It is important to point out the layout of the album. Several of the beginning tracks offer pinched personal confessions and realizations by the lead singer, Kevin Barnes. On “Spiteful Intervention”, for example, Barnes loudly screeches and yelps “I spend my waking hours/ haunting my own life/ I made the one I love start crying tonight/ and it felt good!” Other catchier beginning songs, like “Dour Percentage”, wrap themselves up in the legacy left by Bowie. Whistles scream, base strings are plucked, and drums crash through most songs, making the tunes constantly fluctuate. On “Ye, Renew the Plaintive”, Barnes talks to his wife Nina: ”Oh Nina/I have become so hateful/How am I ever going to survive this winter?” The arrangements are absolutely bipolar.

The later tracks, take on a more darker and sinister tone. Barnes seems to be having a apocalyptic and violent breakdown, summoning up themes of revenge, confusion, and self loathing. Some of it could actually make a good score for a movie concerning psychedelic film noir surrealism (listen to “Exorcism Breeding Knife”), if that is even a real genre. The late tracks drag and drag… and drag, possibly denoting a sense of alienation from Barnes. However, the album ends with an upbeat epic, where Barnes yells “I love how we’re learning from each other/ You are such a positive!” Other music sources have compared Paralytic Stalks to Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, which received an abundance of intense critical acclaim. Both albums are dark, personal, and unpredictable.

Props to Of Montreal for making this physiologically deranged album. It sure shook me up. The confessions, the violent outbursts, and the sincere questioning make Paralytic Stalks a wild expedition through the manic personal troubles of Kevin Barnes.

Album Rating- 8.5

 With the first of the two highly anticipated songs, “What The Water Gave Me”, Florence stayed true to her original sound, producing a light and airy song, perfect for the final days of summer. The cover shows Florence dressed in white cotton, hair blowing in the wind, with the background of clouds. There is a strong implication that the photo was taken at the beach. The song is a perfect way to transition into autumn. While her voice is light and airy, it is slow, and sung like a dark lullaby. The track begins with “Time it took us, to where the water was/ That’s what the water gave me/ and time goes quicker between the two of us/ Oh, my love/ don’t forsake me/ take what the water gave me.” The song tells the story of a broken love, and the lyrics are rich with metaphors—this is a song that truly makes you think. Once again, she references mythical beasts and Victorian imagery that may take you back to another time and another place. Florence’s music, like a dream, portrays a twisted sense of reality that will have you listening again and again trying to figure out what she means.

 The second, “Shake It Out”, is no different. Florence’s voice is light as air, and hits each note perfectly. Her voice has a distinct quality that you would be hard pressed to find in the auto-tuned songs on the radio. You could tell that each note she hits is pure talent, not enhanced with synthesizers or auto-tune. This cover portrays Florence lying on a bed of silk: a much darker, richer image, which feels more geared towards the end of fall and the beginning of winter. “Shake It Out” is faster, with a more upbeat feel and medieval accents infused throughout the song.  Remnants of her first album come through, with talk of demons and ghouls haunting the song, and friendship, love and regrets serving as common themes. While this song is faster, it is darker than “Water”, both in tone and lyrics. The song is richer, more like silk and velour than air. All in all, the song is great and leaves you wanting more, waiting for the sophomore album to drop. Florence Welch says “I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe, it’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear.” That is the only way to describe her sound—in a word: magical.

Critics and fans agree that the album is worth waiting for. Florence has been perfecting this album for over two years, and if these two songs are any indication of how the album is going to sound, it shall be a magical portal that will transport you to another time and place. Filled with enchanting lyrics and sound, the album will surely be amazing. It will defiantly be an album to watch, an album that is going to revolutionize the music industry again. But whether or not it sets demons free, or stirs revolutions within us, it is sure to please fans. It will be the album that simply cannot be done justice to, the album you’ll need to play on repeat over and over again, the album you’ll want to imprint into your brain.

