Citizen Sleeper (Jump over the Age / Fellow Traveler, 2022)

    I grew up too late to be socialized into playing Dungeons and Dragons, so Final Fantasy for the NES was my first exposure to role-playing games. Only recently have I thought about exploring the other side of role-playing games for consoles. You know, the one that is more freeform and comes from tabletop RPGs. Citizen Sleeper’s marketing blurb makes the case that the dice-rolling aspect of the game is part of that lineage. So, I can’t comment much on how 'authentic' it is in that regard, but I do love the way the dice-roll mechanic is used as a seamless part of the gameplay here. The bigger constraint on free movement is the cycle, which is essentially the way days are marked on the spaceship where your humanoid character resides. There is only so much you can do with just one day.

    Instead of quests and checkpoints, the game issues you a drive as a motivating event. When you speak to someone, such as a mechanic who first helps you understand how your half-human, half-android body operates, you have a choice to continue working with or for that person or to find someone else to interact with. As you continue to explore The Eye, the ring-shaped space ship where you reside, you’ll eventually have to decide which of these many drives you want to engage with. By using your dice rolls, you can complete certain defined tasks to help progress parts of that storyline and deepen connections with people. Some reward you with currency while others may give you gadgets or items that you can use to help yourself or others. (Lab-grown mushrooms are a big part of The Eye’s economy.) Your movements and options are limited by the number of dice you have, so grinding isn’t really an option. You still need to nourish yourself and take care of your frame as well. Wait too long before doing either and you will be severely limited in terms of how many dice you are permitted to roll and how high the values on those dice can be. Push it even farther and you will temporarily lose certain skills or abilities until you can unlock them again.

    The idea here is that every day, you have to consciously choose which drive to pursue. There is no open-ended exploring. Choosing to engage with one drive may prevent you from doing another because the people you are helping are working at cross purposes or because they have only so much time when they need your help. Getting a “Drive Failed” notification can sting, but only temporarily. The many roles and tasks you take on are meant to mimic the modern gig economy and that is part of what makes the game’s pace exhausting, but in a good way. There is just enough success to be had each cycle that I kept coming back to try again at the same old tasks until I achieved a milestone. It was numbing, but also realistic in that it reflects the monotony of working for a living, especially when your choice of career isn’t entirely wide open. The ambient soundtrack helps to break up the succession of cycles, too. It is gorgeously composed and gives an appropriately contemplative air to the decisions you make as you while away your time on The Eye.

    One idea the game repeatedly pushes is that you can’t do it all. You can’t please everyone and you can’t keep yourself safe all of the time. It’s a good life lesson, quite honestly. If I prioritize certain behaviors or goals in my personal life, other goals or plans I have will die on the vine. If I focus all my energies on building a career, my relationships and friendships will suffer. I started to feel connected to the other residents or transients on The Eye as I continued to play, even the sentient vending machine that I liberated and who helped me deprogram the digital assassin that stalked me when I hacked the ship’s computer mainframe.

    Later on, I had to decide whether to use a ticket (that was not mine) to board a ship headed on a 10-year voyage to an uncertain fate or to give that ticket to its owners, an engineer and his child who had been passed over during other chances they had to leave The Eye. You will face choices like these that ultimately have no consequence on your gameplay. As far as I know, it is impossible to get a Game Over, but you can continue playing after The End, if you would like. The consequences are felt entirely by you, the player, should you have a conscience.

    In the end, I chose an ending that was akin to merging with the lifestream and I was genuinely shocked at how deeply the onscreen text touched me as it recounted my fate. I knew there were still other drives to explore and other tasks to fulfill, but I set my controller down and walked away mouthing “What the fuck?!” a few times before I could bring myself to shut down the game. There is a sequel coming next year and I cannot wait.

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FUCKED UP Another Day (Fucked Up, 2024)

    One of the lessons you’ll learn about FUCKED UP if you read enough about them is that they were a reaction to the DIY music scene of the 1990s. They were not reactionary, mind you. Mike has said that punk was about the rebirth of the song and that is why bands from the era made two-song singles that played at 45 RPM. Those bands were taking music back to the immediacy of an a-side and a b-side from the album-length ideas of many a 1970s rock band. In the same way, FUCKED UP was going to reclaim the small vinyl format from fastcore / powerviolence / thrash bands that squeezed every possible second out of a 7" record. No, FUCKED UP would give you your money’s worth by making tunes. Jams. Cuts. Tracks. Bops. Songs you’d play over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, if you’d believe the “Litany” insert.

