doesn’t come close to matching the heights of the previous album’s opener. The stronger two singles “Divination” and “Silverseal” follow to maintain pretty strong atmospheric and melodic vibes and keep the album afloat before the advent of the album’s best track “The Misfortune of Virtue”, which sounds like a leftover from Secrets with a darkened melodic tinge and valuable rhythmic swing to make you feel like you’re dancing in a circle with a bunch of painted witches wearing animal skulls and nothing else. It’s hard to describe what really sets this song apart from the others; it just sounds like the band had a sudden jolt of creativity and poured it into this one song. “Eternal Eleanor” also features a refreshing change of pace with a nice melodic structure and more acoustic guitars, and almost sounds like a long-lost track from Heathenreel. Sadly, the album goes downhill pretty steadily from here with one filler song after another. The violin folk melodies get repetitive, Damnagoras’ vocals lose inspiration, and the guitar riffs and leads don’t make up much ground. I guess if the final song weren’t so drawn out with so little building it up, then my impression of the album would be less sour.

Still, in my opinion, Elvenking has yet to release a truly bad album, though there have been disappointments here and there, or otherwise strange directions the band has taken. This first of their Runes album cycle ranks among their worst to date, and certainly doesn’t bode well for the rest of the cycle, but it’s not without its merits. Elvenking still plays in their style like no one else can, but they just sound much less enthused about it this time around, especially in the lackluster choruses. I wouldn’t say that Divinations sounds rushed, but more like it’s obligatory, the kind of album that’s needed to set the stage for what’s to come. With that in mind, we can certainly hope its follow-ups will be more inspired and ambitious, but even for its stronger tracks, this is not the album I would advise anyone new to Elvenking to start with. For that, you’re much better off with The Winter Wake, The Pagan Manifesto, or even their 2000 debut Heathenreel, even if it sounds a little less professional by today’s standards. I’ll leave it at that, I suppose.

Taylor Swift – Lover (2019) album review

Track listing:

  1. I Forgot You Existed (2:51)
  2. Cruel Summer (2:58)
  3. Lover (3:41)
  4. The Man (3:10)
  5. The Archer (3:31)
  6. I Think He Knows (2:53)
  7. Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince (3:54)
  8. Paper Rings (3:42)
  9. Cornelia Street (4:47)
  10. Death by a Thousand Cuts (3:14)
  11. London Boy (3:10)
  12. Soon You’ll Get Better [feat. Dixie Chicks] (3:22)
  13. False God (3:20)
  14. You Need to Calm Down (2:51)
  15. Afterglow (3:43)
  16. ME! [feat. Brendan Urie] (3:13)
  17. It’s Nice to Have a Friend (2:30)
  18. Daylight (4:53)

Oh, trust me. I didn’t expect to find myself here either. I’ve had no desire to check this album out all year, as much as each new single has made its release more inevitable. Back in 2017 I gave a listen to Taylor Swift’s sixth album Reputation and agreed with the general consensus that it was a misguided effort to turn this blonde-haired, blue-eyed American sweetheart of the music industry into a darker, more spiteful and bad mannered pop icon, even though I concede there were a few songs I genuinely liked. As someone who’s generally considered a metalhead, though I have a broad musical background, I find myself having to switch gears whenever I listen to something totally different, like rap, jazz, country, or classical music. The elitists out there have always criticized pop music, especially today’s pop music, for being too shallow and built around hooks and lyrical motifs as opposed to larger concepts and more complex instrumentation. But, guys, look, I’m not sitting around waiting for Taylor Swift to drop the next game-changing prog metal concept album. If her music fits the current pop trends of being shallow and simplistic, then so be it; let’s just hope she can make some meaningful and catchy songs in the process.

Taylor Swift is not totally removed from writing the teen breakup songs that made her famous, but ever since her transition from country pop to straight mainstream pop with the album 1989, she seems more wont to explore different subjects and express herself in different ways. And if 2017’s Reputation was her way of relishing the spotlight and dissing her haters, with her new album Lover she seems to have had a come-to-Jesus reconnection with herself and her personal life. Part of this is due to her new, under-the-radar relationship for which she has been dedicated to maintaining discretion in a culture obsessed with scrutinizing every detail of her private life. She has described the album as being a ‘love letter to love’, which sounds sappy to the point of inducing vomiting episodes, though I find in exploring this album she’s not necessarily always talking about romantic love. Sometimes it’s familial, sometimes it’s friendly, sometimes it’s self-love, sometimes it’s a throwaway LGBT ally posture, and sometimes it’s simply about being able to move on from having loved.

But I’m not here to accuse Taylor of being disingenuous, even if she’s had a history of going through guys like pairs of underwear. I think it is worth pointing out, though, that what Taylor has accomplished here, quite unexpectedly, hinges much more on the success of the album’s deep cuts rather than its singles. The leading single “ME!” featuring Panic at the Disco’s Brendan Urie is as grating and forgettable a pop track as they come these days, and its counterpoint, the soft vaporwave synth-pop of “The Archer”, aims for a sense of triumph but instead feels deflated and derailed by its Humpty Dumpty versing, and the less said about “You Need to Calm Down” and its powerless virtue signaling, the better. However, the title track promised significantly more heart in the album’s ballads, and its welcome use of more acoustic instruments and bright melodies, not to mention an old-timey country swing, was endearing in every way that the previous singles were eye-rolling. Still, that’s only one for four out of the teaser tracks, so the album as a whole had the unenviable task of catching up. With 18 total songs, however, there was always the potential that the good could outweigh the bad. In this case, had the album been limited to 12 or 13 songs, the bad might have been eliminated altogether.

I’m honestly surprised how much I liked this album as a whole, especially given that, with most of the pop musicians I like, the deep cuts on their studio albums tend to just come across as flavorless filler. And while I can’t say that Taylor achieves something truly unique with this album, merging her lovey-dovey mainstream pop with the 80’s synth music popularized in the past decade by Carly Rae Jepsen, she does sound very comfortable with the style, enough to contrast more playful moods with more somber moments. “I Forgot You Existed” opens the album with an oddly indifferent sentiment, and while it’s not the strongest musically or lyrically to rev up the album’s engine, it does make up by being dismissively cathartic, a nice way of clearing the slate after the bad taste left by Reputation. From here Taylor breaks into sonically satisfying choruses and well-balanced songs like “Cruel Summer”, the title track, and the female empowerment anthem “The Man”, whose well-intended motives are somewhat undone by the tongue-in-cheek irony of its title. “The Archer” remains a depressive sigh on the album, but against much more vibrant tracks like “Paper Rings” and “I Think He Knows”, it’s easily forgotten. Both of these remain my favorite songs on the album, the former for its bright, upbeat tempo and frizzy, subtle punk energy and the latter for its fantastic choral refrain and danceable r&b rhythm. Had these, along with the likes of “Cruel Summer” and “Cornelia Street” been chosen as the album’s leading singles, I’d have been looking forward to Lover from the jump. It isn’t all fun and games, however, as Taylor takes a reflective moment to pen a love song to her mother battling cancer in “Soon You’ll Get Better” featuring backing vocals from none other than the Dixie Chicks. I can’t even lie, I don’t think Taylor has ever succeeded in putting a lump in my throat before now, but this one’s a rare lyrical gem from a lyricist who hasn’t really moved much beyond the starry-eyed high school senior level.