Although WB140J has certainly been around for a while, he has recently started smooth himself around the edges, as he becomes the leader of the chair genre.  The beginning of these changes was WB140J’s decision to terminate his contract with WALMART and sign with W.B.MASON.  While he gained praise for his stripped-down simplistic style on his first work Stool, it’s clear that a round platform is no longer enough for WB480J.   However, don’t let this chair’s smooth exterior fool you.  WB480J is still as much a part of indie office collective WALMART as he used to be: under that smooth façade WB480J is still as gritty as anything else that you would expect WALMART to produce. Some WB480J fans may be upset by the chairs choice to become a little classier.  However, these changes are nice: where WB480J once smelled kind of funky on Beanbag, WB480J now smells like new pleather, perhaps making himself more accessible to the masses.  All in all, Armchair feels like watching a sunrise from a dilapidated but not shut down factory in downtown Detroit.

How, may you ask, is WB480J catering to his WALMART past, even though now he’s signed with W.B.MASON?  He makes it clear that he recognizes his past by having a series of guest appearances on Armchair  by his old WALMART friends, namely ThrowPillow  and Febreze.  These guest appearances give some of WB480J’s tracks some of that good old “much cheaper than it looks” feel that it was so acclaimed for back in Stool days.  However, these guest appearances seem somewhat forced, as ThrowPillow’s post-leather Stool –style delivery seems out of placed on Armchair’s smooth interior: its like a time machine back to Beanbag’s over psychadelicized themes.

Armchair is not all smooth surfaces and adjustable seat heights.  Under the smooth leather lie some serious mechanical and conceptual errors. WB480J tries to recreate the ample lumbar support of chair gods like Staples and OfficeMax, it’s clear these grandiose features are still forced for WB140J: he acts like Armchair  needs to be his opus, when in reality WB140J still has plenty of time to make his mark on the industry.  Also, the chairs new style of ringing post-transient impressionist lyricism seem to be somewhat derivative of those of The Stroke’s Is this It. Lastly, the chair’s ephemeral Steve Buscemi-esque Native American-style shine is highly derivative of similar overtones produced by Animal Collective.

All in all, Armchair  is WB140J’s way of saying “I’m here to stay”.  WB140J is a serial number that the industry is never going to forget, even if Armchair isn’t a Chair-y winner.  WB140J has great work to do for W.B.MASON, which this reviewer wholeheartedly looks forward to.  In Armchair, I hear the ghosts of classic chairs of the 90’s, like Elementary-School-Chair-That-Had-A-Compartment-For-Your-Books-Under-The-Desk, and Cafeteria Bench.  Where Armchair is an old jalopy pulling into a posh villa in Madison, Wisconsin, the next step for WB140J is clear: a bright moonlit picnic on the Seine.

On their new album, The Whole Love, Wilco brings back some of their old charm in the song “I Might,” adding in new layers of electronics to their old folkie instrumentals. The album iincludes “Art of Almost”, which is approximately seven minutes long. The song uses a type of instrumental that the band has not encountered before, presenting a new genre to their album by this song’s fast-paced, jerky polyrhythms. That song is not even longest one on the record though, as “One Sunday Morning” clocks in at about twelve minutes long. Unlike “Art of Almost,” it consists of calm instrumentals and repetitious beats.

Without giving up their identity, Wilco has managed to use the new production to their advantage, maintaining the soul of their past work. The combination of music and lyrics here is stronger than it has ever been. The group has had its fluctuating members and pitfalls—this album definitely holds some memories or Wilco’s past: you can easily hear the pain  and stress of the bands history in many of the songs on The Whole Love. Although it has some similarities to Wilco (The Album), The Whole Love takes Wilco’s talent to a level we had not seen before from them. Their song “Dawned on Me” is almost a conventional pop song, and shows that they are going outside of their comfort zone. “Sunloathe” has a late 70’s psychedelic feel in both its lyrics and the accompaniment. Meanwhile, “Capitol City” feels like a different genre altogether, with more folk than ever. Even though each song on the album is unique, the harmony between the songs is evident, and together they make a very meaningful album. Wilco is known for wonderful chemistry in live performances; so what is so refreshing about the new album is their blend of electronics, precision and, of course, that live Wilco touch.

