So while I'm working on my long review of the Front Line Assembly album I figured I should post a quick review of the Foetus album "Love".
"Love" was released in 2005 by the band Foetus which features ex-PIG member J.G. Thirlwell. The album art/insert is really interesting and features vibrant art that is very simplistic. Now let's move on to the music because this is what I want to talk most about. The instrumentals are FUCKING incredible! The percussion is a little sub-par and garage, but everything else masks that. The instrumentals are incredibly symphonic and you can hear that J.G. Thirlwell used to be in PIG. Lots of horns and harpsicord. Whenever guitar shows up it's very electric and distorted, and I like that. There are occasionally a few synth loops, but not very often. The instrumentals sometimes sound like they came out of a horror soundtrack. The vocals... I'm not too fond of. They are very... whiny. It's like a punk vocalist who was inspired by main stream male vocalists. Though I'm not fond of them now, I'm sure I may become so in the future. One thing I've noticed with the music is that towards the end of songs the intensity tends to kick up and make you go, "Aw, hell yeah!" then the song ends and you feel a little down. Not to fear, the intensity does get stretched out later in the album. Overall, this album kicks so much ass! I'm very glad that I decided to get it! I recommend this album to anyone who likes early PIG works, classical music, and rock music then you should most definitely pick up "Love" by Foetus. It's a must have!
So I've gotten almost all of my stuff, I'm just waiting on the "Naive" (original pressing) cassette. I just got my new shoes today, as well as my KMFDM Russia Tour T-shirt, and yesterday my Kraftwerk sweatshirt came so I've got my new style for now. Got "Epitaph" yesterday and "Love" today. Reviews will take awhile to type up because I am reviewing EVERY song and EVERY little detail about the album so... yeah. Right now I'm half way through the "Epitaph" review.
I have about three $50 amazon gift cards left so with that I'm using them up to bring you guys reviews of stuff. I recently ordered: -Kraftwerk Sweatshirt -KMFDM Russian Tour T-Shirt -"Love" by Foetus -"Naive" by KMFDM (Original Pressing/Cassette) -"Epitaph" by Front Line Assembly -"Covergirl" by Jared Louche I will not be reviewing the clothing of course as they are merely clothes and there's nothing to say about clothes... in my opinion. I will do seperate reviews this time of all the music I get and I'll try to do it more in depth by reviewing the liner notes and individual tracks. My next order I may use up two cards leaving one left (if you know your arithmatic) by buying the KMFDM "In Your Face" tour VHS that is EXTREMELY rare.
1) Guten Tag! 2) Daft Individuals [Album Version] 3) Domination Creation Station Nation 4) Jesus Kicks the Nuclear $h!t Out of the Nazis 5) The One They Call Evil 6) Insane 7) Flip The Switch 8) Horse Goggles 9) PC L04D L3TT3R 10) Search 11) The Phinale Phoenix
So, I justed watched "Sessler's Soapbox" and Adam Sessler was talking about how Resident Evil 5 wasn't that good and it didn't live up to the hype or create the amount of tension that the old games created. While waiting for the video to load I scrolled down and gazed at the comments a little bit and saw a comment that said that Resident Evil 5 was extremely racist and that it was demonizing black people. Actually I've heard many arguments like this and if you've been closely paying attention to Resident Evil 5 stuff you'll find that a lot of people say this. What I find so weird about these arguments is that in Resident Evil 4 a white guy was killing a bunch of spanish people (that are zombies mind you) and somehow that didn't attract any attention, but now that a white guy is killing black people (that are still zombies mind you) people start to freak out. It's not racist really because in the end you are just killing zombies and afterall the game was made by the Japanese who are a race different from both blacks and whites. I'm very perplexed by this all. I think our society is just too sensitive these days.
Okay, so I have to put out an apology. I said I was going to post a video blog this weekend, but I can't. my camera and dazzle are being stupid right now and therefore I'm in too much of a pissy mood to try and upload it again. So with that said I'll just quickly post what I said on that.
In addition to my music that I got I bought an electric drum kit and a mic stand. Both are equally awesome and the employee that helped me out at Sam Ash was very cool. The electric drum kit I got is very low end, but I don't care. I got it because doing percussion on a synth sucks. So onto music. First up is "Poke in the Eye... with a Sharp Stick" by PIG... the cassette. Every track on this album rocks! They're all different in their own way, one is slow jazz while another is latin followed by a rock song, I love it. The sound quality is outstanding! It's like the band is in my room playing right next to me. This cassette has inspired me to buy more cassettes, which I will! Overall, it kicks ass and I recommend it to ANYONE so long as you can find it (either LP, CD, or Cassette). Next up we have "Prime Evil" another PIG album, this time a CD. This album is rumored to be one of PIG's worst albums, though when listening to it you have to bare in mind that the tracks were only half done when the album was published. The reason I had gotten this was because I am collecting the PIG discography. On this album we have a cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" which is pretty good. There's too much tech for a Black Sabbath cover, but where it fails it makes up for with the chorus. I'm not a big Black Sabbath fan, but when I heard the chorus I started chanting it in my head. In addition to this there's the track "Prime Evil" and "Keeper of the Margarita". Both are pretty good, but "Keeper of the Margarita" is probably the best track on this album. It has a main synth line with some classical chorus vocals and very garage percussion, which may sound bad together, but it's actually really satisfying. The rest of the tracks are remixes and.... well... they're not that good. Enough said. I'd recommend this album to strict PIG fans. Finally (I just got Caustic Grip so I've had no time to listen to it) we have "Provision" which is a single by Front Line Assembly, so this one will be quick. It's classic Front Line Assembly, which is good, you got nice synth lines partnered with Bill Leeb's distorted voice and the percussion. It's calm industrial with this suttle intensity. The first track "Provision" reminds me a lot of old Command & Conquer music and how it's got this heavy rhythmic percussion and prominant synth lines that spew emotion. That is why I love this track, it's like a Command & Conquer song.... but with vocals. The last track on the single (told you it would be quick) is "Overkill (Surge Mix)" and it's got this very rapid punk percussion, which I'm not a big fan of. The synth lines in the background were essentially trying to keep up with the percussion, while the vocals were not that good. With that said, "Overkill (Surge Mix)" is the worst of Front Line Assembly tracks that I've heard. Overall... well... half was awesome and half was bad, I don't know what that averages out to I suck at math.