    So they did just that for about three years and it was glorious. Confused reviewers felt cheated by getting only two songs on a 7", yet those songs were miles beyond almost any band from that era in terms of compositional complexity and, counterintuitively, direct impact. Their first 12" release (aside from a one-sided live record) was a statement—a two-tracked a-side that played either the first or the second half of the song, depending on where you dropped the needle. The b-side was a longer song than they’d attempted to that point (“Fate of Fates”) but it did not suffer in the least. (It’s hard for me to believe it’s been nearly 20 years since I bought a copy of “Looking for Gold” at their show in Chicago.) The point was that they were signaling a readiness for a longer collection of songs, and even longer individual songs, to fill a full-length record. That would come about a year later and then somewhat regularly every two years after that.

    We’re now at the point in their career where they have made their second iteration on the everyone-does-their-parts-in-24-hours-but-not-all-at-once-or-in-the-same-place idea. The timing of the first iteration’s release (early 2023) suggested maybe that idea was borne of necessity during COVID’s enforced lockdown, but the recording dates reveal the opposite—it was conceptualized, if not mostly executed, before the pandemic hit. So now they’ve gone and done it again, with a slightly tighter timeframe, though not as tight as “Who’s Got the Time and a Half?” reviewed previously. The next iteration probably involves mimicking WARSAW PAKT’s “Needle Time” and recording live in the studio, direct-to-disc, and having the physical copies in the stores the next day. THELMA HOUSTON & PRESSURE COOKER used this approach to recording with “I’ve Got the Music in Me” as well. One take, no restraint. The release of “Windsor” as a live album recently doesn’t count because, it’s, well, a live gig recording. If you missed it, that means you’ll have to wait a while to hear “Disabuse,” if you ever get to hear it. What a monster of a song!

    I bring up all this history with the band and the nature of the recording of these three most recent album-length releases because these songs represent a return to the idea of the power of the hardcore punk sounds that first brought the band to make music together. So yes, the collection of songs coheres as an album. It does not feel like a singles collection, which they’ve done numerous times, or one of the sprawling Zodiac 12" releases either. It lands somewhere between the power of the early singles and the more contemplative and moody spaces they’ve explored on records such as “Dose Your Dreams,” “Year of the Horse,” and, yeah, even “Looking for Gold.” In other words, it’s worth your time.

    Both “Another Day” and “One Day” shove immediacy in your face from the first songs. A friend of mine pointed out that “One Day” does not begin with a song featuring a long instrumental build-up à la “Crusades,” “Son the Father,” “Let Her Rest,” “Echo Boomer,” or “None of Your Business Man.” The same is true of “Another Day” and its opener, “Face.” The riff repeats maybe twice and then Damian barrels in relentlessly within seconds. Instead of the feeling that these songs have been working their way through the practice space for months and that searching, sifting process resulted in pristinely hewed tracks, you get the feeling that these tracks were borne of a simple idea, a riff, a lead, a cool part, and built up from there incrementally. It’s the difference between a band really finding and riding a groove and feeling that flow and just punching ideas together in ProTools until the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is what is happening here, make no mistake. The magic of studio construction, part by part, makes this record possible across time and place. When it results in “Stimming” and “Tell Yourself You Will,” I couldn’t care less how they get there. I mean, “I’m clenching my arms around a guitar / make music instead of a hole the wall” is one of the realest lines I’ve heard Mike write. “Tell Yourself You Will” has shades of WALLS AROUND US if only in its lyrical bent. It’s like when BREAKDOWN did “You Gotta Fight” just to show you they could be positive, too.

    With a one-two-three combo like that, you’d think maybe the album is front-loaded and not paced well, but you’d be wrong. The pro-pot anthem of the title track has me singing along even if I’ll never indulge. The synthy start to “Paternal Instinct” brings in the other elements of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that “Police” did on its main riff. (Yes, I know Mike wrote “Police” while vibing on the first STROKES album, but the connection to The WHO is unmistakable.) After “Divining Gods” tears open the b-side, the power slips a little for a song or two, but Mike’s turn at the vocals on “Follow Fine Feeling” begins to set things right. It’s not as instantly accessible as “Cicada” from “One Day,” but the chorus still works. I’m still trying to come to terms with “House Lights.” There are some truly low notes on this track and some of Damian’s strongest attempts at clean-ish signing that I can recall, but the song itself seems triumphant and there is a chiming guitar lead throughout. It works, but I don’t know why. If “Face” doesn’t have the build-up intro you expect, then at least “House Lights” clearly signals the end.

    There are moments throughout the record that recall the feeling I got from AVAIL or HOT WATER MUSIC when I was a teenager. Those same heartfelt ‘90s DIY sounds aren’t present here at all, but the vibe is. Pat West once called AVAIL “the Michael Jordan of punk” in an issue of Change zine because they did everything right musically and politically and everyone loved them for that. Even if FUCKED UP doesn’t sound like AVAIL at all, the catholic vision of punk presented here is as easily grasped as Jordan’s elite status. Even better, it’s likely to welcome in even more scruffy or clean-cut or confused kids looking for something beyond the norm, and that barrier-lowering, welcoming stance is as powerful as anything the band has done before.