The back half of the album does deflate the excitement gradually, sadly, and not simply due to the recurrence of the two worst singles to be released from it. To her credit, Taylor doesn’t really sink to such lows on any other songs, even if the shallow foreign infatuation of “London Boy” gives me horrific flashbacks to Ed Sheeran’s recent collaboration album. But as I previously stated, had the album been limited to 12 or 13 songs, it could have been a contender for one of 2019’s better pop records. I do like the backing strings melody and the country harmonies driving “Death by a Thousand Cuts”, but songs like “False God”, “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince”, “Afterglow” and “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” just read like half-hearted attempts to pad the album’s length to over an hour of music, and to incorporate more different facets of love as an emotion, since that’s her lyrical focus here. They’re not really bad songs, but rather just passable fare which are more disappointing than normal on an album of generally much stronger material. In the end, though, I think the album has enough good going for it that I’ve been willing to come back to it for multiple listens, which I’ve not been able to say about a Taylor Swift album in quite a while. I’ve never been her biggest supporter, even though I have to appreciate her willingness to write her own songs and use more acoustic instrumentation where appropriate, but there’s little denying the infectious nature of her joy on this album. The real problem for me, honestly, is having to pull off the mental gymnastics of justifying how a Taylor Swift album, one of which appears every two years and I wasn’t excited for at all, has turned out better than a new Tool album, which hasn’t occurred in over a decade. But that’s a subject for another sermon; for now, just take my recommendation for this surprisingly enjoyable record, or just save the best songs to your playlist, if that’s your thing. Hopefully you won’t be disappointed

Tool – Fear Inoculum (2019) album review

Track listing:

  1. Fear Inoculum (10:20)
  2. Pneuma (11:53)
  3. Invincible (12:44)
  4. Descending (13:37)
  5. Culling Voices (10:05)
  6. Chocolate Chip Trip (4:48)
  7. 7empest (15:43)

So I turn 26 in October, which means that the last time Tool released a new album (in April, 2006) was half my life ago. I remember the time a little differently from most Tool fans (or, just, people who listen to Tool, since I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fan), since I had never heard of them before three of their songs, “Vicarious”, “Schism”, and “Parabola”, were featured on the soundtrack for the 4th main title in the Guitar Hero series, World Tour, and the first in that series to feature a full band setup like the Rock Band games. It made sense to feature a few Tool songs in such a game, seeing as how Tool’s method of songwriting infuses the four instruments together in such a unique way and builds to such impressive movements and crescendos, and the rhythm section of Justin Chancellor’s bass guitar and Danny Carey’s drums are such an integral part of all that. I remember always thinking, even back when I was an immature young listener as a teen and just getting into metal for the first time, that there was just something different about Tool, something that no one else could replicate, though many have tried.

13 years later, and that still holds true to me, though I’ve started to think that the band’s unique approach to building their music is also what has limited them in terms of style for all this time. They avoid common time signatures like the plague (normal in prog music), they stick to one key throughout each song, even the longer ones, guitarist Adam Jones doesn’t really dabble in big, layered chords or utilizing full scales in his riffs, and vocalist Maynard James Keenan pops in here and there to provide enigmatic lyrics about self-expression and refusal to conform to societal norms. Rinse and repeat about a dozen times, and you have a Tool album. Obviously I’m paraphrasing here, but suffice to say, Tool isn’t exactly the kind of band to offer much range or variety in their songs, a sort of time and place prog metal rather than a jack of all trades. And this is fine, they have a niche and they occupy it well; what’s problematic to me is that it’s taken these four guys over a decade to produce essentially the same product. Keenan has explained in numerous interviews that the reasons for the album’s repeated delays have more to do with legal issues the band faced after their 4th album 10,000 Days was released, and difficulty the four band mates have encountered in working together, all wanting to accomplish different things with their music.

After such a long period of silence, Tool fans have been understandingly skeptical in recent years with studio updates appearing few and far between from this notoriously private band. Teasing for this album began with two new songs debuted during the band’s live dates this past spring, “Invincible” and “Descending”, both of which promised the band’s signature sound was very much intact and the quartet was getting more ambitious with more ten minute songs. The band then finally released their entire back catalogue online for streaming in early August, and supported this move by releasing their first official single from the new album, the title track. But while Tool fans were getting increasingly pumped as time went on, each taste of the new album left me feeling more skeptical. And look here, I love long songs, I really do. Look up songs like “The Scarecrow” by Avantasia, or “Ghost Love Score” by Nightwish”, or “The Odyssey” by Symphony X, Opeth’s “The Leper Affinity”, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Iron Maiden, or just about anything by Ne Obliviscaris, to name a few of my favorites. Listen and you may notice that these songs have a few things in common: they each tell a story, and they take the listener on a journey. Some may be a little repetitive, but they don’t just stretch out the running time with a few ideas. They have an ebb and flow and ultimately arrive at an emotional climax and catharsis. With Tool, however, particularly in the new songs, I was getting the sense these songs were all ten minutes or longer just because the band demanded that they would be, to satisfy some arbitrary requirement on the upcoming album. It’s not to say that there weren’t some great moments in these songs; I just felt that maybe some of these ideas demanded their own songs rather than being tacked onto another song. There was a lot of build up but no release for the tension, no substantial arrival point to justify such immense length. I feared, noting the length of each song on the final album, that this would be the case throughout Fear Inoculum.

My fears soon proved to be true with my first listen through of the album, though I wondered if it was just a the kind of product that I needed to allow time to let it grow on me with multiple listens, that it was all too much to absorb in one go. However, I also feel that if a song, a piece of music, or an album takes more than 3-5 times of listening to it for you to appreciate it, then you’re probably in denial about how bad it is. There are certainly exceptions as my tastes in music, especially metal music, have changed over the years, but with Tool, I’ve enjoyed most everything that I liked by them on the first listen. The opening single “Fear Inoculum” didn’t grab me that way, though, even as there were certain aspects (like Chancellor’s bass licks in the early part of the song, some pretty smooth sectional transitions, etc.) that I liked a good bit. The song sets the tone of the album pretty well but it’s also kind of foreboding in that it lays the groundwork for pretty much everything the listener can expect going forward in the album. Fear Inoculum is about 85% an instrumental album, with vocalist Maynard James Keenan really only appearing for scant few lines in each song (or not at all, as in the case of the nearly 5-minute drum solo “Chocolate Chip Trip”). I honestly can’t figure how some reviewers out there can say this is the best set of vocals he’s ever put to tape; aside from moments on “Descending” and the first quarter of “7empest”, Keenan’s presence is barely felt in these songs. It’s enough to make me wonder why the band didn’t just commit to a fully instrumental album if this was the direction they wanted to go, though as dull and repetitive as some of these instrumental passages are, I guess we should be glad they didn’t.