Well i ordered ore music: -Poke in the Eye... with a Sharp Stick - PIG (cassette) -Caustic Grip - Front Line Assembly -Provision - Front Line Assembly -Prime Evil - PIG You are probably wondering why the heck I ordered the cassette version of an album. Well I don't own a record player so I can't buy the LP (priced at $20) and the CD was too expensive when it was on Amazon, but it isn't anymore so I purchased the cassette version. I might purchase more cassettes anyway to get more use out of the clock radio I have from the 80s. So I'll tell you guys all about those when I get them. I'm also thinking about doing a video blog just to see what it's like. I'll need to think about what to video blog about though.
So I became so immersed in ZPC that I was checking my living room for enemies the other night, so I figured I should take a break from it and play another game. Since I was almost done with it I decided to play Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. This game is definitely a classic and has an intense story that is so possible it's almost frightening. The story is that an environmental-terrorist group is planning to unleash a deadly virus (I won't tell you which one because it'll spoil everything) upon the world and it's up to you to stop them. There are many plot twists to keep you going and the ending is not necessarily a reward. The ending isn't bad, it's good, but what the villain says in the end makes me very uneasy. Anyways, the gameplay.... you go through every aspect of preparing for a mission: yoou select your team, select their gear, put them in teams, devise a plan, and then select which team you want to play as. You aren't left to just this team though, you can switch between teams constantly throughout the mission and if your team dies you are sent into another team. Every mission begins with a dossier read to you by your leader John Clarke who judging by the voice acting belongs there. The action is quick and intense. Every gun battle lasts about a second or two depending on whether one has cover or not. AI is also very sharp in this game. My allies tend to react quicker to an enemy walking through a door than I did, wow. The missions aren't all run and gun either. Some missions are stealth, which forbid you from killing anyone or being spotted, if you do it's game over. The soundtrack also sets a creepy pants wetting tone and whenever I got shot with this music going on in the background I jumped. There is multiplayer support, though at this day in age I'd be surprised if anyone was playing this online right now. Overall, I HIGHLY recommend this game to ANYONE unless you want to be all run and gun and regenerating health.
Since Iron Storm was a "first impression" I figure I should repay you with a FULL review. So in my big order I had to get some music because being a musician I have to have my boat load of music to keep me company. So I had to order The Swining/Red Raw & Sore because it's classic PIG music and I love PIG. If you are unfamiliar with PIG I don't know what I could suggest you to listen to to help you get some ground on what to expect in this CD. I guess I should tell you that PIG's music tends to be on the disturbing side of things. Anyways the CD is a compilation of the albums The Swining and Red Raw & Sore. This compilation is phenominal! Every track is different. Some of it is metal, some is jazz, some is salsa (yes you heard me right, salsa), one track is spoken word. The best track on the album is Seven Veils. It opens with this very suttle symphonic fluttery thing and then kicks into kind of suspense music followed by rock. I can't really describe it, it's pretty awesome. Another track entitled Ojo por Ojo (Eye for Eye) is an incredibly creepy spoken word track. This song seems like something you'd hear deep within the bowels of hell. If there's one thing I don't like on the CD it's the song Rope. Every version contains this girl panting and moaning and I hate when that is in music, it bugs me. Aside from Rope I love this CD to death! I highly recommend it to anyone in the industrial or rock scene. I give The Swining/Red Raw & Sore by PIG a 9 out of 10.
So in addition to ZPC I got Iron Storm so I could have some more games to play. Iron Storm takes place in an alternate universe of the 60s where World War I never ended. The story was the selling point for me and seeing screenshots of running around in trenches seemed pretty cool to me because I've always looked for a World War I game to play. I also felt that I'd enjoy this because IGN gave it an 8 out of 10. Now when I got the game it came with a bunch of advertisements (of for Painkiller which I found really odd) and a fake newspaper from the era of the game, which is pretty cool. It seems almost like this newspaper could exist, it gives sports news of the era and all that stuff. So I eagerly installed the game and forced myself away from ZPC to play it. The opening cinematic has bad voice acting. I heard it and thought someone was playing line through Microsoft Sam, I let it fly though. So it has bad voice acting, I thought, I can manage! The menu sound FX are so annoying and repetitive. The programmers apparently get a stiffy to the sound of a silenced pistol shooting. Every time you move your cursor over a button you get a silenced pistol sound effect. Every time you click on a button you get an explosion. The first level you have to take out enemy snipers and then infiltrate enemy lines by getting into a church, it's very confusing. It seems like it's attempting to be Medal of Honor or something. The enemies' guns have magic power that does more damage to you than your guns do to them. While staying on the topic of enemies and guns, whenever you are shot you move back. So when two enemy soldiers are unloading on you you are being forced back six feet every two seconds, it's so annoying. Anyways, the reason I call this a "First Impression" is because I couldn't finish the first level to save my life, this game sucks something feirce. I wish I had bought Deus Ex or something I know I would've liked. What are the positives of this game? Well... it's a game... you can play it.
Score: sucks something fierce out of 10.
"Take out those snipers with your rifle!" (REALLY!?!?!? WITH MY RIFLE!?!?!?!? I was gonna use a rock, but that works!)
