EP Elaboration: After the War

Right, I should really try and finish this series of blog posts. Today: After the War.

England, Shaking

I’m really loving Let England Shake right now, so; some thoughts.

Despite the way it seems to have been characterised, it’s not really a protest album, is it? Lyrically, she seems to be largely concerned with First World War-era futility and the decline of the British Empire. Which – despite our apparent insistence on continued interference with other countries’ affairs – has really already happened. These days there is no British Empire, just a small island with rather more influence, globally, than it deserves. It seems to me that any attempt to deal with England as it exists today would have to focus on its disproportionate financial sector (employing 25% of the population, IIRC), and the impact of the neoliberal regime instigated by Thatcher and maintained by every government since.

Her focus on soldiers too, feels slightly anachronistic. These days there are surely very few (if any) conflicts which follow that ww1 course of a huge number of soldiers fighting a huge number of similiarly-equipped soldiers. With the – horrific – technology we’ve developed over the last century, it seems we have far fewer soldiers involved in war, doing far more damage. And generally fighting forces who may as well be using sticks and stones, considering the vast technological superiority of their foes. Surely if you’re going to talk about the casualties of war these days, you’d have to focus on the civilians who are increasingly treated as collateral damage. I think A Silver Mt. Zion’s Ring Them Bells is a far more current look at war than anything on Let England Shake:

ring them bells
now freedom has come and gone
we’ve been waiting so long
never ever so long
now freedom has come and gone

…

imagine the view
from a helicopter gunship
a man comes into view
and you hit a switch
and you cut that man in two

There’s also an odd disconnect between the sound of the album and its lyrical content. Sonically, the album is lush and polished – it’s a gorgeous, gorgeous thing. Yet her lyrics are almost solely concerned with death and decay:

and what is the glorious fruit of our land?
its fruit is deformed children

And the first part of All and Everyone is fantastic…

death was everywhere,
in the air
and in the sounds
coming off the mounds
of bolton’s ridge.
death’s anchorage.
when you rolled a smoke
or told a joke,
it was in the laughter
and drinking water,
it approached the beach
as strings of cutters
dropped into the sea and lay around us.

…but it doesn’t really match the rather pretty arrangement behind it. It’s maybe similar to the ‘no art after the holocaust’ position – how could you create something which could encompas even a fraction of the horror involved – but I still feel these lyrics are crying out for a far harsher, far more uncompromising sonic backdrop.

That said, it’s an album that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for the past few weeks, and I suspect it’ll be on my stereo for a while yet.

EP Elaboration: RGB

And now some words about RGB. This post may be a bit shorter than the others since I didn’t have any hand in the words barring the end bit.

EP Elaboration: The Accident

Continuing my elaboration of the ideas behind the songs on our EP, here’s The Accident, which is hopefully as emo a song as we’ll ever write.

Canal Photos

EP Elaboration: Swings

Now that the intial stuff about the format of the EP’s out of the way, we can get onto the songs. Part of the reason that Swings is the first song on the EP is that – lyrically at least – it’s the song that comes closest to what I imagined the band to be when I first suggested it to Craig.

EP Elaboration: Packaging etc.

So I thought it would be a nice idea to elaborate a bit on the various ideas behind the EP, since I think they’re kind of interesting. And besides, the whole point of having a band blog is to talk about this stuff. With most bands you have to rely on interviews to hear all the interesting background, and then you have to rely on the interviewer asking the right questions, and the band being able to answer the right questions on the spot, without falling back to prepared responses. Lonesome Monsters are different.

Driving in a straight line forever

I love racing games. I love games with a real sense of speed, the feeling of rubber forced down onto tarmac, the knowledge that the slightest twitch or lapse in concentration could send you spinning off the road in a second. But my love seems to be a bit different to other people’s because the thing is, more than anything, I love driving in a straight line.

This can probably be traced back to the first racing game I remember ever playing: Vrooooooommmmm! (I swear, this is the name I knew it by – it seems the reality is altogether more prosaic).

(image via Lemon Amiga)

Like pretty much all my games back then, my copy of Vrooooooommmmm! came via my friend Graeme, whose brother had copied it from one of his friends, who had copied it from someone else etc. etc. (because back then we were all dirty thieving bastards). And like so many of our games, Vrooooooommmmm! came with a trainer, letting you toggle all sorts of options to make the game easier. Of those options, there was only ever one I cared about – the option that removed all the corners from the circuits, turning them into bizarre Möbius strips where you repeatedly passed the start line without ever changing direction. I spent hours on those corner-less roads, fire button held down, making only the slightest of adjustments to avoid the painfully slow computer cars. Neeowmmm! Neeowmmm! Neeowmmm! Fun times.

For obvious reasons I guess, I’ve never found another game that really let me indulge in my passion for corner-less racing games, but recently I have found something that comes close.

My car’s called ‘the flash’.

Fuel is, in so many ways, a flawed game. A vast (seriously, it’s enormous) open world which never lets you get out of your car and instead tries to force you to take part in tedious races full of obstacles, huge vertical drops should you make a mistake, and relentless, fiddly corners. But. That ‘open world’ bit’s the key. Because in Fuel’s world there are motorways. Motorways that go for miles without the slightest hint of a corner. And when they do finally, grudgingly concede that maybe it’s time to change direction, they do so in long, graceful curves that don’t require you to slow down in the slightest.

The stroke of genius to Fuel’s motorways is that every now and then the tarmac’s relentless forward march is broken up. Not with a clumsily placed broken down lorry, or an infuriating hair-pin bend, but with a ramp. A ramp that, thanks to the arrow-straight road and lack of obstacles, you get to take at full speed. Every time I hit one of these I revert to my 9-year old Amiga-playing self, uttering wheeeee! in a high-pitched voice.

wheeeeeeeee!

The one downside to Fuel’s endless straight roads is the game’s dogmatic dedication to (basically) realistic physics. It doesn’t take long to hit your car’s maximum speed on these roads, and driving at a constant speed just isn’t that exciting. If I ever make a driving game it will have no such restriction. No corners, no maximum speed. Just endless acceleration. And when you hit one of those ramps, at a high enough speed, your car will fly so high, it’ll go into orbit. That’s how you make a racing game. It’s not about cornering, or traction. It’s not about tramping round a circuit in a better time than the other drivers. It’s about going so fast the world turns into a blur and the slightest bump rockets you off into outer space.

Lonesome Monsters

This is the blog for the band Lonesome Monsters. We’ve just released a couple of linked EPs: You Have to Swing the Bat (a physical CD-R release):

…and Atomsk (a digital-only bandcamp release):

And if you’re interested, I’ve elaborated on the ideas behind the EP in a short series of posts:

Packaging etc.

Swings

The Accident

RGB

After the War

Suzumiya

If you’d like to hear more, see this post for some wip versions of the EP tracks and some other bits and pieces.

to the burning pool

It’s here!