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Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Camille T. Dungy, Simon & Schuster, 2023)

    This is a book everyone should read. Dungy makes that argument right from the start, explaining that “whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy” (p. 10). The distinction between being “politically engaged” being for people who vote only once every four years (and possibly only for one office at that!) and being “politically engaged” being for everyone who has a “vested interest in the direction people on this planet take in relationship to others” is a clarifying and instructive one. It’s sentiments like these that immediately hook me into a book and make it part of my living and breathing for however long it takes to finish reading it—and then for some time afterward. Thankfully, there are plenty more thoughtful ideas throughout the text.

    You can tell from the subtitle that this book is more than a how-to book about cultivating flowers and plants in a yard or community garden. As a result, one of the themes that appears throughout the text is the strangeness of the white, male gaze in nature writing that has existed for centuries (e.g., Muir, Thoreau). These writers, Dungy contends, see themselves as “set apart from” nature instead of being “a part of the natural world” (p. 86, emphasis in original). As with many types of writing from the past, the views of these men are seen as supposedly neutral or correct because their positionality is left uncritiqued. It’s simply assumed they saw the world accurately and were right to see nature as separate from humanity.

    Dungy critiques this idea not just through counterargument but through her lived counterexample as a Black mother raising a garden and cultivating a family during the anti-Blackness of her fellow Fort Collins, Colorado, residents during the Trump presidency and the uprising for Black Lives in the summer of 2020. In relating the conversations she had with her child and husband during this time, as well as caring for the garden and explaining how each plant has its place in the yard, she relates an embodied version of nature writing that Muir and Thoreau could only dream of. She also reveals how the knowledge of nature that she wields is not borne from her mere observations alone. The emphasis on community knowledge and distributed cognition is evident through the group chats, personal conversations, and other insights she gleans from everyone she discusses gardening with.

    A further difference in Dungy’s approach and that of those men is that Dungy is not merely observing nature but is, as I’ve indicated already, growing a garden. Anyone who has planted or weeded or mowed or trimmed knows that certain plants grow more easily in certain areas. You may even be aware that there are invasive species to your area. Dungy’s reflection on USDA Hardiness Zones (p. 135) demonstrates that she has to have a deeper knowledge of how nature actually works than could have been available to Muir and Thoreau. We all know the USDA’s zones didn’t exist back then, so they couldn’t have used it to inform their writing. That’s not my point. My point is that these men didn’t have to grow anything except old and they had a lot of help doing even that, which Dungy ponders as she regularly switches gears from being a university professor to being a gardener to being the parent of an elementary school child during COVID’s pre-vaccine months. The invisibility of the care work that Muir, Thoreau, et al. received is the point here. They couldn’t have done their work alone, yet they are seen as solitary geniuses.

    To bring it back even farther, Dungy discusses The Great Chain of Being by Diego de Valadés, a sixteenth-century artist. This engraving was designed to help European missionaries explain how the world works to indigenous people in the Americas how the world is structured. It is heavy on structure and hierarchy. Dungy herself comments that it “sums up much of the thinking that still drives so many interactions in the world” (p. 162). That is, that if there is a hierarchy, then the people at the top are holy or otherwise deserving of their place at the top, and if you challenge the structure, you are going to have a bad time. If nothing else, Dungy’s text is meant to argue against such a brutal regime.

    Dungy’s analysis of religious hierarchy reaches a pivotal point when she confronts the white, male pastor in her church who has used Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words in a sermon on the Sunday after the 2016 election to emphasize the importance of turning the other cheek (pp. 191-195). If reading that sentence made your eyes roll back in your head, then you can see where this conversation is going. Dungy relates how the pastor’s sermon caused harm to people in the audience hearing it, most of whom were white and half of whom where women. The pastor thanks her for her words and then puts the onus on her to let him know if he causes offense in the future… It’s galling beyond belief. If nothing else, I will ask my fellow well-meaning white people to please learn that there are other Black radicals from the ‘60s besides King and he gave speeches other than “I Have a Dream” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Lest you think racial justice and environmental issues are disconnected, Dungy reminds us later, through words of her father, that “For us… there is no separation between the environment and social justice” (pp. 211-212). If I had to pick just one of the many quotes I’d already used in this text to sum it up somehow, it might be this one. Pairing it with the quotation from the first paragraph about political engagement tells you quite a bit about what you can do to empower yourself and others socially and racially in this world. Think of how you can challenge the hierarchy of The Great Chain of Being and act accordingly. After all, worrying alone never added an hour to anyone’s life.