There isn’t a single memorable riff, vocal melody, or guitar/bass lick on this album to compete with any of Tool’s past hits. I can’t praise drummer Danny Carey enough for his performances on this album and for doing his best to inject these songs with more vitality, but the strength of songwriting here just doesn’t justify six songs of this great length. A lot of the riffs played here are so rudimentary and seem to echo riffs of past Tool songs with elemental precision, there’s no movement in the chugging, and some of these time signatures are so needlessly complex. 21/16 time? Really? Exactly who are you guys trying to impress? I can certainly admit that it’s nice to hear more lead work from guitarist Adam Jones, especially his extended solo in “7empest”, but when these moments are coming to the relief of the dead horses they’re beating with the same chugging riffs, is that really cause to celebrate? The songs “Pneuma” and “Culling Voices” are somewhat set apart, at least, the former for at least feeling like more of a heady prog song and having some clear, explosive points of arrival, and the latter for having a steady build throughout and utilizing some more melodic techniques and introducing perhaps my favorite riff on the album (not that that’s saying much). The opening of “7empest” felt like such an assured departure from the rest of the album that it had me wondering exactly where THIS Tool was during the past hour of music, but at 15 minutes in length it still feels stretched way beyond any of the statements the band felt it needed to make in its closing track, and still suffers from the same repetition and narrowing songwriting capabilities that made so much of the album forgettable. But, if that’s not enough, the deluxe version of this album features an additional four interlude songs which push the album’s runtime to nearly ninety minutes, interludes which, frankly, add nothing to the experience and don’t form any kind of segue from one song to the next. I guess Tool wanted to give fans the most music they could possibly offer after such a long period of silence?

I think there are some bands out there that have been out of the game for so long that it just seems illogical for them to attempt any kind of comeback at this point, especially given that their discographies, as they stand now, are pretty much solid as steel. They’ve all gotten older, they couldn’t possibly recapture the energy or the anger they had when they were younger, and they have such a great legacy built up that any attempt to add onto it would inevitably lead to a lot of safe, boring material that sounds outdated in today’s market. Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, and now I guess Tool would fall into this category. 13 years is a long time to take working on an album. Dozens of masterpieces in all varieties of music have been made in a year or less. My expectations for this album were always that it could never possibly live up to all the hype and memes that have been built around it for the past decade, but seeing as it was Tool, it ought to at least be a solid, enjoyable slab of alternative progressive metal. Sadly, it really seems these guys have lost their way, that they’re overthinking what it is that made them special in the first place. Critics are hailing this album as being ‘worth the wait’ (easy enough to say now that the wait is over), and a ‘successful attempt to refine Tool’s sound’. But I say Tool’s sound doesn’t need refining; it needed updating, it needed some new tricks to make it more interesting and less stuck in a box. Fear Inoculum just feels like the band wanted to play it safe after over a decade of silence, to drone on and jam to their signature sound as long as possible rather than take their sound to new places. For anyone who’s familiar with Tool’s previous four albums, there’s not really much new here at all, and to me that is the biggest sin this album could commit.

Killswitch Engage – Atonement (2019) album review

Track listing:

  1. Unleashed
  2. The Signal Fire (feat. Howard Jones)
  3. Us Against the World
  4. The Crownless King (feat. Chuck Billy)
  5. I Am Broken Too
  6. As Sure As the Sun Will Rise
  7. Know Your Enemy
  8. Take Control
  9. Ravenous
  10. I Can’t Be the Only One
  11. Bite the Hand That Feeds

You can probably tell by now that I’m not usually on time with these album or movie reviews. This here new Killswitch Engage album was released last Friday, the 16th, and most fans of the band will have taken the time to give it a listen, or several, before I get around to reviewing it. So what’s the point in writing a review, if most people interested in hearing it will have already heard it? Well, that’s not really why I write reviews, to be honest. In fact, I don’t think many reputable reviewers are in a hurry to put up their reviews first so people will know whether or not an album like this is worth getting into. People who like Killswitch Engage are going to listen to this and form their own opinions regardless of what I or anyone else may say about it. I’m in this for people who hold my opinion in some regard, people who may be on the fence about giving this a listen, or people who maybe didn’t even know this album had come out and wanted the perspective of someone who’s already heard it to warm themselves up. Or maybe there are some people out there who like, or don’t like, what they hear and want to look to reviewers for validation, to find someone who will put to words whatever it is about a certain piece of art that they find so compelling, or disappointing. All this aside, though, I usually don’t put my reviews up on day one just because I need to be able to sit and think about these things for a while, and usually an album will take multiple listens before my appreciation, notes, or complaints become very clear. Hopefully my readers, whoever you are, will be patient and understanding.

Now then, with all that out of the way, it’s time to talk about Killswitch Engage, and their studio return after 3 years. The new album, Atonement, is the third since original vocalist Jesse Leach rejoined the band in 2012, and it is the band’s eighth album overall. Killswitch Engage has enjoyed steady success in the past decade as one of the leading names in the metalcore scene, and yet, even with strong singles like “In Due Time” and “Hate by Design” to go on with the new lineup, somehow the band has never quite reached the peak of success they knew in the mid-2000s. There are many who would attribute this to the fact that Jesse Leach, capable vocalist as he is, just doesn’t have the same presence or power behind the mic that vocalist Howard Jones did. I belong to the camp that agrees with this sentiment, though it hasn’t been enough to deter me from checking out each new Killswitch album and returning to their earliest works such as Alive or Just Breathing (2002). The band hasn’t had a true hit along the lines of “My Curse”, “The End of Heartache”, or even the cover of Dio’s “Holy Diver” since Howard Jones left. But metal bands don’t measure quality by their number of radio hits, the same way pop, rap, country, and rock artists do. Most metal bands are more concerned with building a body of work they can be proud of, and Killswitch Engage, despite a few weaker efforts, hasn’t really released a bad album since they’ve started. They know their audience and continue to deliver in their own way, while also providing some uplifting messages about overcoming personal struggles and being true to oneself.

With Atonement, Killswitch aims to keep that streak going, and they do in many ways. I’m a little disappointed that the band insists on leaning towards shorter songs and more brutal riffs rather than stronger lead guitar melodies and harmonies, but the trade-off is that this new album is, for the most part, Killswitch’s heaviest and most aggressive to date. The album features two guest vocal spots on the songs “The Signal Fire” and “The Crownless King”, with former vocalist Howard Jones and bay area thrash legend Chuck Billy of Testament appearing respectively. Both songs are blisteringly quick and surprisingly thrashy for Killswitch’s standards, but they pull them off well, and add some nods to Lamb of God and Pantera in some of the riffs, as in the song “Know Your Enemy”. “The Signal Fire” is a standout moment on the album just to hear Jesse and Howard singing (or screaming) together, a union which has fans clamoring for both vocalists to remain in the band full-time (which, I won’t lie, I would love to see). The opener and lead single “Unleashed” is pretty standard fare and follows the metalcore formats which dominated the previous two albums, but the song just feels like it wants to be more ferocious than it actually is, and never seems to reach an arrival point or focus for its fury. Compared to previous openers “The Hell in Me” and “Alone I Stand”, it just isn’t the triumphant burst through the gate that I’ve come to expect.

