Say Hello. Wave, Goodboy!

Next up in Next Fest this month - Hello Goodboy. Apart from a truly inspired pun for a title, what do we have here?

"A wholesome, non-linear adventure game, where a lost soul and his dog set out on an otherworldly trek through the afterlife. Pass into the world beyond, commit acts of kindness for other souls, and mend mistakes from a forgotten past life. All with a very good boy by your side!"

 Well, alright then. Let's get started.

The intro confused me more than a little. I hadn't at that stage read the description above so I didn't know for certain the game was set in the afterlife but when the very first screen I saw was this...

... I did have my suspicions. 

The following cut scene, though, left me uncertain whether the boy in the picture was meant to be dreaming or if he'd somehow died in his sleep. I'm still not sure. Maybe it's all explained at the end of the full game or maybe I misunderstood something. Or maybe it's a problem with the translation.

Let's talk about the translation. It's good but it's not perfect. The occasional line stands out as not being quite idiomatic English. Partly from that but also from the general tenor of the game, I got the impression it might have been developed in Japan - it has that almost indefinable, know-it-when-you-see-it, off-kilter charm that's helped to make Japanese video games a gold standard around the world. 

In fact, the developers, Rolling Glory Jam, are based in Bandung, Indonesia. While I've watched a fair number of Indonesian bands on YouTube and been mightily impressed a few times, I definitely couldn't claim to know anything like enough about the culture to say how typical or otherwise Hello Goodboy might be - but if it's in any way representative, I look forward to seeing a whole lot more games from Indonesia in the future.

By which, yes, you can take it I had a good time. I found the demo entertaining, accessible, involving and surprising, all of which are good things. The controls felt natural in moments, the graphics were universally delightful, the characters were endearing and the soundscape soothing. 

Gameplay, which consists of a great deal of explanation and exposition, as befits a demo, but also plenty of exploration and action, zipped along handily, punctuated by a number of mini-games that were, for once, actually fun. I particularly enjoyed the one where a hen and a goose ask you to fill a suitcase with packs of seeds resembling Tetris tiles. The frequent interludes when you have to use your magic toolbox to repair things by tapping the space bar at the correct moment were fun, too.

There's a narrative throughline concerning some kind of corrupting force but the demo doesn't do much more than introduce the concept then tell you not to worry about it for now. Mostly what you have to do is familiarize yourself with the Journey you're on, something you do by discussing it with Coco, your canine companion.

Coco is a typically friendly dog, whose role is neatly inverted from sidekick to mentor, a relationship beautifully encapsulated in the way he (She? They?) refers to the protagonist, Iko, as a Good Kid. Coco has a better idea of what's going on than Iko but neither of them seem to have the whole picture. I can't say I was all that much clearer by the end of the demo either but so long as I was being a Good Kid I didn't much care.

Being a Good Kid involves making the right choices, this being one of those games where choices matter. How they matter or what happens if you make the wrong choices is less clear. I'm not even sure you can make a wrong choice. There was one time when I had to decide which of four drinks to bring to a picnic and every time I chose one, Coco gently suggested it might not be suitable. The right one turned out to be the last one I picked but there didn't appear to be any penalty for getting it wrong the first three times.

By and large, that leniency reflects the gentle, relaxing nature of the game but if that sounds a touch too twee for your tastes, I wouldn't write the game off just yet. What appears to be the fluffiest of sequences, involving two young people on a picnic date, takes a very unexpected turn into some dark psychological waters towards the end. Thankfully, all is resolved happily, although I was left wondering whether, had I made different choices, the outcome might have been a lot less cosy.

Hello Goodboy is unusual in other ways than its emotional timbre, not least in the way it occasionally delivers an infodump of real-world statistics for no discernable in-game reason other than the character speaking is, according to his girlfriend, a bit of a geek. It left me wondering whether the game had its origin in educational software. If not, that's some serious characterisation they have going on there.

