2013 Year in Review: Album of the Year, Random Access Memories

Robot heads, robot voices, 808s and a whole lot of guitars.

When one considers the album of the year, the music is not the only thing there is.  Maybe once this was the case, but it hasn’t been that way for a very long time.  It isn’t just how many tracks you can hum along with or how complex the time signatures are.  It’s about the social impact.  How much of a technical masterpiece it is.  What the album says, how it says it, and who it is saying it to.  How driven the artists behind it were to do something that makes people feel something, to make themselves feel something.

In that scope, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (RAM) was not only the biggest album of the year, but also the greatest.

It is ambitious, radio friendly, challenging, fresh, recognizable, and compelling.

It is the album that spawned the biggest radio hit of the year and it is the same album that features a nine plus minute track with a long voice over by Euro producer/DJ Giorgio Moroder.

It’s an album principally produced only by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo but features a dozen different artists from half as many genres of music.

It starts and ends with burst of visceral energy bookending its cold, brooding core.  Steve Hyden of Grantland deftly described it as “miscast” as an album of the summer thanks to its dance friendly mega-hit “Get Lucky”.  The album’s dulcet tone gives a feeling more that of sitting by a fire with a bottle of brandy in a solitary winter cabin during a blizzard than Forth of July at the Beach.  If you plan on listening to RAM, it is best to settle down with a glass of wine and your best headphones and set aside an hour and twenty because you won’t be doing as much dancing as you think.

This calculated melancholia is perfectly exemplified by the stellar “Doin’ it Right” and “Instant Crush”, the latter featuring Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas on vocals.

RAM features five different named artists on its track listing and several more uncredited ones that provided lyric or studio work.  There in lies one of the truly great accomplishments of RAM: variation.  Daft Punk was able to branch out and experiment while never doing anything that felt unnatural.  I would call it “taking chances” but they were in control the entire time.  They experimented with new sounds and genres and what they got was a great pop album that could still never be mistaken for anyone else.

There are many stand out tracks on RAM, but my personal favorite would have to be “Touch” featuring Paul Williams.  The eight minute mini-symphony ricochets from piano ballad to vaudeville-disco to techno space odyssey and back again and it feels completely natural.  The touchingly tragic tone of the song – with the child like refrain “If love is the answer, yeah, hold…hold on” – is nothing short of the heart of the album (coincidentally, 7^th of 13 tracks). 

It is a album that draws you in and can suck you down, but only just long enough to make the explosive release that much more pleasurable.  The most inspiring track on the whole album could very well be the final track, “Contact”.

Featuring an opening voice over recording from Apollo 17, “Contact” bursts with energy in a song built perfectly around a theme:  exploring the unknown.  Even without any words, you get the message loud and clear.

2013 Year in Review: Game of the Year, The Last of Us

I downloaded The Last of Us one day onto my PS3 on whim when I turned it on to play Injustice: Gods Among Us.  It was an impulse buy.  Boy, am I glad I followed that impulse.

 

Zombies have been big in recent years.  The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, no matter the genre fighting the dead is a popular story. 

The gaming realm has focused most of its zombie smashing energies on providing online-based antics rather than a story driven experience.  Even the classic Resident Evil series is more memorable for its thrilling game play than the convoluted plot lines.  The Last of Us breaks that mold.

Technically, the mindless flesh-consuming villains in The Last of Us aren’t zombies, and that’s part of the beauty of it.  They actually aren’t the primary villains either, also part of the beauty of the best game to come out this year.  A large swath of the global population has been infected with a “zombifying” virus, much like in the Resident Evil series.  Unlike Resident Evil, The Last of Us draws inspiration from a real life cordyceps fungus which effects ants.  Science fiction makes it possible for the virus to take the leap from insect to human, chaos ensues and the game begins.

