Hello, and welcome! I’ve had a good week. I did do some reading- but no reviews, alas, the books I finished were for extramural pieces I will share when they come out. I am also working on a book! It is a history of/lessons learned from Boston antifascism during the Trump years. I anticipate finishing some time before the end of the year. Research and writing has been a blast. Maybe I’ll find a way to share bits of it with the MAR audience (or MAR Citizens… consider becoming a Citizen!). What I’ve got for you is a link to what I think is my best video yet, a Discography entry on one of the more musically ambitious bands out there today, and of course, a nice Mithra pic. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Video Content-
The Culture of Super Smash Brothers: Melee
Discographies-
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard!
Lagniappe-
Mithra Pic: The Supervisor
VIDEO CONTENT
This was a really fun one. I said I’d bring on guests, and I have! My friends Matt and Tosh had been talking about the video game Super Smash Brothers: Melee in a group chat we’re in and I was intrigued by the social scene and cultural dynamics they described. I don’t know from video games but I do know from interesting cultural phenomena. Matt and Tosh suggested I hit up Philip (who I also knew from weirdo school) and Jared, who had been on the competitive scene. So we all got together on Zoom and they learned me a bunch on Melee and the peculiar push-and-pull between Nintendo, the “Disney” of the video game world -- omnipresent, compulsively “family-friendly,” and highly image-conscious -- and the Melee scene that developed in the online fora and basements of obsessive nerds who knew they had found a good thing and were determined to make it their own. The video is ninety minutes and has a technical glitch about a third of the way through but people report enjoying it. The thumbnail makes it look like I’m really “feeling it” while doing a karaoke rendition of “When A Man Loves A Woman.” Give it a watch!
DISCOGRAPHIES
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard! I first heard of this Australian rock band when I was playing a tabletop role-playing game a few years back. It was a fantasy setting and I made a dude who was a lizardman and a wizard, and a friend said “is his name King Gizzard?” I didn’t jump to listen to them right away. One day, their song “Float Along, Fill Your Lungs” came on one of my Pandora stations. I liked it a lot, in spite of its transparently nostalgic quality, the way it LARPs as genuine sixties psychedelia. It’s a nice tune. Once I got Spotify premium, with its ability to play whole albums unshuffled and uninterrupted, I thought I’d tackle their discography. They’re a fecund bunch, producing no fewer than seventeen albums since 2012. That’s impressive in and of itself!
KGLW both shows a number of different faces across those seventeen albums and maintain a number of themes. Their first album is basically surf rock, decent but not that memorable. Was there a surf rock revival in the tens? The same friend who tipped me off about this band complained once that all his friends from work were annoyingly obsessed with surf rock. Then they did a concept album that was basically a spaghetti westerns soundtrack, complete with voiceovers describing a bloody vengeful Western movie. That was pretty cool. I’m not going to go through all seventeen albums this way! They also did some jazzy numbers, soft folk-jams, psychedelia ala “Float Along, Fill Your Lungs,” and what could only be called metal. Apparently they did whole albums using “microtones,” which is some fancy music thing I don’t understand, and couldn’t tell the difference between it and the others. There’s a lot of the same lyrical themes -- twinned ecological disaster and personal emotional/mental catastrophe with an underlying sense that maybe it’s all worth it after all? -- and I feel like they do use the same tune or melody a lot. I could hum it for you but it wouldn’t transcribe. All in all, I feel like I probably “missed” a lot that was going on, musically, but I enjoyed it reasonably well much of the time. KGLW don’t seem like the kind of guys who’d get at me for not getting their music-nerd doings so long as I was having fun, which I mostly did.
Best and worst albums? Hard to say (I know I say that a lot). I wouldn’t call “Quarters!” or “Sketches of Brunswick East,” their jazziest albums, bad, but it’s not really my cup of tea. And they were still finding their feet in their debut, “12 Bar Bruise,” and the name kind of implies a blues album which it was not. Their more psychedelic stuff is in the middle for me, with some good tunes like “Float Along, Fill Your Lungs” and some maintaining the psychedelic devotion to tedium. In terms of favorite, their second, “Eyes Like the Sky,” the spaghetti western concept album, was cool. I enjoyed their metal albums, especially “Infest the Rat’s Nest.” I kind of don’t like it when non-metal bands do metal albums because it seems like they are doing a bit, just fooling around with a declasse genre. But I think KGLW’s genuine ecological concerns do a lot to provide the anger metal needs, and “Infest the Rat’s Nest” rocked pretty hard and had a cool back story, being about Earth’s destruction and efforts to colonize other planets. My favorite, if I had to pick one, is “Fishing for Fishies.” No surprise, I go for the blues-iest one. I find when these very ~musical~ bands -- the kind that care about stuff like “microtones” -- stick to a purpose, like being groovy, as they do in “Fishing for Fishies,” it often produces better results for a philistine like me than when they’re being artsy and experimental… even if sticking to genre goods is an experiment for them.
Next Discography: A Post-Punk Family Tree!
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra likes to watch me while I’m at work, sometimes.