Playing the demo through to the end took me just under an hour, by which time I'd completed one of the Seasonal zones; Spring, as it happens. Completing it lit one rune on a panel in the central atrium. There are, naturally, four. Assuming all the zones are about the same length, I guess that implies a four hour running time plus however long it takes to do whatever happens when all the runes are lit.

In other words, I haven't a clue how long the game is likely to be when it releases in Q2 2023, as is currently planned. I'd certainly be up for a few more hours, though. So I've wishlisted it.

Of course I have. I'm a Good Kid!

Next Fest : MMORPG Edition

As I was saying only yesterday, my selection from the current Steam Next Fest bucket of demos includes a couple of mmorpgs. Until then, I'd never heard of either of them and nothing I read in the descriptions led me to believe I'd missed all that much.

Of the pair, the one I felt looked marginally more interesting was Grace Online, "a 3D fantasy MMORPG featuring an immersive experience that allows the players to forge their own paths through exploration and discovery". A bit vague but might be worth a look...

Outside of the demo, the game is currently in semi-closed testing, with access being available on request "when the developer is ready for more participants". Early Access is imminent, scheduled for next month. The EA phase, described quite pragmatically, even off-puttingly, on the Steam Store page, is estimated to last a year or two, although "...given that it's a one person team this time is subject to change". When people talk about soloing mmos, that's not usually what they mean, is it?

Still, respect for trying. And the screenshots make the game look not unattractive. I was curious to find out how it might play. 

I still am. I can't get it to run.

It downloaded without problems and it fires up when I hit play but every time I get to Server Select, I get this:

I checked my antivirus wasn't blocking it. It wasn't. I googled. Nothing. I joined the game's Discord to see if anyone was complaining there. 

At first I couldn't find any mention of anyone else having issues getting into the game. On the contrary, there were plenty of ongoing discussions suggesting people were indeed playing. 

Eventually I came across the following exchange:

It seems the demo is just too popular for its own good. Nice problem to have, although since the OP talks about "getting continuous "cannot connect" " and I've had the same message half a dozen times over two days, I'm not wholly convinced that the "29 minutes" overload is the whole story.

I'll try again at what might be a less congested time, maybe tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll get lucky. If not, there's always Early Access in March.

Since I couldn't try a demo I wasn't sure I wanted to try anyway, I decided to double down and try one I was pretty sure I didn't. In for a penny...

 Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore describes itself as "a hardcore, old-school MMORPG for players not afraid of challenge, risk, and adventure." I guess one out of three will have to do. I do like an adventure.

I realize there's a demographic for whom the words "hardcore" and "old-school" sound a dog whistle but for me they ring an alarm bell. The phrase "too old for all that" comes to mind, along with "got more sense" and "life's too short". When you factor in come-ons like "Teamwork is a must", "Death is not an inconvenience" and "High risk gameplay" they might just as wel have put up a big sign saying "Not for Bhagpuss".

It's just a demo, though, I can put up with a little hardcore, ffa, full loot ganking in the name of getting a post out, surely? I mean, it's all about the stories, right?

So I logged in. Smooth as butter. No problems at all. Then I made a character. Ditto. Well, if you don't count what the character I made looks like.

Character creation is slick, detailed and entertaining. The design is solid, the illustration rich and bold, the writing lucid. The whole things oozes professionalism. Given the strength of the ancillary elements  the character models themselves come as quite a shock. They seem almost nominal, placeholders, perhaps, for finished artwork to come later.

I spent a while reading through the numerous classes and specializations, a somewhat fatuous enterprise seeing there was literally no possibility of my ever needing to specialize during the demo the demo. I'm not saying it's not possible. I have no idea whether it is or not. I'm just saying it was never going to be possible for me, especially given all the other demos I have to get through before Monday.

All the classes looked interesting but in the end I plumped for the Fighter because fighters are generally the easiest to start with in any game. Why make things harder than they have to be? I mean, it's not like the game won't do that for me, is it?

