Video Game Review: L.A. Noire

                Remember growing up with Video Games? Well I don’t. I grew up in a strict Amish family. The Butter Churn was our Pac Man; barn rising, our Super Mario Brothers. Years after the fact, I look back with nostalgia at lazy Saturday afternoons constructing an entire building from scratch. Perhaps it was a simpler time for me, before I got involved with the English and the internet.

                Video Games were lost on me. I thought they were just pointless action sequences. Some of my friends began telling me about one particular video game, L.A. Noire, that I might enjoy. According to them it had a compelling storyline, intelligence and a bit more on mid-century economists than you’d expect. Usually I don’t hear about such epic tales about video games. While I’ve heard this isn’t the first time this has happened, it may be the most impressive.

                We start in 1940s Los Angeles. Our hero (Cole Phelps) comes from Kansas as a way of righting the evil he sees in the world. Los Angeles to him appears as a place where Satan has taken hold of the poor citizenry. Early in the game, as he’s rising through the ranks of the Police Force, he sees his first murder victim. As they remove the sheet they placed over her, with her body mutilated beyond recognition after she had been murdered to death, he turns to his dog and says “Toto I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!”

                The Midwest comes up a lot in the game. Slowly we learn of Cole Phelps’s background. His family (the Joads) constantly bothers him for money. Apparently they work as sharecroppers trying to scrape by after they left Oklahoma years ago. Compared to the rest of his family, Cole has made it further than anyone would have imagined. As a child, Cole suffered badly from being utterly useless n rural Kansas, conducting investigations of missing corn stalks but not actually picking anything. Occasionally you see how Cole tries to overcome his feelings of inadequacy by frequenting prostitutes. Prostitutes help restore Cole’s health after he gets shot.

                A lot of people are working against Cole. Corruption extends to the highest offices in the Los Angeles. You have to avoid being assassinated a few times. To ensure better odds of survival, you’ll need to befriend an Anarchist couple from Turku, Finland: the Dickovers. Full warning though, Cole laughs uncontrollably at the city name Turku, thinking it to be such a silly name.

                By the end of the 40s you come close to breaking the Governor’s iron grip on the state government. The final battle requires you to stock up on small puppies to shoot at the Governor, killing him with kindness. Or you can employ a prostitute who will begin singing “Killing me Softly” and moving Governor Nixon to tears. Either way, you will lose the 1978 Chevy Camaro you got from the wormhole in the Red Light district. 

                I don’t want to give away the entire game’s plot. There are certain touches that make the game more entertaining which avoid giving away further plot details. Whenever you need to make change for a $10 or a $20, you need a Math Blaster. Math Blaster is a game within the game where you save the universe by doing basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Do this enough and you’ll earn your Ph.D in mathematics. Once you earn your Ph.D in Mathematics, you have to choose between working for Friedrich Hayek or John Keynes. Either way, you have to give up working the beat as a police officer.

                Overall, I really liked this game. Certainly I am excited for DC McCarthy, where you’re a small-time representative from Minnesota who has to work to clear the names of alleged enemies of the state.

Joseph Hammer – I love you, Please love me too 7.6

               This album is proof that the original weird spirit of LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society) continues. Here we have Joseph Hammer engaging in some old-fashioned weirdness. Plunderphonics would be a good description of what’s going on here. However, that wouldn’t accurately describe what’s exactly going on.

                Instead of the usual abrupt edits prevalent in so many plunderphonics records, this is much more spacey. Samples weave themselves in and out of the mix, as various anchors (themes like the ongoing phrase “The Water stops”) give it a sense of moving forward. Most artists would’ve preferred a faster pace, by making the project more akin to plunderphonic drone; he’s stumbled upon a surprisingly engrossing method.

                Part II offers even stranger samples. I think I can make out some of William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops” through the various levels of muck. By having these diverse associations, it gives an otherworldly effect. Towards the end of it you’re treated to a singer’s voice transformed into crow form. 

                I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.  Perfect music for a lazy afternoon; just let it play in the background. As it plays, feel it come in and out of focus, that’s probably the best way to experience its many charms.

No Age – Everything in Between 8.6

No Age

Like all No Age releases, this one grew on me. The immediate difference was how the songs felt fuller, both in terms of recording quality and it terms of more conventional structure.  Add that to the length of the album (almost 40 minutes, a record for them) and the word “maturity” comes to mind.

Yes, they have finally reached the next logical step in their evolution. But simply growing older and a bit wiser doesn’t mean that they’ve given up their energy. Rather, this energy is directed in new and exciting ways. “Valley Hump Crush” combines the joys of old No Age with the new focus. It has the same catchiness but there’s even more heart than before. “I don’t want to go to bed/The Sun’s still shining in my head” gives you some idea of the blissed out California world these two still inhabit. But the ideas are better fleshed out than before. Even the chaotic pace of “Fever Dreaming” can’t disguise the fact that they’ve worked harder on this without losing the energy that made them so likable in the first place.

Initially, I worried about this new approach upon first hearing it. For one, the reverb and effects are gone, making it sound more direct. Muscle like that found on “Life Prowler” allows you to actually respect the fact that they could tear down that wall. Also I wondered whether having so much thought behind the emotion would let it succeed on that visceral level. Thankfully, I was wrong after giving it a few more listens. So give this one a bit more tries than their previous work, it does take some getting used to. But ultimately, it is a very enjoyable work. Even the pacing of the ambient interludes works well, with most of them helping to mellow out the latter half of the album, with the album front-loaded with intensity.