On a technical level, The Last of Us is fantastic.  It looks amazing.  The voice acting and sound is of the highest caliber.  The weapons system is easy to understand and lends itself well to the survival/horror genre.  The upgrading system encourages multiple playthroughs and world exploring.  The only place where the game disappoints is in the multiplayer game, which had the opportunity to be an immersive, world building system but instead was relegated to a simple CoD style team deathmatch system.  But most players will spend little time on the multiplayer experience, because the story mode is just that good.

**Minor Spoilers** Ahead. (Minor spoilers are spoilers that will only really bother you if you’re a whiney jerk, as opposed to a real spoiler, such as Darth Vader is Luke’s sister in Star Trek.)

The game begins with the outbreak, but the story doesn’t really get going until several years later.  After surviving the initial wave of chaos and making it through the subsequent decades as a smuggler the protagonist of the game, Joel, is enlisted by a questionable ally to transport a young girl across the country.  Joel and the young girl, Ellie, portrayed in stellar performances by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, embark on there journey through cities that are either under strict martial law or completely lawless.  In turns running from armed soldiers, marauding groups of scavengers, and the always present infected humans, Joel and Ellie make there way from Boston towards their final goal encountering many equally well written characters who either become valued allies or terrifying enemies.

As they near the finish line both struggle with their past choices and what will become of them when they do reach their final destination.  The weight is especially heavy on Joel, who is still struggling with the loss of his own daughter at the outbreak of the virus.

All of their decisions and struggles culminate in what is one the most realistic, subtly shocking, emotional, and fantastic endings ever to find its way into the medium of gaming.

Even without the incredible story, The Last of Us still would have been one of the top games this year.  With the ending, no other game even came close.

2013 Year in Review: Movie of the Year, Frances Ha

Sometimes you find something that is so incredibly great that you can’t help but hate it a little. 

 

I wouldn’t even pretend that I’ve see enough movies from this past year to give the title of “Movie of the Year” definitively to any film.  But what I do know is Frances Ha is the most exceptional and relatable film I’ve seen in theaters in a long, long time.  Relatable, not just to myself, but to a generation.

Frances Ha may not be a movie for every single person between the ages of 21-35, but it certainly is for anyone who has ever felt the urge to create something, the need to be something, with no real idea of how.  Particularly if you live in New York City, and especially particularly if you live in Brooklyn.

Directed by Brooklyn art movement’s patron saint of film Noah Baumbach (Squid and Whale) and starring his girlfriend, Greta Gerwig (Lola Vs.), Frances Ha has been compared many times over to Lena Dunham’s HBO hit show, Girls.  The two are similar in many ways, ripe with sarcastic humor, awkward moments, and youthful energy but Frances Ha surpasses Girls with its sincerity.  Where Girls disenchants some with it’s perceived pretentiousness, Frances Ha endears its audience with its sweetness.  It is fitting that Frances Ha be a black and white film, reminiscent of the timeless quality of Woody Allen’s classics Manhattan and Broadway Danny Rose that turns the city of New York itself into a character.

 

Excellently paced and just under an hour and a half, one of the most disappointing things I might say about Frances Ha is that it is over all too quickly.  The efficiency in story telling is quite possibly the most envious dimension of the stellar script written by Baumbach and Gerwig.

The story is filled with magnificently written characters that you would swear you know in your own life, even if they only populate the screen for a single scene.  One of the great guilty pleasures of watching the film comes from these characters and the secret comfort that at least your life isn’t this much of a mess.  But then, you have to ask yourself, “Wait, it isn’t right?”

The story begins with the protagonist, Frances, drifting through life in the city, dreaming big and living small.  She’s a free spirit but a lost soul.  A vibrant but silly girl, that you’re drawn to in the same way you’re drawn to a train wreck.  The inciting incident comes when her best friend moves out of her apartment forcing Frances to go out and actually make something of her life.  It becomes sink or swim.  She struggles at first, but the message of Frances Ha is hope; learning never to lose enthusiasm for the things you love no matter where you end up.

You watch Frances Ha and it does more than entertain you, it inspires you to do the things you love.  That’s why it is a great movie, and my Movie of the Year.