Except that's not what happened. Very much the opposite, in fact. I had a jolly good time playing Ethyrial for nearly two hours, until I had to drag myself away to take Beryl for her evening walk. By then, I'd learned two things: 1) No-one ganks you in the Tutorial or the starting city and 2) That old mmorpg magic still just works, somehow.

The first thing to say about Ethyrial is the graphics are W.E.I.R.D. Seriously, they are very, very strange. The whole thing takes place in a kind of top-down, over the shoulder 3D that I found utterly disorientating at first but surprisingly comfortable later. 

The buildings all do that cutaway thing, where you can see inside them from the outside. Every mob and NPC has a massive nameplate like a signboard. Conversations type themselves out word by word in what looks like a cross between a speech bubble and a printed flyer. If an NPC walks away while you're talking to them, as several did, the speech bubble slides along at a slant and changes perspective, almost as if its actually supposed to be a physical presence in the world. Also you have to either type in your side of the conversation or trigger keywords, which is truly old school, but that's another topic altogether.

It's hard to see much detail, using the default settings but I did eventually figure out how rotate the camera and zoom in and out. Neither option uses what I would consider traditional controls. You have to right-click the hotbars rather than left-click, too, which is back-assward to my way of thinking. And I had to invert the camera controls to get them to feel comfortable. 

When you can eventually move and see properly, the aesthetic is convincing, within the parameters of the graphics, which are otherwise not the most sophistiated or up-to-date you're going to find. It certainly doesn't help that the entire Tutorial takes place both at night and in heavy rain. Since the clock never moved, I assume this is a narrative choice not just my unfortunate timing. When I finally made it to the world proper and the clock began to tick again, it was still night and it was still raining but at least the sun did come up eventually.

The storyline, what very little I saw of it, and especially the quests, definitely qualify as "old school". No-one asked me to kill ten rats, although I killed several on my own recognizance, but I had to carry  things from one townsperson to another, rescue pets for children and turn ore into metal bars, just as I've done countless times before.

And it was fun. That's the oddest thing about it. 

I got jumped by ruffians in an alleyway, killed them, got complimented by the Guard and deputized to go kill the dead men's boss, just as would surely happen in real life, if real life was a fever dream. I got chased into a house by poisonous spiders and bitten to death and the last thing I saw as I was dying was the spiders turning on the houseowner, who'd been standing in his living room, minding his own business. I climbed a ladder into an attic and took an old man's leather pants and put them on, with his blessing. I found a cluster of mushrooms growing on a wall and picked them all, then ate them, and it  didn't kill me but made me feel much better.

Just normal, old school stuff like that, all wrapped up with some moderately witty, always grammatically correct dialog. I played for a couple of hours but I could have gone all night. Or at least I could if it wasn't for the nagging feeling I'd done it all before. 

And of course, I have. That's the problem. Even leaving aside the post-Tutorial, post-demo room-hogging elephant that is ffa, full-loot PvP, why would I want to do it again? I wouldn't. At least, I don't think I would.

For anyone that does still hanker after the old days, though, the level of quality present here bodes well. I've played a few of these things and most of them don't have this amount of heft. Didn't run into any bugs, either. Well, unless you count the spiders.

On the other hand, few modern games have such awkward graphics, controls and movement. Yes, I got used to all of it quickly enough but a moment's consideration could hardly fail to bring up unfortunate comparisons with just about any other modern mmorpg you care to name. A potent cocktail of novelty and familiarity carried me through but I fear it wouldn't carry me far.

That said, Ethyrial is definitely now on my radar. I'd say that means the demo did its job.

Who Likes Short Shorts? Steam Likes Short Shorts.

Another  year, another Next Fest. How often do they run these things, anyway? Seems like once a quarter.

However often it is, maybe it's too often. Last night I scrolled through the entire catalog and I can't say I was impressed. Every other time I've done it, at least a couple of games have jumped out at me but this time around I'm not at all sure I'd have bothered with any of them if it wasn't for the blogging opportunities.