As the album goes on, I find myself glazing over here and there as the monotony of Adam Dutkiewicz’s riffs and lack of memorable solos as well as Jesse’s straightforward vocals and lyrics running several songs together, but there are exceptions to break up the pace. The classic inspirational metalcore driving “As Sure as the Sun Will Rise” takes me right back to high school, though with some added blast beats just to keep the performance a cut above the younger version of the band. I also like the added depth the 7-string guitars bring to the songs “Us Against the World” and “Take Control”, and I can’t get enough of the pulverizing breakdown of “Ravenous” or the melodies giving the album finale “Bite the Hand that Feeds” the closure and impact it needs. However, where Killswitch has historically suffered, with Jesse as frontman at least, is in their attempts at ballads. I thought the song “Always” was the most skippable and monotonous track on 2013’s Disarm the Descent, and with “I Am Broken Too” and “I Can’t Be the Only One”, while neither falls quite to a plodding pace, both just seem like obliging attempts by the band for lighter and more upbeat songs to get on rock radio, and Jesse’s lyrics can’t help but come across as preachy and literal. I mean, I get it, metalcore is basically metal’s subgenre for the youth, specifically middle and high school years, and having overly poetic lyrics can risk going over a lot of kids’ heads, but I always thought Howard Jones rode the line perfectly in songs like “Rose of Sharyn” and “The Arms of Sorrow”. Those songs really felt like there was a beating heart behind them, even if they would seem cheesy and sappy if performed by a different band. Nor do I doubt that the new songs come from a real place; Jesse Leach has been very vocal (no pun intended) about his struggles with anxiety and depression, these being a large part of the reason he left the band in the first place. Still, as someone who often has similar struggles himself, I don’t really feel the cathartic power behind these songs, as well-intended as they are.

To me, Killswitch Engage really hit their stride musically and cohesively on their last album Incarnate in 2016, at least for the first time since As Daylight Dies ten years prior. The album was heavy, direct when it needed to be, and showcased some new tricks from the band that shook up their sound a bit and kept the album fresh. Atonement is a solid follow-up, arguably heavier and meaner but not quite as unpredictable. It’s a shorter album, at just under 40 minutes, and Adam D’s production along with Andy Sneap’s crisp mixing and engineering keep the album sounding like a complete and hard-edged slab of classic metalcore. Atonement does lack strong singles to make it as memorable as other offerings from the band, and I can’t help but wonder if the band’s inclusion of guest vocals and their turn towards nearly death metal levels of grinding and urgency are meant as a distraction from increasingly stagnating songwriting, but for now these tactics are working pretty well. For the moment, Atonement is, in my eyes, Killswitch’s heaviest album to date… except when it’s not. Depending on what you’re looking for personally, that may be just fine with you. I’ll be looking for some next-level songwriting maturity with their next album, and perhaps seeing Howard Jones come back full time, if his other projects aren’t demanding too much of him.

To my readers, what do you think of the new Killswitch Engage album? Is it awesome? Is it meh? Do you kinda hate it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and follow me if you want to read more reviews like this. Ciao!

Slipknot – We Are Not Your Kind (2019) album review

Track listing:

  1. Insert Coin (1:38)
  2. Unsainted (4:20)
  3. Birth of the Cruel (4:35)
  4. Death Because of Death (1:20)
  5. Nero Forte (5:15)
  6. Critical Darling (6:25)
  7. A Liar’s Funeral (5:27)
  8. Red Flag (4:11)
  9. What’s Next (0:53)
  10. Spiders (4:03)
  11. Orphan (6:01)
  12. My Pain (6:48)
  13. Not Long for This World (6:35)
  14. Solway Firth (5:56)

What the? A new Slipknot album? Released in the same month as a new Tool album, and a new Korn album? What year is this? Are we back in the 90’s? I wish someone would’ve told me. Maybe it won’t be too late to warn the folks at Lucasfilm about how George is about to release a trilogy of travesties, then sell the rights of his series to Disney in fifteen years so that they will, in turn, make their own set of travesties.

Oh, yeah, my bad. I’m doing a music review. So here it is, folks. Iowa’s own nu metal maniacs in Slipknot are finally back with their sixth album, and their first in 5 years. It seems like every time this band comes back with a new album, something about them has significantly changed, whether it’s a lineup change or a stylistic shift or signing to a new label or what have you. And yet, when Slipknot turned out their sophomore album Iowa in 2001, they were young, vital, and angry and had just been given the resources and budget to channel that fury into an album which, along with their debut, defined what Slipknot ought to sound like for metalheads everywhere. At the time of their third album, you could hardly turn on a metal radio station and not hear one of their songs, especially when the band cleaned up their act lyrically and watered down their aggression for Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses to produce some of their biggest hits. The band would go on to dial up their angst in small doses on the following two albums All Hope is Gone and The Gray Chapter, but the consistent addition of ballad-like songs such as “Snuff” and “Killpop” had done the damage of diluting the band’s reputation as a particularly vicious breed of flyover state metalheads.

I write this review not as a diehard Slipknot fan, but as someone who really appreciates the band when they get their formula just right. Their lyrics can be juvenile, their riffs can be simplistic, and sonically speaking their brazen use of static, feedback, and sampling can get obnoxious, but when they unleash the penned-up beast in the manner of songs like “Surfacing”, “Gematria (The Killing Name”, “People = Shit”, and “The Negative One”, it becomes pretty easy to overlook their vices. When their last album came out in 2014, I only really knew their hits, and while I wasn’t really in the position of judging it with any authority, I thought it was decent and wondered why so many metal fans were raving over it when groups like Machine Head, Accept, Behemoth, Mayhem, Judas Priest, and Ne Obliviscaris had all released considerably better albums the same year. The announcement of a sixth Slipknot album last year after a period of notable silence came with some hype and expectations built around it. Bassist Alessandro Venturella and drummer Jay Weinberg proved to be fitting replacements for longtime members Paul Gray (who tragically passed away in 2010) and Joey Jordison on The Gray Chapter, and the band was promising “Iowa levels of aggression and heaviness” on the new album. While it seemed doubtful that band like Slipknot, who are much older in 2019 than they were in 2001, could pull off such a feat, they delivered in fine form with the single “All Out Life” in late 2018, which to me stands as one of the better Slipknot songs of this decade. I’m not sure what possessed the band to leave such a strong track off the listing for their new album, but in any case they had the pressure to deliver up to that same level throughout the album when it arrived.

And now it has arrived. We Are Not Your Kind takes its title from the chorus of the menacing single “All Out Life” (again, Slipknot, what the hell guys?), but ultimately the band has set out to deliver a ‘front-to-back album experience’ as opposed to relying on the strength of singles. They attempt this with a selection of brooding intro tracks (“Insert Coin”, “Death Because of Death”, “What’s Next?”) and some menacing slow burns, as in “A Liar’s Funeral” and “My Pain”, which ultimately contribute to this new album having a certain bleak, jaded feel. Instead of trying to recreate the pulverizing and youthful aggression found on their early albums, Slipknot has channeled their more mature anger into a set of heavy slabs of metal for a generation of fans that’s grown up with them. Like any aging band should, they acknowledge their limitations and push against them when necessary. They also seem to be cutting down on the melodramatic balladry that has watered down recent albums: Corey Taylor does a lot more screaming here than he’s done in a while, and brings back some of the rapid fire flow that latches well onto the grooves of songs like “Nero Forte” and “Critical Darling”. Even the slower song “A Liar’s Funeral”, which I feared would devolve into this album’s version of “Snuff”, still seethes with anger under the surface and makes for one of the band’s better slower songs, even if it is one of my least favorite tracks from the album.