It is apparent that Das Racist has become, to some extent, more noticeably socially conscious; comparing their ironic Soulja Boy-esque song that earned them internet fame –“Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” (a ‘joke’ rap song about… you guessed it, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell)—with ‘Relax’, the first song off of their new album: ‘Relax’ deals with a few touchy subjects, with Heems briefly discussing the conflict and suffering in Kashmir. “What good is this Cashmere/If they’re still dying in Kashmir/there was just homes/now there’s just dust there/a rough year/stay in after dusk here” raps Himanshu.  As the song starts to come to an end, Heems wraps it up with bars reminiscing of his teenage years continuing onto the present. “These days, I’m mostly focused on my bank account/I ain’t backin’ out until I own a bank to brag about”. When the song finally comes to a close, we are left with meaningless robotic laughter that fills up the remainder of the song’s duration.

Don’t expect Relax to be a full-time serious or melancholy album. You might even be let down if you’re expecting hard-core, serious rap. “Michael Jackson”- released as a single, is a good example of Das Racist’s more playful and less serious tracks, complete with what appears to be influence by renowned internet goofball, Lil B (“the Based God”). Also, despite the misleading title, this song is in no way a dedication or homage to the late King of Pop but does contain a couple of Jackson references. The hook is an element of the song that’s impossible to ignore—“Michael Jackson/one million dollars/you feel me? / Holler!” is repeated ad nauseam. Not in an obnoxious manner, but enough to make you forget about the rest of the song’s lyrics.

Das Racist channels their inner Kanye in “Power” (ft. Danny Brown and Despot), with a synth-y beat similar to the Kanye West song of the same name. Detroit shock rap artist, Danny Brown, makes a guest appearance and plugs in eleven bars full of puns and clever wordplay. “Another episode/you still writing pilots/I’m the big dog/yousa fire hydrant,” boasts Brown. Of course, there are many other great lines by the Despot and Danny Brown; but the lyrics are too explicit to make note of here!

My personal favorite track off the album, titled “Rainbow in the Dark,” epitomizes Das Racist’s trademark style—comical and ironic yet still holding some truth. Some memorable lines include references to a “rap bridge on a duet with T-Pain and Stephen Hawking”, poking fun at T-Pain’s infamous auto-tune rap style, comparing it to Stephen Hawking’s voice-box.  Das Racist is a big fan of food, so it may not be surprising that they not only start with a White Castle reference, but they also shout out pizza, cave-aged gruyere and Big Macs. Kool A.D. raps: “I’m at the White Castle (I don’t see you here, dog!)/tiny hamburgers/tiny cheeseburgers/tiny chicken sandwiches/It’s outlandish, kid.” There’s probably no significance to this verse, and if there is… it sure is obscure.

Das Racist isn’t trying too hard to be the best of the best in the rap game. They don’t want to be taken seriously, a point they’ve been trying to emphasize since ‘hahahaha jk?’… “we’re not joking/just joking/we are joking/just joking/we’re not joking” . Das Racist wants everyone to do what the album title says- Relax.

Album Rating: 7.5/10

Just like Clark’s puzzling public image, Strange Mercy is an album of dualities. Delicate string arrangements and lush synths bump up against gory guitar noise. Breathy laments about modeling days and lullabyes melt into references to horsehair whips and “sharks swimming in the red.” Like some sort of deranged Disney princess, Clark paints Strange Mercy like an ever-shifting balance between the beautiful and the vile. It’s exciting!

The album’s first single “Surgeon” begins in a breeze of very pretty synthesizers as Clark gently recalls “I spent the summer on my back.” On the chorus, a woozy, almost nauseas guitar loop replaces the cooing first verse while the song takes a murkier turn: “best find a surgeon/ come cut me open,” Clark begs. The song continues, and the tension builds. The beat pulses and a blossoming horn and string interlude slides it’s way into the movement. Clark repeats the chorus with increasing intensity, until she jumps an octave into a even more frantic plea. After the final, most tense chorus, the song eschews any sort of denouement for a contorted-funk-keyboard solo on a mini-Moog by renowned gospel ivory tickler Bobby Sparks. “Surgeon” finally twist up into its queasiest climax in the final, squealing notes of Sparks’ solo.