After about half an hour of scrolling and clicking, reading descriptions, looking at screenshots and watching the odd gameplay clip, I settled for six demos:

• Mika and the Witch's Mountain
• Grace Online
• The Black Grimoire
• Zid Journey
• Hello Goodboy
• Splittown

This morning, after reading about it at MassivelyOP, I added a seventh:

• Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore

Seven demos is probably about as many as I could hope to check out before the event ends on Monday and even then I doubt I'll be finishing most of them. 

I certainly won't be finishing Grace or Ethyrial; they're both mmorpgs. You don't "finish" mmos, not even in demo form. And honestly, even if you could, neither of them really appeals to me enough to imagine I'd try. 

I feel honor-bound to at least look at pretty much any new mmorpg I happen upon but Grace Online looks kind of vague and nebulous, while Ethyrial purports to be one of those uphill in the snow both ways throwbacks, this time with both mandatory grouping and full-loot PvP. I'm not sure why people keep making those. When was the last time one succeeded? I'm guessing never.

Still, character creation is always fun and you never know when something is going to light a candle in your soul. I mean, I'm still playing Noah's Heart...

All things being equal, I'm hoping to try one of the mmorpgs later today. That said, I tried to play Grace Online last night and couldn't connect to  the server, so no promises. There was no indication whether the server itself was down or whether the problem was something to do with my settings but either way  it doesn't bode well.

Thwarted, I played Mika and the Witch's Mountain instead. It's "a fantasy adventure about an aspiring witch who delivers packages to the townspeople of a small island" and its tags include "wholesome" and "cute" which, along with the delightfully colorful screenshots, was what attracted me to add it to the list.

The first thing to greet me on logging in was a warning that the game was only playable with a controller so not to bother trying to use a keyboard and mouse. This, it turns out, is not true; there's a correction on the game's Steam page saying "The game is currently compatible with both gamepad and keyboard/mouse, but UI prompts only show gamepad shortcuts. We will fix it tomorrow." 

I didn't know that at the time so I plugged in my trusty, cheap, Made in China gamepad and got on with it. I was glad to. I've been looking for an excuse to use the thing.

In-game instructions seemed sparse but with a little random button-pressing I soon had Mika careering into walls as the camera span wildly, which is pretty much par for the course when I use a controller. Finding the map and menu took a little longer but not so long as to be annoying.

The game opens with Mika's mentor, Oligari, pushing her off a cliff. 

Well, okay, not exactly "opens". There's a bit of dialog first. Some scene-setting. A little backstory. Not much. Then it's five hundred feet in freefall and a crash landing that snaps Mika's broom in half. 

The rest of the plot would appear to revolve around earning enough money to buy a powerful-enough broom to fly back up to the top of the cliff, which is the graduation exam Oligari has set Mika to prove she's ready to become a witch. Before that, you'll need to help her find all the things that fell out of her backpack on the way down. And before that, find someone kind enough to fix the broken broom for free, because without some kind of flying broom your earning capacity is zero.

It's engaging stuff. Mika is chatty, the people she meets are friendly, the world is bright, colorful and charming. It only takes a minute or two to get your broom mended, after which you're free to swoop around at head height like a wounded butterfly. It's very clear you won't be climbing into the clouds on this thing but at least now you won't starve.

A fellow in the town square offers Mika a job delivering parcels. He's cagey about pay, even when she pushes him. In authentic gig economy style, everything rests on reviews. If your customers aren't happy, you don't get paid.

I did find the strict adherence to 21st century employment mores uncomfortably ironic but then what do almost all games do but try to turn things that would be unbearable in real life into welcome entertainment. Sometimes I wonder about us all.

Philosophy aside, gameplay is fun. Chatting to townsfolk, picking up parcels, bouncing your broom off walls an buildings to gain height, then swooping down to try and land on a dock or a fishing boat without tipping into the sea had all my attention for twenty minutes or so. And then I threw up.