Where Slipknot continues to shine, however, is just in the meaty delivery of some of their heaviest and most vital material to date. They promised Iowa levels of aggression, and to some degree it appears in tracks like “Orphan” (which feels almost like a continuation of “My Plague”) and the breakdowns of the opening single “Unsainted”. Whereas The Gray Chapter only really exercised their more sinister motifs in three or four songs and pushed in more of a Stone Sour-esque melodic direction in the majority of its songs, this album feels mostly packed with headbangers, and fewer of them feel like filler material. “Birth of the Cruel” recalls nu metal highlights from the early 2000’s and has this pervasive sense of violence driving it that propels the chorus, while “Unsainted” offsets its sinister church choir melody with vicious verses and a massive breakdown in the latter half. “Nero Forte” stands as my personal favorite on the album, introducing one of the album’s most memorable riffs and complimenting Taylor’s ill-tempered rapping with an eerily melodic chorus that comes in out of nowhere. The album ends off with the darkly monstrous “Solway Firth”, a track with a bitterly cynical sentiment driving its rudeness and brings the album surprisingly full circle after the band took a detour through its last few songs. Then there’s the track “Spiders”, which appears on the latter half of the album and is easily the most unique selection of the bunch. The band capitalizes on its Children of the Corn creepiness here with a surprisingly restrained yet seemingly volatile track, not quite bursting at the seams but still wrenching up the terror like Rammstein previously accomplished with the song “Puppe” earlier this year. It’s an example of the kind of creativity that you would hope for a band like Slipknot to experiment with, as opposed to defaulting to Corey Taylor’s standard hard rock melodrama.

Slipknot has succeeded at making an album that is, at its core, very different from the other five studio releases in their discography. For a band that’s witnessed as much personal tragedy as they have over the years, Slipknot finally seems focused and driven on We Are Not Your Kind. I wouldn’t go so far as to declare it their best yet, being as their early albums were good in a different way that this album is good. The band was pissed off back then at the political and cultural climate they found themselves in; nowadays they seem less physical with their rage, and more resigned to leave the world to its fate. The music is heavy, but it’s a different kind of heavy. They’re more focused on setting a tone than they are slapping your eardrums with snarling riffs and unrestrained drum solos. Still, they can fall victim to some of the familiar trappings of nu metal and their own interpretation of it. The album is too long, overproduced, and weighed down by some drawn-out passages to make the album feel more cohesive. Despite these things, Slipknot sounds about they best they’ve sounded in a long time in several moments throughout. I think for Slipknot fans, or knotheads, or maggots, or whatever they like to be called, this should satisfy in pretty much every capacity. It can be as mean as the old Slipknot, but it also doesn’t lose touch with the more mature band that has written great songs like “The Negative One” and “Psychosocial”. The album also just doesn’t sound like more of the same; the band has clearly picked up a few new tricks along the way, and adapted their songwriting to Jay Weinberg’s drumming. For my personal tastes, I’m surprised how much I enjoyed this album, and how much I anticipated it compared to the new Killswitch Engage and Alter Bridge albums in the pipeline, both of which are suffering from pretty weak singles so far. For metalheads in general, this album requires at least one listen, though anyone who’s previously never been keen on Slipknot may not find much to enjoy here, even if that is less true of this album than any of their previous ones. To me it’s one of the better metal releases in 2019 so far, and one of the few that hasn’t been a disappointment.

Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019) – Review

The 9th film by Quentin Tarantino. For most moviegoing audiences, that statement is pretty much all they need to hear. Judging by the film’s impressive box office performance this past weekend, it’s certainly a good thing to see that more original filmmaking still has the capacity to get audiences out of their homes and into a theater, though the fact that this movie never really stood much chance at dethroning a shot-for-shot remake of a film less than 30 years old which panders to the nostalgia craving generation I belong to is the depressing other side of the coin. But still, in an era where studios gravitate to sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of every comic book character you’ve never heard of, it’s nice to see that there are some names that still carry weight with people who truly appreciate filmmakers who, well, truly appreciate film, as an art form rather than a way to make money. Heavyweights like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson (yes, I named him with all these others, suck it), and Quentin Tarantino just seem to attract attention regardless of what kind of project they’re working on. Hell, even newcomers like Denis Villeneuve, Jordan Peele, and Robert Eggers are starting to state their claims as this generation’s greats, the masters behind the camera that keep innovative filmmaking as much a part of the present as it is in the past.

And what makes all of these directors such universally lauded names in the movie industry? Well, there’s any number of things you can point to, but each might be attributed to an individual director. Generally speaking, you know a Wes Anderson movie when you’re watching one, or a Woody Allen movie, and especially a Tarantino film. For better or worse, the director’s passion and personality always shines through his product. Take Tarantino’s newest film, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, for instance. The title itself is a reference to Sergio Leone’s series of classic Italian interpretation films for western genres (as in Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and so on). The poster above is designed to mimic movie posters from the 1960’s, clearly the era depicted in the film and the decade most influential to Tarantino’s work as a director. The plot centers around a TV actor from the 1950’s whose transition to film acting hasn’t been the smoothest ride, and the scenes of him acting on set alongside other actors are so deliberately shot to evoke the scene that you can forget you’re watching a movie within a movie sometimes. Even Tarantino’s casting of big-name stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino calls back to an era when films were more driven by their star power than their special effects, continuation of a previous film, or adaptations of beloved characters.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is directed and written by Quentin Tarantino and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Margaret Qualley, Emile Hirsch, Dakota Fanning, and Al Pacino. It is set in the year 1969, where veteran TV actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) fears he has reached the end of his rope as an actor, condemned to make appearances in supporting roles and starring opposite the heroes as the heavy, or else relegated to spaghetti westerns over in Italy to earn his way, another nod from Tarantino to director Sergio Leone. His stunt double and best friend Cliff Booth (Pitt) remains by his side to encourage him and face down the changing landscape for actors in Hollywood with him. Dalton also lives next door to promising young actress Sharon Tate (Robbie), whose new relationship with hot young director Roman Polanski might just be the venue to redemption that Dalton is looking for. However, Cliff Booth’s side adventures and incidental crosses with the Manson family lead to some classic Tarantino tension as the movie presses on.

Critics are calling this movie as Tarantino’s love letter to 1960’s Hollywood, but that’s about as reductive an analysis as it gets. More than that, this movie, like many others that he has done, is Tarantino’s way of showing audiences the magic of movies and the potential of films as works of imagination. This isn’t a nonlinear film like some of his earlier ones, but it does take an unconventional approach of showing who his characters are by repeatedly placing them in slow, mundane sequences where, in the moment, you as the audience member may find it difficult to see how this relates to the rest of the film and the other characters, only to reward you later on when the bigger picture comes together. And Tarantino has a knack for writing and directing character actors, and he likes to give meaty roles to big name stars like DiCaprio and Pitt in order to let them dig in and enjoy themselves. But he’s also a director known for splattering the screen with excessive bloody violence, and in that regard Once Upon a Time is among his most restrained films. To be sure, the sparks fly in the third act as one would hope, but unlike some of his earlier works, the violence seems much less a subject of focus and more an inevitable point of arrival, akin to his previous film The Hateful Eight. In a sort of tongue in cheek way, Tarantino as a filmmaker seems to enjoy playing with the audience’s expectations for his work based on previous outings, which makes Once Upon a Time, with its first viewing, a bit perplexing to the average moviegoer. I had the prediction as I was watching it that fans of movies like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill will be disappointed, dare I say even bored by the film’s largely dialed-back pacing and seemingly ordinary dramatic structure.