St. Vincent throws a very similar left-hook on one of the albums many peaks, “Northern Lights.” Not only does the fuzzy track’s tension explode into an Ira Kaplan style skronky guitar solo, but pinnacles again in a strange, spastic electronic freak-out. “It’s a champagne year/ full of sober months,” carols Clark on the song. Both the two aforementioned songs are part of the albums relentless first half, the house for some of St. Vincent’s most furious tracks to date. Side A is like a six song investigation of the demented groove of “Marrow,” the streets-ahead highlight from 2009’s Actor. Each song in this part of the record buries the most sinister lyrics under an oddly jarring combination of fluttering strings, new-wave-y synths and Clark notorious burly guitar tone. Clark, a master of these many-faced compositions, manages to make the snarling, basilisk-motorcycle-engine guitar solo that enters midway through “Cruel” flow so seamlessly with the easy-to-swallow art pop track that the song wouldn’t sound complete without it. Out of context, the string-scraping solo might sound like a page out of a Shellac leaflet, but with the help of master producer and past collaborator John Congleton, Clark makes it sound like a digestible piece of a dance-y, cerebral pop. That’s so cool!! So cool.

Strange Mercy’s second half comes off as a bit less immaculately structured than the first half, but still throws enough unexpected twists into the music to keep the album exciting. With it’s jagged, nearly Asiatic guitar lines and multilayered choral vocals, “Neutered Fruit” brings up memories of later Dirty Projectors material, but with a keyboard bass line way funkier than anything Dave Longstreth would go within a breadth of. Throughout the whole record, Clark’s vocals at their most frantic remind me of Longstreth’s pitch-jumping, syllable mangling pipes. Unfortunately, the backbeat of “Dilletante” stumbles along drunkenly, and “Champagne Year” drifts along without reaching any sort of substantial climax. But by the time the album rolls into its closer, “Year of Tiger,” the excitement returns in full. Clark sounds more seductive than ever on the verses: “When I was young/ coach called me the tiger/ I always had a knack [a breathless pause here] for the danger” she coos with an air of repressed malice. Clark’s pouted lips quickly curl up into  a snarl as she sings of “living in fear in the year of the tiger.” Well, if the visceral, confusing thrill of Strange Mercy holds up as well as St. Vincent’s mesmerizing live show, 2011 may very well end up in the claws of the jungle cat with the fiery Danelectro.

8/10

So, I had fun at the concert! The weather was ideal, a comfortable 78 degrees with enough breeze to keep sweat off the neck but enough sun to be thankful for the Manhattan skyline speeding up the sunset process, when Kurt Vile and the Violaters took the stage at the Williamsburg Waterfront at around 6:30. The crowd had yet to completely pack the lengthy stretch of concrete that made up the venue but those who came early enough to see the Philadelphia pedal-folk crooner were pleased enough with his breezy cuts from the wistful Smoke Ring for My Halo. The music was a nice soundtrack to the waning afternoon, but the visual spectacle left a lot to be desired. A kid’s keen observation that the drummer of the Violators looked a lot like the frontman quickly led to a brief party game among a group of concert goers, in which we tried to guess the names of Kurt Vile’s family band—Burt Vile and Kyle Vile were among my favorite hypotheses.

A few minutes after the Violators left the stage, the ladies of Wild Flag took their places in front of a much larger crowd. This Sleater-Kinney/ Helium super-group brought a excited performance that more than made up for Kurt’s lack of charisma. Former Sleater-Kinnist Carrie Brownstien broke out a catalogue of scissor kicks that surely haven’t flown as high since 2002, leaped on the drumkit and man-handled the microphone stand with a grin and a snarl. Since she and Mary Timony split frontwoman duty about 50/50, it was very difficult not to feel more attached to Brownstien’s vicious stage presence than to Timony’s jumpiness. The actual music was pretty good, nothing mind-blowing. But it’s certainly not hard to see why Kim Gordon later dedicated the classic

The opening band, Wild Flag, performs. courtesy of L magazine

“Flower” to this no-boys-no-bass four piece.