Okay, no, I didn't. I just felt like I was going to. Unlike Mrs.Bhagpuss, I don't often suffer from motion sickness while playing games but the lurching, wheeling, yawing flight of the broomstick (As controlled by a thoroughly incompetent gamepad-user, namely me.) left me feeling too nauseous to carry on. 

I think it would have been okay if I'd heeded the obvious signs and taken some breaks but I was enjoying myself too much to stop until I had no choice. Without that major drawback I would certainly have played through Mika and the Witch's Mountain until the demo's end. I still might, now I know you can use the mouse and keyboard, after all.

The whole thing feels tight and well-made, barring some very slightly wonky translations, which honestly just add to the charm of the affair. There's a particularly good piece of fourth-wall bending if you check the mailbox, something I thought spoke well of the quality of the writing. 

I'm not sure I saw enough to give a full recommendation but I'd certainly encourage anyone who likes this kind of gentle, explore-and-collect gameplay to check out the demo, particularly if they know how to use a gamepad safely. 

One down, six to go.

"What Are We Doing Here? I Dunno. But Here We Are!"

I had absolutely no intention of following one music post with another. That would just be cruel. I also had absolutely no intention of commenting on the Grammys this year. I did it once and I think I got away with it but there's no sense tempting fate.

However, sometimes circumstances conspire and things happen that simply can't be ignored. This is one them.

Bizarrely - or perhaps not, if you follow my methodology - there's no tag for Wet Leg on this blog. There really should be, since I keep writing about them. (And there is, now.) A search query finds ten posts, just about all of them including a video. Anyone would think I liked them or something.

I first wrote about the band on July 22 2021, the same day I discovered them by way of a post on Everett True's now-dormant blog How NOT To Write About Music, a problem Everrett seems to have solved pretty handily by just stopping. I have no plans to follow his lead in that regard but I thank him once again for introducing me to the band he originally, if wildly inaccurately, assumed to be "some corporate-funded suck-ass rich kid duo from the Midwest of America".

As everyone now knows, they are not. They're from the Isle of Wight. At the time, that was pretty much all anyone did know about them. As they've risen to international fame, more has been revealed, including much that contradicts and confounds some of the more romantic myths about how the band was formed. They do not, after all, appear to have fallen quite so green from the tree as once was thought.

Still, they have no real form before the astonishing reveal that introduced their laconic, affectless, whimsical motorik drone to the world in a video now revealed to be the Best Alternative Music Performance of last year - in the eyes of the Grammy electorate, at least. Even if it actually arrived the year before. 

The band seem as bemused by the whole thing as, frankly, I am. I mean, to be nominated for the Mercury is one thing, even if you lose, but I always think of the Grammys as an exceptionally American institution. I'm kind of surprised to find any UK acts in the nominations at all. 

Added to that, when you consider the other UK artists who also got recognized this year, specifically the ones against whom Wet Leg were competing, you're looking at bands who've been around for years; bands with global profiles: Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine. And the rest of the nominees included Bjork ffs!

Not that the video for Chaise Longue doesn't deserve to be included in its category, where the list of nominees was strikingly similar. It's one of the best pop videos period, let alone the best "alternative" and not just of last year but of all time. The song, too, is a classic. I hope its creators remain as fond of it twenty-five years from now, when it's undoubtedly still going to be the one number from their back catalog they'll still absolutely have to play at every gig.

It's a big assumption, that Wet Leg will still be a thing going into the second half of the 21st century but these days no-one ever stops and one signature tune everyone remembers and can yell along to is pretty much all you're ever going to need. Of course, having just won what's probably the biggest award in popular music for making the best album in their weight class, first time out, no less, chances are they'll have more than one song to remember them by, come 2050.