And yet, despite that the film does feel its 2 hr 45 min running time and falls victim to some expository voicing over in the third act to set up the final confrontation, I enjoyed it from start to finish. I think Leonardo DiCaprio has rarely come across so playfully unrestrained in a performance, not at least since The Wolf of Wall Street, and because he owns the intentionally comedic role with all the serious gravitas of a paranoid, perhaps bipolar person, you just wish that he and Tarantino had done more work together before now (Django Unchained notwithstanding). And him starring across from Brad Pitt is such an ingenious combination that you just know their chemistry went well beyond the portrayal for the big screen. I loved their banter, their best buddy commentary on their work together, their cynical outlook for the changing landscape of Hollywood around them as they struggle to find their place within it. Tarantino has this unique way of making his leading characters come across both as realistic people (often by taking notes from real people and mixing them together in a character) and as over-the-top movie characters which always know just the right thing to say and never forcing them to behave in a manner which seems out of character. In a way they’re often reflections of the director himself, embodying his own energetic and neurotic idiosyncrasies. Some moviegoers may find this approach to writing a bit tiresome and predictable, but to me it’s part of what makes his films seem so alive and frenetic throughout.

There are moments of classic Tarantino tension and explosive violence, but what I really appreciate about the movie is its willingness to explore a bygone era of Hollywood and develop its characters based on the rose-colored lenses while also taking advantage of the audience’s perception of movies and filmmaking in both past and present. There’s a brilliant moment towards the beginning of the film where Rick Dalton is looking across at the car next to him and staring at the two people in the car, being Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. The camera pushes in on both Dalton and the his two neighbors and you get the sense that he’s lovestruck by the sight of Sharon Tate, especially since the two haven’t interacted at all in the film up to that point. The two actors, DiCaprio and Robbie, have even previously starred together in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The silent tension in the moment all points to the idea that he’s become smitten with her, and perhaps has been for some time. However, Rick reveals to his buddy Cliff Booth that he’s actually starstruck by the director she’s sitting and laughing with, and right then I had to laugh at the dramatic irony that Tarantino had playfully built up in what seems like a throwaway moment in the film’s full story arc. I haven’t talked about Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate much yet, largely because her role in the film is pretty diminished, and at one point early on I found myself wondering if she was going to do anything beyond going to parties and seeing her own movies in the theater. I imagine there were some limitations for what Tarantino felt he could do with her character, in order to remain as respectful to her tragically short life and career and still make her a compelling part of this story, and end off the film the way he’s written it. In the end I think he was tastefully optimistic, but I can see people being disappointed overall, especially given Robbie’s notable acting range showcased in films like The Wolf of Wall Street and I, Tonya.

I don’t think Quentin Tarantino could possibly eclipse his masterwork of filmmaking that is Pulp Fiction, and I don’t think he’s really wanted or tried to since that film came out in 1994. The man has said repeatedly that he only sees himself writing and directing the compact total of ten films and then being done, so with that in mind, we can reasonably assume he only plans to do one more, although as a writer myself, I find it hard to believe that anyone, even Tarantino, could ever completely set aside something like writing and directing which is such a big part of who they are. It’s the same reason why musicians continue with their careers long after they’re famous and in their prime, and sometimes make huge comebacks. But all that aside, Tarantino’s movies only ever come around once every three or four years these days, and each one feels like a fitting addition to his catalog. Even The Hateful Eight, which I found to be rather underwhelming, still felt like his heart was really into it. With Once Upon a Time, I think he’s started to come back around full circle to what storytelling and filmmaking have meant to him as a creator. I mean, sure, this movie is a love letter to golden-age Hollywood, there’s authenticity in every frame, every time Cliff Booth goes for a drive, every time Rick Dalton is on a set, every time Sharon Tate turns on the radio and gets lost in the music. But it isn’t JUST that. He’s showcasing the imaginative potential for movies as a medium, not simply the mind-melting mush that packs our theaters and TV screens today. Yet Once Upon a Time, for all its nods to the 50’s and 60’s, doesn’t really feel any more old-fashioned than any of Tarantino’s other movies. He’s not stripping away the finery and his expertise as a writer and director to evoke a certain period. If anything he’s bridging the gap, showing how relevant star power, subtext, and visual storytelling can be and how far filmmaking has come in the last 50 years at the same time. It’s not making the old new again, it’s more about the willingness to appreciate both. Otherwise we wouldn’t be getting movies like this at all. That’s my take on the film, anyway. I would most certainly recommend seeing it, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see something different and unique.

Age of Empires IV: Modern Warfare?

So it’s been a few years now since Microsoft announced that after over a decade, they were returning to oversee the production of a fourth entry in the beloved historical RTS series Age of Empires. This coincided with the further announcement that the original three games, complete with their expansions, were getting brand new ‘Definitive Editions’ with updated HD graphics, a fully orchestral soundtrack, and new gameplay features and quality of life improvements. Somewhat puzzlingly, however, the initial announcement came with no other information aside from the confirmation that Age 4 was indeed happening; fans were given no rough estimate of a release date, or any clear indication of the time period the new game would be set in, or any hints as to what new features could be expected to build on the series’ previous three titles. I’ve come to accept that this probably has to do with the fact that Microsoft and the startup developer Forgotten Empires are more focused on releasing the definitive editions for the first three games in sequence, with the Age of Empires II remaster arriving later this year, and the third likely to appear within the next year or two. Age IV, however, has been picked up by Relic Games, taking over for the now defunct Ensemble Studios which produced the first three games, with Relic’s primary credentials being the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games. To my understanding, neither of these series have quite the same reputation as more modern RTS series such as Starcraft or Total War, but I’d like to think, given all the flack we gamers throw at developers for rushing out unfinished products in order to score bank quickly, the fact that Age IV has already been in development for at least two years now is a good sign.

But I’m not here to argue the potential quality of the game prior to its release. Whatever Microsoft or Relic’s track record may be, I only have the highest hopes for the new title’s success. What I’m actually wanting to talk about is Age 4 as it relates to the other three titles in the series, particularly in its historical progression. I’ve seen quite a few arguments made about how, based on the trailer, Age of Empires IV will be a celebration of the series’ history thus far, covering all eras from the stone age up to the industrial age where Age 3 left off. I’ve also seen points made about how Age 4 should stick to the series’ strengths, and play it safe by returning to the time period of the series’ most successful entry Age of Kings (AoEII). However, whenever it’s suggested that the series continue to move forward in history into the modern era, potentially covering the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the present day, the general consensus is that this would be a bad turn for the series. People have cited that the time period they would have to cover is too brief, only a few hundred years at most, and incorporating modern combat strategies with the game design of Age of Empires, which has best been suited to older civilizations, just wouldn’t work. How do you build up your city, your home base, from a civilization like the United States, Great Britain, Russia, or China which is already globally established? That aside, nothing in the announcement trailer hinted at the arrival of tanks, automatic weapons, fighter jets, destroyers, etc., and would it even be accurate to think of the modern world as a world built up of, well, empires?