Since their canon of classic records is so extensive, the band has a pretty polarizing live set, some songs working half the crowd into an appreciative frenzy, others doing the same for a completely different group of fans. At the Waterfront on Saturday, there was the Goo and Dirty fans, the Sister and Daydream Nation fans, Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves fans and everyone in between. Every fan has his or her preference, even when it comes to band members. What dorky Sonic Youth fan-boy hasn’t spent hour contemplating whether Lee or Thurston is a more exciting frontman? What about whether Kim Gordon is more attractive as a grungy twenty something or a rock star cougar? Regardless, the packed crowd saw a setlist on Saturday filled with a surprising amount of material from the group’s early career—a healthy showing from the abrasive Confusion is Sex and the Kill Yr Idols EP, and from one of my personal favorite records, 1985’s Bad Moon Rising. Sonic Youth opened up their set with two songs from that album: “Brave Men Run” transitioned into a super tight rendition of “Death Valley ’69.”  Sure they’re on their way up the hill, but besides for a couple of crows’ feet and smile lines on the musicians’ face, age definitely is not slowing them down. Especially now with former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold in their live line-up, Sonic Youth is a hurricane on  stage.

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan

Highlights included classic album cuts like “Cotton Crown” and “Eric’s Trip,” the second of which included Thurston Moore going hog-wild on a four-stringed guitar with a drumstick as a slide, one of the many noise-making antics of the night. Later in the show, Moore took a Poland Springs Bottle and smashed it open onto the strings of his strangely tuned Fender Jazzmaster, sliding the crushed plastic up and down the fretboard, spurting water all over the stage. Lee Ranaldo, a fellow avante garde noise auter, was not to be out shown, accepting a ukulele from a duo of thrilled concertgoers dressed in polka-dotted Salsadance get-up and manically mutilating it with a screwdriver in the cacophonic intro to the rarely played “Inhuman.” (I saw the two Salsa women, [possibly hermanitas] trying to persuade a security guard to let them back stage after the show to receive their instrument. Best of luck to them!). The Ukulele assisted closer had to be one of the best songs of the show though, featuring a very extended coda with Thurston wrapping the microphone cable around his neck with tortured shouts of the title, Kim having a try at the indulgent feedback debauchery that the band is so infamous for and Lee comically swinging his guitars around by a drumstick wedged under the strings, one by one snapping all the strings off seven or eight guitars with a satisfying screech.

Up against a 10:30 curfew, the band ended its main set pretty quickly—the band lunched into a grossly sensual “Drunken Butterfly” after Thurston prophesized that a giant rattlesnake would poke its head over Manhattan and spray LSD over the crowd, turning all attendants into women, and talked about a local Connecticut motorcycle gang from the ‘70s called the Charter Oaks—but came on for three separate encores of deep cuts. These oldies were a rare treat, and it was very interesting to think about how this band is now twice as old as they were when they recorded their ’83 debut, but they still put on such a fiery live show of the same snotty, noisy masterpieces.

The venue allowed for a sublime view of the famous New York City sunset, but a glance over the shoulder to take it all in was pretty difficult considering the unruly royalty making a spectacle of the stage in front of us.

On New Brigade, Iceage wear their influences proudly on their collective sleeve, but since the group seems to take a little piece from every movement that has ever found a cool way of expressing anger or agony on the mean streets of New York City, that sleeve is more cluttered than those of only the most veteran cub scouts. Merit badges include: the jagged, muscular dissonance of DNA and the taut aggression of classic Wire, with flashes of the sheer technicality of a band like Darkthrone and the slack-jawed bleakness of Joy Division.

In an infamous scene in Quintin Tarantino’s 2009 WWII/ spaghetti western homage Inglourious Basterds, the audience (and the captured Nazi who soon meets a predictably gruesome fate) is introduced to “The Bear Jew,” who sadistically delivers the blunt force of martial justice-by literally beating fascist criminals to death with a baseball bat (yikes.) In this scene, the “Bear” ominously bangs his weapon of choice against the inside of the dark tunnel from which he appears with painfully slow strides before beginning to pummel the Nazi officer. New
Brigade’s intro consists of a skipping, reverb heavy tension-build, with which the album strides hungrily into its first track. If “Intro” is the foreboding echo of the bat hitting the tunnel walls, then “White Rune” is surely the actual assault. An early highlight of New Brigade, “White Rune” is clearly the product of a very well oiled unit: the strong-armed snare hits (in the record sleeve only credited to “Dan,”) robust bass tone and barked vocals all perfectly compliment each other in the mix.