Right now, though, I imagine the whole thing seems like a fever dream. When Rhian Teasdale made the first acceptance speech, for the Performance award she made no attempt to conceal her disbelief. With glorious understatement she observed "This year has been so surprising". For all of us, Rhian.

It's puzzled me for a while, the way every news report, review or opinion piece on Wet Leg refers to the band as a duo. It seems odd to relegate the other three musicians to the role of sidemen. It was heartening, then, to see drummer Henry Holmes take the mic for the second award and even more heartening to hear him describe the band as "one big, fucked up family." 

Given the exceptional level of fame and success this DIY project has achieved in just a couple of years, I suspect they're going to need that level of emotional support as they build what could and most likely will be a long and successful career. My closing comments from a year and a half ago, when I expressed doubt that the promised "string of releases", planned to follow Chaise Longue would ever materialize, look pretty silly now.

To add an element of realism to this otherwise positively surreal story, Wet Leg did not win the biggest award they were up for last night. While they dominated the relatively niche "Alternate" categories, they were unsuccessful in the much more prestigious, non-genre-based "Best New Artist". That was taken by Samara Joy, a jazz singer of some repute, with whose work I am wholly unfamiliar.

A typically wilful and idiosyncratic selection by the electorate, some might say. I couldn't possibly comment. I'll let Chris deVille at Stereogum do that for me:

"You never want to rule out the chance that the Grammys will reward a jazz artist just to remind you they’re the Grammys. Young singer Samara Joy could feasibly pull an Esperanza Spalding, given that she’s unleashing her rich alto on music that feels like it was in the same ultra-respectable mid-20th century milieu where many in the Academy’s brains seem stuck."

Curiously, despite having been a very early adopter, a fan to the extent of having a framed copy of one of their seven-inch singles on my wall, I don't really listen to Wet Leg all that often. They may have won the award for best album but they seem to me to be an archetypal singles band, best suited to be heard booming unexpectedly out of the windows of a passing car as it cruises by with all the windows wound down or popping up, suddenly and joyously, on MTV or whatever passes for music television these days. A whole album's a bit too much of a good thing. I find listening to it all the way through feels a bit like eating an entire box of chocolates on my own, self-indulgent and ulitimately enervating.

Anyway, congratulations to them all and here's to whatever they'll do next. One thing's for sure; the world's going to be watching, now. 

So, no pressure there, guys...

I Know A Song That'll Get On Your Nerves (I Think That Might Be The Name Of The Feature Now...)

Before I checked my download folder just now, I was wondering if I'd have enough new songs for "What Have I Been Listening To This Week?"  but it turns out I've been listening to a lot. Twenty new numbers in there. Way too many for one post.

Where to begin, then? Let's see...

Okay, how about an obvious crowd-pleaser to start? One we can all sing along with. Everyone knows this one, right?

Video Killed The Radio Star - Teenage Dads

I've never heard of these guys before but a quick check tells me they've been around for seven years or so. They really were teenagers when they started although not, as far as my researches tell me, dads. They still look like kids, even now; bass and guitar sport the kind of mustaches you grow just to prove you can, vocals/keyboards reminds me of a very young Matthew Perry and the drummer looks like he's wandered in from another band altogether, most likely on the way to the beach.

It's not every day you see someone sing an entire song through a nineteen-eighties vintage rotary phone, either. There's a behind-the-scenes interview, where they talk about how they rigged the thing up as a microphone, which is really going above and beyond for a one-off cover. I followed up on a few of their other videos on YouTube but nothing really struck me, although the original tune they did for the same TripleJ session, Teddy, is pretty good fun.

Now we're all warmed up, let's keep the vibe going with another cover of a song we all know and, I assume, love...

Sk8er Boi - STAYC Yoon

I'm making a halfhearted attempt to come to terms with KPop although at my age and this far into the process it's a fairly forlorn hope. Still, you get nowhere if you don't try. At least I recognize a few of the names now and I'm beginning to get a glimmer of an idea how the machinery behind the whole cultural phenomenon works. I think. Maybe. Probably fooling myself, there.

