Content Farming

The title track opens with a spoken word section over droning instrumentals, a brave choice for your first EP. But then, Folly Group appear to be a brave band. Their music is filled with off-kilter grooves that are somehow tight as hell while sounding like they are about to fall apart. "Butt No Rifle" is a standout track that perfectly encapsulates this aspect of Folly Group's music. Shifting guitar riffs underscore obscure lyricism about "cowboy shit" and surrendering to love, directed by the locked in rhythm section. "Butt No Rifle" is a certain standout, but this EP packs a punch in it's short runtime. The moment when the distorted bass and drums kick in on "Awake and Hungry", the laserlike synths that ripple throughout "Ripples", the pulsing preaching of "Four Wheel Drive". These, among others, show that this EP is full of great individual moments. Luckily the songwriting skills on display here means that these mom

  Welcome back to Revisitation Nation, a series of posts where I talk about band's lesser-loved work and consider whether it deserves a revisit. So far it's a series of one,  starring The Killers . No more will that post be lonely, as today I will discuss Modest Mouse's follow-up to "the album with Float On", We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank. To be honest, if I can speak on the future of this series, it's gonna have a lot of the flowchart below going on.  Band floats under the radar in the indie scene releasing critically acclaimed work > Band has a breakout work that actually hits the charts > Band tries to follow it up with mixed results from the public. Unlike Wonderful Wonderful however, I am not writing this with curiosity in mind. I am not writing this with doubt that this is a project perhaps not worth embarking on. I am writing this with full throated praise. If Good News For People Who Love Bad News (aka the album with float on on it) is t

The dog. This is who you are on Rubicon-3, or at least who the pilot you play in Armored Core VI is introduced as. You go by many names. Never is your character given a history, emotion, or a voice, but by god do they have names.  C4-621, Raven, G13, Tourist, The Wallclimber, Buddy. What does this array of names mean? After all, just because you're a silent protagonist doesn't mean you're not a character. Link goes by Link, Gordon Freeman is Gordon Freeman. 621 however, is less than a person. Less than a dog. Raven is a weapon, pointed at whatever the holder wants to crush.  G13 gains the respect of the Vespers and various groups struggling for power on Rubicon purely through the might of their own destructive capacity. Tourist is perhaps the most fitting of these names. The only concrete history we have on Raven is that they're an outsider to Rubicon, a pilot with unstable fourth generation augmentations that leave them essentially unable to exist as a human being, and

Who are Mr Morale and the Big Steppers? Out of all the questions asked online about this album, out of all the discourse surrounding the varied choices, I believe this is the most important question to understanding this incredible double album from Kendrick Lamar. Released on Friday the 13th (my birthday, thanks kung fu kenny), Kendrick's latest covers a wide range of topics, such as the grieving process, wealth and it's corrupting influence, cancel culture, rap culture, toxic masculinity, and love as retribution for the sins of the past. Did I mention that's just the first 5 tracks? Mr Morale is a dense album thematically, but at no point do we ever get a clear answer for who Mr Morale and the Big Steppers are. Well, kind of. We'll get to it. Before we can properly examine this album, we must first look at the prequel track, "The Heart part 5". Here, Kendrick essentially presents a thesis statement/abstract for the album. It's a dense 5 1/2 minutes, cove

The Killers are usually defined as a singles band. The Las Vegas based band's debut Hot Fuss produced indie classics "Mr. Brightside" and "Somebody Told Me", among others. Their follow-up. Sam's Town, was seen as a stronger record overall, with the track "When You Were Young" becoming a staple. Day & Age was less well received, but still produced a huge single in the memeable "Human". Battle Born however, possessed little of note on the charts and critically. After this, the band took a 5 year hiatus, returning in 2017 with Wonderful Wonderful. Since it's release the band have gone from a singles band to an album band, with follow-ups Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine receiving glowing reviews, strong sales, and exceptional fan responses. Wonderful Wonderful, in the context of the band's trajectory as a whole, reads as an abberation. Sure, Battle Born had no hits and wasn't particularly well reviewed, but it's

The White Lotus is an anthology series produced by HBO, written, directed, and produced by Mike White of Mr Schneebly in School of Rock fame. As a series, it devotes itself across the two currently produced seasons to the inner lives of the rich and powerful, using the opportunity of a holiday destination and a chain of hotels (the titular White Lotus) to examine why these people who ostensibly possess everything capitalist society works towards, are so miserable. Season 2's Di Grasso family, made up of exceptionally horny grandfather Bert, his equally horny but better at hiding it son Dom, and Dom's son Albie, who is also horny, but in a nicer, more digestible form. The three men are in Sicily attempting to find long lost relatives from when Bert's mother left the old country to put up roots in the land of opportunity. As a side quest however, they spend episode 3 going on a sightseeing tour of Godfather filming locations. Nice-guy Albie invites Portia, a personal assistan