Just some side notes on my history with the series, but anyone who knows me personally knows I grew up playing Age of Empires 1 and 2. I have fond memories of playing the campaign missions with my older brother and failing miserably because we didn’t really understand the game when we were younger, and usually resorting to cheats just to see the missions play out. I adore those games and still play them every so often today (the HD remasters and 2018 definitive edition of AoE 1 certainly helped rekindle my interest), and though it took longer for me to get into Age of Empires III after it was released, I think it’s a great game as well. Age 3 certainly lacks the replay value of its predecessors, and while I think its innovations like the home city mechanic and troop queues and sound design, especially in warfare, are all really well accomplished and realized, somehow it just wasn’t as easy to jump into a random map game or campaign in Age 3 as it was for the first two. But what’s held over for all three games, and even the spinoff Age of Mythology in its own way, is that these games were fun, engaging, and often challenging without ever feeling like mindless entertainment. Playing Age of Empires always made me interested in learning more about the real-life stories behind the campaign missions, and the civilizations you could play as. I always felt like I was getting more out of a computer game than a simply diverting experience, and it helped me to appreciate similarly cerebral games like SimCity and Zoo Tycoon. Age 3 lost some points for attempting to tell an original story with uninteresting characters set in the colonial period, as opposed to the strictly historical campaigns of the first two games, but the game as a whole still mostly succeeded where the others had before it.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that I’ve been playing these games off and on really since they were brand new, so I feel like I’m in a position of authority to make arguments about each game and the franchise’s future. And my contention is that Age of Empires IV, in order to keep the series fresh and stay loyal to the spirit of the first three games, simply has to continue to move forward in history. What sets all the games apart from each other isn’t just that each new game brings new gameplay ideas, but you can feel the world modernizing and expanding as you play through history. When people criticize Age of Empires III, they rarely have any issue with the fact that the warfare centers around muskets, cannons, galleons, and artillery; it’s almost always had to do with the new mechanics getting in the way of the classic gameplay of the first two games, issues that, granted, could have been solved if the game allowed you to turn off certain features or let you play random maps entirely separate from your home city, leaving no impact on your progress. I’m hoping the forthcoming Age of Empires 3 remaster will fix these issues to make the game more user friendly and show people how it’s been a great game all along, but I digress: my point is, as long as the core gameplay that sets Age of Empires apart from its competitors is kept intact, I don’t think most people should worry about the implications of sending the series into the modern era of warfare.

Of course, given my acknowledgements above, I do recognize that there will be some issues that Relic Entertainment has to iron out in order to make the game a hit with fans who have been with the series since the late 90’s, such as myself. How will building up a base to train an army and defeat your enemies work, on a basic level, if the game is set in a time period where the major world powers are well established? How do you advance through the ages if there’s only a brief period of history to cover? How do you gather resources to support your army in that world? How will the combat be handled, once you have to factor in bunkers, snipers, bombing raids, anti-air guns, drones, and even nuclear weapons? How will classic buildings like castles, town centers, and wonders be utilized? How will they handle a campaign; will it be more like the first two games, a series of smaller campaigns all based on true events, or more like Age 3 and Age of Mythology, a longer narrative involving a group of bland video game characters fighting a bland, faceless villain? And how can the series continue, once you’ve covered the modern era of warfare? Doesn’t it cease to be a historical RTS game when you start speculating about space age and nano technology of the future? There’s certainly a lot of potential for Relic to screw this up and tarnish the legacy of a nearly perfect trilogy of strategy games.

But I have to wonder, what exactly would be the point in treading over the same ground the series has already covered? To improve on the potential of previous games? Isn’t that the whole point of the Definitive Editions? Isn’t that exactly Microsoft’s way of celebrating the series’ legacy after 20 years? Sure, after playing AoE 1 Definitive Edition for a few months now, it’s certainly not a perfect game, and there are certainly some oversights, some details and mechanics common in today’s RTS games, which could have improved the game further, but I recently tried to play a match of the original game from 1998 with none of the Definitive Edition’s amenities, no farm ques, no simultaneous tech and unit productions, no smart villagers or improved pathfinding, and it was honestly much harder to enjoy as a result. I imagine it was how a lot of passionate Age of Kings players feel whenever they try out the original game, but I always saw Age 1 and Age 2 as separate games and tried not to measure my enjoyment of one based on the other. But when it’s the same game, as in the Definitive Edition, it’s hard not to make comparisons. If Age 2 DE can accomplish the same feat, which it looks like it might, then the whole process has been worth doing, for nothing else than the fact that it continues to move the series forward. Which is exactly what we should be demanding of Age of Empires IV. To those who are fully comfortable playing the original games and don’t like to see the series change, well, fine, you’ll always have the originals, but I would suppose that Age 4, the Definitive Editions, or even Age 3 weren’t really made for you.

For those skeptics, I’d like to call your attention to a pair of little games that were released between Age of Mythology and Age of Empires 3, which were called Empire Earth (1 and 2). I never played the second one, and the third one, from my understanding, isn’t even worth talking about, but from my recollection they were both pretty similar, and they were built much like the Age of Empires series in that you started matches from an archaic age and continued to advance through the ages and utilize newer technology against your neighbors in a fight for control of the map. Just like AoE, you gathered resources, explored the map, produced different units from different buildings, you fought on land and sea, and you could even build wonders to advance your score. In the first Empire Earth (and maybe the second as well) you could start in as early as the prehistoric age and run all the way to the space age, with sixteen ages in total. This would include, of course the modern period of warfare, with planes, trains, and automobiles. Granted, the game’s mechanics and engine were about the same level as the Age of Mythology games, lacking impressive graphics or innovative strategies and techniques as were introduced in later games like Civilization V and Medieval Total War, but I remember the modern era combat, even as dated as it may be today, working pretty well. Training troops, gathering resources, advancing ages, it all worked about the same as Age of Empires had ever handled it, and adding in tanks and artillery wasn’t much different from adding in siege weaponry from the later ages of the first two AoE games (and the artillery from Age 3). Aerial combat could be a bit troublesome, since the planes tended to orbit around a certain spot rather than staying still (impossible for anything aside from helicopters). But it’s been over a decade since those games were released, and RTS games have evolved considerably over the years to make aerial combat easier and more believable. All this to say, it’s been done before, so why are we bothered by the idea of Age of Empires moving in that direction, and potentially doing it better?

All this aside, the picture below gives some pretty clear indication of where the original producers in Ensemble Studios were headed with the series after Age 3. Obviously, since Ensemble isn’t around anymore, any discussion about their intentions with their most beloved series is just speculation, but given that one of the games Relic is best known for currently, that being Company of Heroes, is a strategy game set during the world wars, I think it’s not a stretch to predict that Microsoft intends to honor the planned future of the series as set by Ensemble. And pay good attention now, since that’s going to be one of the only times you’ll ever see me put the words ‘Microsoft’ and ‘honor’ in the same sentence.