This is Yoon from STAYC (Stands for "Star to a Young Culture" because all these names turn out to be unpredictable acronyms.) with her cover of the Avril Levigne pop-punk classic. All the members of STAYC are doing covers at the moment but this is the only one where I knew the original. Weirdly, even though I've heard Avril's version loads of times, it was only while watching this version, with the lyrics on screen and my attention drawn to them by Yoon's delicate, accented enunciation, that I finally realized exactly what the song's about. I mean, I knew but I didn't know, y'know?

Trust Yourself - Balming Tiger

Since we're in Korea... This is really catchy, isn't it? I love that fuzz bass boom. Like a jet warming up. And he's really enthusiastic. I like that a lot. The whole affair sounds very old school nineties rap. Reminds me of the kind of radio-friendly hip-hop that made the charts back then.

Speaking of old school, anyone else remember the schoolyard rumor you could get high by rubbing tiger balm on your forehead? I think I must have been twelve or thirteen when that one was going around. Tried it. Doesn't work. Although it does feel weird...

And for our final visit to South Korea for today...

아름다운 세상 (Beautiful World) - 파란노을 (Parannoul)

Now that's different. I mean, it's not different different in that it sounds like a lot of other things I've heard - Sigur Ros, Cranes, any number of post-rock/shoegaze crossover outfits - but it's very much not what I think of when I hear Korean music mentioned. Japanese or even Chinese, yes. Indonesian, certainly. Pretty blinkered of me not to realize South Korea would have its own hinterland, outside the obvious mainstream. You surf and you  learn.

I really like the video, too. I wish more bands would use stills of scenery instead of chucking food at each other.

Okay, I have to thank Syp for introducing me to this next one. It takes a while to get going, so give it time...

Penny Lane - the Fairmount Girls

Now, you'd expect that to be a cover, wouldn't you? Huge props to the band for not being scared to use the title they wanted even though someone else got there first. No-one says "props" any more, either, do they? Far from sounding like the Beatles, it sounds like the parts of the Velvet Underground people don't usually revisit. Specifically, it sounds like an outtake from Loaded. 

There's very little online by the Fairmount Girls but what there is is uniformly excellent. I love the lead singer's voice, the way it seems to crack with scarcely concealed heartbreak. The harmonies are stellar, too. If we had space I'd give you another but we're crammed. Let's press on.

I think that concludes our new-to-the-blog section for today. From here on in it's new stuff by old favorites. Like...

Nowhere - Patrick Wolf

Anyone jonesing for some B&W goth glam? Patrick's got you covered. Back after a years-long layoff following a near-fatal car accident, this is Wolf's second release in a decade, following last November's Enter the Day. He's one of rock's renaissance men, writing, producing and playing every instrument, but it's his voice that carries the weight; resonant, expressive, emotive, vulnerable and confident all at once. It's good to have him back.

Boy’s a liar Pt. 2 - Pink Pantheress, Ice Spice

While Patrick Wolf toils away in virtual obscurity, Pink Pantheress' star continues to rise and rise. As I write this, the video above sits at a spooky 666k views after less than twenty-four hours on YouTube. Patrick's comeback managed less than two percent of that attention in as many months.

I read somewhere that Pantheress's style is so easily copied she's in danger of being overwhelmed by those she's influenced but she sounds pretty distinctive still to me. So does Ice Spice, who I know I ought to like but who, until now, I just haven't been able to handle. Clearly an age/gender/culture thing on my part. Thankfully, this collab offers a way in. At my age, I can use all the help I can get.

Song About Love - English Teacher

I was introduced to the joys of English Teacher by way of the Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition I wrote about last year. They didn't win but they were one of the acts that got a chance to perform, where they apparently smashed it. I liked them well enough back then, but this is the best thing of theirs I've heard. I particularly like the breakdown into chaos towards the end.