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FUCKED UP Who’s Got the Time and a Half? (Fucked Up, 2024)

    In their third iteration of the record-an-album-in-a-24-hour-span idea, FUCKED UP spent an uninterrupted day (from 1PM on August 6th to 1PM on August 7th) in the studio writing, recording, mixing, and mastering these 11 songs, which they then made available on Bandcamp for download for (you guessed it) only one day. Of course I bought it. Who do you think I am? I also spent like maybe 15 minutes watching the in-studio livestream of the recording on YouTube. (It had to compete with the Olympics and a family vacation for my attention.) It’s a testament to the band’s creative energies that the record is wonderful despite the self-imposed constraint. It also sounds like a new take on “David’s Town” from 2011, which featured a variety of guest vocalists and genre explorations. In other words, this record is probably a great listen for people who think FUCKED UP would be better if Damian wasn’t the vocalist. I’m not one of those psychos, yet the record still plays on repeat. It’s a marvel. They managed to get so many contrasting ideas to gel in such a short time.

    The first four songs hit somewhere between the early singles and “David Comes to Life” in terms of raw energy and power. That is, it is a mix of drum beats from The UNDERTONES, an urgent melodic sensibility from ADOLESCENTS, and the vocal stylings of Dwid from INTEGRITY mixed with Jerry A from POISON IDEA. An exploration of what it means to grow old in a scene predicated on youth identity formation. Making something of yourself and reinventing that person over time. Still being disgusted by right-wing opportunists who try to co-opt the scene. Part of that reinvention means having kids who can share guest vocals on your songs, which at least one of Damian’s kids does on “YNIC,” which seems to stand for “You’re Not In Control,” if the lyrics are any indication. It’s hard to review a record absent liner notes or a physical form. In that way, this release is also a reprise of “Baiting the Public” (and its sequel “Being Annoying”) in that the lack of any information beyond the music is meant to frustrate the listener into analyzing the sonics more deeply. Damian’s opening line on the album’s first track, “No One’s Left” seems to be “Since when have I ever been a story without an end?” That implies a sense of finality for this project (the band and the album) because it is not meant to last forever. Something like “Oh, you thought I’d always be here? Well, I quit.” Enjoy it while it lasts, etc. It’s a good sentiment to use to open an album that is a commentary on impermanence.

    These songs give way to “Living Nightmare,” a showcase for Jonah, and the longest song on the album. It’s Jonah doing his best version of Jerry A doing Sakevi. Just a little bit of pussyfooting. This track has the most straightforward, moshable moments and even a “trash” exclamation to go along with the requisite “ugh” and “bleh” parts. It’s a treat to be able to hear Jonah do his MAD MEN voice again for most of the track, too. When you hear those words, you think of Don Draper being too hot, while I think of Jonah Falco being “Too Hot;” we are not the same. He also had me fooled with the spoken word drawl on some parts of the song. I swore it was Jerry A doing the dopey talk singing thing but after discussing it with a friend, I realize it’s just Jonah morphing comfortably into yet another vocal style. The spoken “I’ll see you in hell” into a riff that sounds just like the opening to “Plastic Bomb” further solidified my confusion.

    If these songs ever get vinyl treatment, I figure this is where the sides will split because “What’s New? (Mary Lou)” is a gem of a power pop song with some DINOSAUR JR.-esque noodling going on in the guitar leads. It’s a stark contrast to the pummeling onslaught of “Living Nightmare.” Both “Make You Mine” and “Sometimes” continue in a similar vein and bring to mind DANGERLOVES and The BAYONETTES, if we’re keeping Toronto-area punk bands of the early FUCKED UP era in mind. Well, “Make You Mine” is kind of its own thing, with Mike’s double-tracked, slightly out of sync vocals over a two-riff pop song that’s under two minutes long. It’s got the perfect cadence and rhyming lines to stay in your head forever. Damian comes back to the mic for “Conspiratorial Relations,” which is a solid, tuneful song that reminds me of a ‘90s punk song that I probably heard in a friend’s car one time in high school and never again, but somehow stuck with me all the same.

    Jonah comes off the bench again with a HAPPY MONDAYS / PRIMAL SCREAM style trip with “Hold Up Half the Sky.” This is probably my favorite song on here because of the line “half of me shows up to work / and half of me a Mechanical Turk.” While they sit and record music for 24 hours straight, I’m sitting here like “Yeah, I like to give a half-assed effort at my job, too. I identify with this idea.” His delivery of “lean back and take a half-assed bow” is perfect. There’s just the hint of a stutter on bow and it communicates the idea of being uncommitted to anything. The album closes with “A Little Friend of Mine,” which again has Jonah on vocals, softly putting you to sleep. Given that the album’s run time is barely over 30 minutes, it’s not a chore to simply let it play again. There’s a lot of fun ideas and creativity involved in this project (the band and the album) and it’s inspiring that even after 23 years they can still do something so compelling in one day.

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