Like I’ve said above, I don’t know how Relic is going to handle moving Age of Empires into the modern age, but honestly, the idea of fighting WWII-type matches in the Age of Empires format has excited me ever since the last expansions for Age of Empires 3 came out a decade ago. I want to send platoons of marines through war-torn Europe and Russia. I want to crank out tanks from my factories and blow the shit out of annoying CPU from their unprotected southern flank. I want to see matches decided from intense aerial dogfights between spitfires or F-18’s. I want to play my own little versions of battleship on the oceans during matches. I want to see classic match types like king of the hill and regicide translate into modern warfare, and all the other little details that made the original trilogy of games such fun and accessible strategy games. And wouldn’t it be cool as shit to train units like fighter jets and helicopters from aircraft carriers, making some ships double as units and production buildings? If Age of Empires remains stuck in the past, then how is Age 4 even a sequel at all? I had given up years ago on ever seeing a fourth addition to this franchise, so the announcement of this game back in 2017 came as a welcome surprise. What a tragedy it would be if all these years later we hungry fans had our appetites whet by Microsoft only to be given more of what we already had. I wouldn’t put it past them; they do have a reputation of exploiting fans of beloved series, but I always thought Age 4 had the potential of doing more than capitalizing on nostalgia. It’d be a new age, taking the best of what worked before and updating it, adding new features, and just make Age of Empires new and exciting again. After all, they can’t just be thinking of established fans when developing this game; they ought to be trying to win new players over, and Age 4 should be a landmark in the RTS genre of games the way its three forerunners were. It simply won’t achieve that by revisiting past ages: it has to be the ultimate strategy game for the modern age.

Microsoft says they will be finally talking more about Age of Empires IV this fall, so I guess we’ll learn then once and for all what Relic plans to do with it. Anyway, this has all been my two cents, as a loyal fan who wants to see the series grow and succeed. An Age of Empires with modern warfare could be so awesome, but mishandled it could also be really disappointing, lacking the substance and replay value of the classic games. I hope Relic and Microsoft know what they’re doing; the HD editions and Definitive Editions show that Forgotten Empires at least understands the series and fan base, but does Relic? We’ll see soon enough.

Midsommar (2019) – Review

I saw Ari Aster’s 2018 horror film/family drama Hereditary about a year after it was in theaters, and found a much different film from what I was expecting. It was marketed as this generation’s The Exorcist, which I found troublesome given that The Conjuring in 2013 pretty much hit all the same beats as that film and the horror genre is so oversaturated with demon-possession films that I couldn’t imagine this one being anything special. But Hereditary and Midsommar, and hopefully all of Ari Aster’s movies going forward, have been produced by the young upstart studio known as A24, one that I’ve grown to love over the recent years of consistently excellent indie films. Filmmakers such as Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade) and Ari Aster have earned their stripes telling small, personal stories with deeper meanings and allegories and achieving knockout performances from both rising and veteran stars. It may be a personal preference that I enjoy these types of films over cash-grab sequels, remakes, and reboots and annoying kids movies, but to anyone out there wondering why there aren’t any great movies being made anymore, well, you’re wrong. They are being made; sometimes they’re quiet indie movies like these, other times a popular, established filmmaker or studio surprises us (as in Toy Story 4, Avengers: Endgame, Blade Runner 2049, Dunkirk, They Shall Not Grow Old, and so on); you just gotta know where to look. 
Midsommar is written and directed by Ari Aster, and stars Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, and Vilhelm Blomgren. It tells the story of Dani Ardor and her relationship with her long term boyfriend Christian, which is plagued by Christian’s waning interest in her and Dani’s personal familial problems. When one of these problems reaches a devastating new height, Dani is thrown into terrible grief, and Christian becomes her only comfort in this difficult time. Christian’s college friends then invite Dani along with them to Sweden for a midsummer folk celebration which is celebrated only once every 90 years, to help her through her depression. When they arrive, they are welcomed into the small community and learn more about the culture and traditions of the celebration, but begin to suspect some eerie and troubling ideas about the commune when strange things begin to happen. Before long, Christian, Dani, and the rest of the group become pulled apart from each other emotionally and physically, and what started as a welcome vacation turns into a desperate struggle for understanding and survival. 
First things first: Midsommar is marketed as a horror movie, but strictly speaking, it isn’t. It’s a study of mental illness, grief, and coping with loss, an examination of the way different cultures view death and the life cycle. Now, this isn’t to say that your eyes won’t be afflicted with graphic and disturbing imagery, because they most certainly will. But Ari Aster proved with Hereditary that he isn’t out to frighten audiences with jump scares, fake outs, and all your other typical horror movie cliches. This isn’t a movie where you’re yelling at the screen because the characters are idiots and make stupid decisions, and only the main heroine survives because she’s young and innocent. Midsommar gets under your skin with a dissonant score, trippy sequences, and a few sequences of brutally realistic gore, and unsettling notion that the main characters are in a place where they have no control and are surrounded by smiling, friendly faces that seem more and more like a cult as the film goes on. Like Hereditary, the characters’ relationships with each other are crucial to the development of the plot; the less they communicate with each other, the more estranged they become, and the more they put themselves in danger. Thanks to the incredibly talented cast, especially lead actress Florence Pugh, the audience truly feels the emotional weight behind the film’s more intense moments, and its moments of silence and subtext, where body language becomes important to watch. I would like to think, given the Academy’s blunder at snubbing Toni Collette last year for best actress, that Pugh will be nominated to make up for that mess, but I have noticed that A24 as a whole has gotten largely ignored at Oscar season, perhaps due to the fact a lot of their films are released earlier in the year, so we’ll just have to wait and see. 
There were at least a few moments when I was watching Midsommar a few weeks ago that I was astonished I was watching a movie as artsy as this in a movie theater. There are sequences of prolonged nudity and edits where gore is thrown right in your face, and I could sense the discomfort in the theater as it was happening. If I haven’t made it clear already, this is most definitely not a movie for everyone. It wasn’t made to make money, in fact most A24 movies don’t attach more than one or two big name stars to them to attract ticket sales. You have to be willing to absorb what Aster is trying to communicate; I recently watched an interview of his where he explained that he had written the movie just after breaking up with a long-term girlfriend, and he was trying to convey in the movie the pain of going through that situation from the inside, rather than watching from the outside. Knowing that, I can understand Dani’s arc better than I initially did, but I also think Midsommar is the kind of movie where you can take away a lot of different meanings, and to me that’s the mark of a special kind of movie. When the story and plot driving a movie isn’t the only thing you need to be paying attention to, when the director throws in little details along the way to make you question ideas and themes in your head, and come to a conclusion in the end that’s not necessarily the same as the story’s conclusion, or even the theme that the director was directly trying to communicate, then you know you’re watching someone who really cares about the art, and not the marketability of their work. That’s why I thought Hereditary was a great horror film, and it’s follow-up, Midsommar, promises that writer/director Ari Aster has a bright future ahead of him, which I’ll be watching intently.

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