“New Brigade” showcases Iceage at their most goth, but still stays coated in sweaty distortion. The song features one of the most straightforwardly punk choruses on the record and a guitar breakdown that, along with many other tracks on here, especially “Eyes,” brings back fond memories of Women’s Public Strain. Never static, the band follows the title track with “Remember,” which sort of sounds like the band pouring sand all over Titus Andronicus. The most immediately accessible track on New Brigade is “Broken Bone.” The song has the greatest pop sensibility on the album, but wears crunchy dissonance like a sweater. On another personal favorite of mine, Iceage cover their contemporaries, Sexdrome, putting some sugar on the originally very difficult to swallow “Count Me In.” From each restless count-in that drummer Dan starts up on this record comes a sweaty nugget of snarling punk goodness.

In no way do I think this album the game-changing masterpiece that seventy percent of the internet claims it is, but I sure had a great time getting into this record and expect very big things from these little Danes in the future.

This brings us to Battles. Their 2007 LP Mirrored, along with its preceding EPs, was a cyber-rock monster. The four piece made ferociously technical behemoths, the sheer complexity and force of which made the band sound like math-rock cyborgs. A mind-blowing album, Mirrored was a perfect fusion of four extremely skilled sound engineers: brutal drummer John Stanier, former Don Caballero player Ian Williams, guitarist Dave Konopka and wild-eyed experimental frontman Tyondai Braxton. Their performances were monstrous, the stage crowded with seemingly miles of twisted cables, towers of amplifiers, Stanier’s signature extra-high crash cymbals and various music engineering equipment.

Last year, the band announced that Braxton would be leaving the band to pursue his own experimental career, which I can only assume involves him sitting on a picnic blanket, mindlessly stomping on a jungle of absurd pedals and whining about how he’s just waaaay too deep for Battles. This came as bittersweet news to many fans. Personally, I thought that Braxton’s annoying pitched-up vocals hindered the band’s intensity, and was sort of looking forward to hearing more tracks like “SZ2”—sort of like I wasn’t dreading the absence of Michael Scott’s buffoonery.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Braxton did a lot more the band than input his robo-chipmunk snarling. Gloss Drop’s main flaw is in the structure. The complex shifts in dynamics that characterized masterpieces like “Atlas” or “Tonto” are really inhibited on the new album by a lack of players. Because Braxton’s many layers of guitar, keys and extra looping are gone, Konopka and Williams (especially the latter, who now spends stage time cramped between four different keyboards, loop pedals and a laptop) have to pick up the slack. Gloss Drop is too confined to the limitations of static loops, so the band has less room to roam. This makes songs like “Futura,” “Wall Street,” “Inchworm” and “Dominican Fade” all give off the same impression: an intriguing figure pops up in the beginning, slowly joined by other fascinating layers, but after two or three minutes, the song begins to meander and grow stale.

Although many of the tracks here falter in structure, the production overall is quite good. Gloss Drop has a much sunnier feel than its predecessor, abounding with sharp tropical keys that sound a quite a bit like a gleaming xylophone, (and also kind of like the Rugrats theme music.) The myriad of sonic layers fit together very well in the mix, not sounding cluttered or jumbled. The musicians still employ a lot of the mysterious noises that made Mirrored such a thrill, especially on the F*** Buttons-esque destroyer “Rolls Bayce.”

Excluding the repetitive lull in the middle of the album, Gloss Drop has some pretty great songs. As far as instrumentals go, opener “Africastle” is a hulking shape shifter with a few very surprising sonic twists and “White Electric” gets very intense after a little-too-long buildup. The band brings in a few surprising guests vocalists into the blend with generally positive results, much like how The Office experimented with Will Ferrell and Creed Batton: Matias Aguayo leads “Ice Cream,” which the most fun summer jam Battles will probably ever make, but Gary Newman gives a pretty underwhelming performance on the sweaty “My Machines.”

The best song on the album is the puzzling closer “Sundome.” Oddly enough, it begins with very foreboding guitar wails that sound like whales moaning, but eventually transforms into a sort of charismatic alien dancehall track, fused with sultry string and horn blasts. Japanese noise-rock crew Boredoms lends Battles their oddball singer Yamantaka Eye, who really catapults this track over the top. He sounds like a mix between the monsters in the live action Scooby Doo movie from 2002 and a reggae hype-man. But in a weirdly attractive way. I promise.

Gloss Drop although definitely flawed, deserves a listen or two this summer. If not for anything else, check it out to see just how great John Stanier is at playing drums. Seriously. The guy is a machine.

Album Rating: 6.5/10

Listen to “Africastle” right here.

What separates Underground from all the other games in the Tony Hawk series is the incredible storyline. In the four games that preceded Underground, there was a Career Mode, where players would complete missions on different levels, but with no real rhyme or reason. In Underground, gamers start by creating a character for Story Mode. The extensiveness of options for creation is amazing, especially for the game’s time, with a huge amount of customizable options and even a feature that let Playstation 2 owners upload a picture of their face onto a skater. Once the character is created, the game opens up in a fitting depiction of New Jersey, complete with slums and exposed sewer lines. The main goal is to get a train ticket to New York City, which is basically the goal of every New Jersey teenager. In New Jersey, the gamer is introduced to Eric Sparrow, perhaps the most annoying and hate-inspiring antagonist of any video game — ever.

Sparrow’s antics have the player running around to bail him out of trouble in many situations, from getting in trouble with the law in Tampa to sneaking out of Mosgow after Sparrow drunkenly steals a tank. As a “thank you,” Sparrow is the worst friend ever, stealing the credit for jumping over a helicopter in Hawaii (one of the climaxes of the game) and “forgetting” to sign the player up for multiple competitions. The most gratifying part of the game is when the player beats Eric one last time in New Jersey and gets to knock him out with a punch to the face.

The levels in Story Mode themselves are surprisingly expansive, with many fun things to do and varied challenges, as opposed to every goal being “collect S-K-A-T-E” or “score 1,000,000 points.” The storyline is often hilarious, but is real enough to keep the player interested in continuing. The setup of each level is different, with some levels like Manhattan being street-based with places to grind and stairs to jump, and levels like Slam City Jam, where the entire level is a vert-dominant skate park. Decisions like picking a shoe and board sponsor after a win keep the game fresh and exciting, with each sponsorship choice changing the storyline of the game.

Underground also introduces features that still remain in skating games today. Along with an expanded trick library, the main improvement is the ability for a skater to get off of the board. Walking around may seem like a small change, but it’s huge: imagine how unrealistic the game would be if you couldn’t walk around! An amusing but short-lived addition was the ability to drive certain vehicles in each level. Although this feature was clunky and was not included in any newer renditions of the game, there is something oddly gratifying about driving a pick-up truck in a half-pipe and crashing through glass in a leaf-blower.

Underground’s creation element was another feature that made it great. Setting the stage for every skate game after it, Underground made the create-a-skater applicable to the story mode, improved the create-a-park mode and introduced create-a-board and create-a-trick.

After playing most video games for a few hours, the soundtrack starts to irritate you with its shallow repetition, lack of variety or just general awfulness of the songs. Not so in Underground, though, as it flaunts one of the greatest soundtracks of any game. With over 75 different songs, categorized in “Rap/Hip-Hop”, “Punk” or “Rock/Other,” the mix of tracks almost never seems to get old. With the ability to turn off a full category of songs, players have the option to listen to whatever they want. As far as the quality of the songs, there are very few tracks that are completely unlistenable, while another skate game might have a 25-song soundtrack with only 15 songs that don’t make the listener go insane.

But despite so many great aspects, Underground goes relatively unnoticed.

In 2007, EA released “Skate,” a much more realistic game, in which the goal was not to get a million points by doing three back flips in a row, effectively changing the dynamic of skating games and ruining the reputation of Tony Hawk games. As this happened, more and more focus was put on the obviously superior Skate series at the expense of the respect for the history of skating games. While it may seem ridiculous now for a gamer to hop over a helicopter from the roof of a hotel in Hawaii or grind around in a circle for five minutes non-stop, Underground is still an enjoyable game that deserves to be hailed as one of the best of all time.