Given the title, lyric and sentiment, maybe I should have saved it for Valentine's Day although perhaps that would have been too cynical. The call is already out for the Emerging class of 2023. I'll be reporting on that when the longlist is published, no doubt. Not like I'd miss an opportunity for a post where someone else has already done the hard work.

Blasé - Mary Shelley 

Yes, the sound quality on this is awful but compare this version, if you will, to another, clearer, better-recorded live take of the same song, here, performed in broad daylight on a street corner, seemingly to no-one.  Yep. No comparison. 

If ever a band was meant for low-ceilinged, beer-drenched basement clubs, whose management have no respect for fire regulations, it's this one. They feed off the energy of the audience in a particularly visceral way that marks them out as a great live band but they're about as comfortable in daylight as a nest of vampires. Judging by their lyrics, they're so dissociated from the world they move in, I suspect they're going nowhere much further than Brooklyn but I'm glad I at least got to see something of them before the inevitable burnout sends them back to whatever it is they do for a day job.

And finally, since we started in Australia...

Good Time - Alex Lahey

She never disappoints. A loping, swaying, swooping talking blues with the longest hiatus I think I've ever heard. It's a full twenty seconds! I wonder if it's like that on the "record", to use an archaic term, or only in the video, where you can at least look at her while there's no music playing.

I think that'll have to do for now. It's only about half of the tracks I had lined up but the likes of Nia Archives, Angel Electronics, Yaeji and Neggy Jemmy are just going to have to wait for next time. Of course, by next time I'll most likely have twenty more...

Daisy Jones & Co.

Believe it or not, I have actually been taking notes in anticipation of a catch-all Friday post for this week. I know, right? Pod person alert!

Of course, when I say "taking notes", what I really mean is I've been bookmarking pieces that sparked an interest or making brief mental notes on things I've heard or seen. It's not like I've worked up an essay plan or anything. I still have to sit here and somehow spin this base metal into gold. Gold thread. Whatever.

It's a useful step in the process, anyway; the mere act of recording an idea. It tends to lead to musing, not to say brooding. It's a bit like prepping vegetables. You don't want to start too soon or they'll lose their freshness but getting some of the work done ahead of time does make things a whole lot easier when it comes to the actual cooking. 

Okay. I'll stop with the analogies. They're not helping. When did they ever?

Let's see what we've got. Here are the topics I bookmarked, literally or figuratively, this week:

1. The Daisy Jones and the Six adaptation and soundtrack album.
2. Velma becomes the worst rated show on IMDB ever.
3. Lockwood & Co.
4. Syberia

Not a lot, is it? Still, these things tend to balloon. I'm sure it'll be enough. If not, we can always pad things out with a song or two.  

Let's start with #s 1 and 3 because they fit together in an unexpected way.

For anyone who hasn't stepped into a bookstore in the last couple of years, Daisy Jones and the Six is a novel by Taylor Jenkins Read. Read is the 39-year old author of eight novels, the last four of which are set in the same universe, as we're now, almost unselfconsciously, training ourselves to think of these things. 

As far as I can tell, no-one paid much attention to the first four. Until I did some research for this post, I hadn't even heard of them, which is kind of surprising, seeing what a huge deal the rest of them have been and what I do for a living. 

This, though, is how publishing works. I can't count the number of "new authors" I've watched being "discovered", only to find they have a back catalog going back years. It applies to several of my favorite writers of recent times- Rainbow Rowell, Emily St. John Mandell, Frances Hardinge - and now, thanks to TikTok, which is in the process of rewriting the rules for both publishers and booksellers, it's happening to dozens of authors all at once.

Taylor Jenkins Read isn't, so far as I know, a TikTok phenomenon. I'm not really sure what caused her sixth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, to catch the reading public's attention but by the time it happened I, for once, already knew who she was.

I'd read Daisy Jones and the Six a couple of years before, in proof. It had a catchy cover, an engaging title and it was about a rock band in the 1970s. Predictably, I gave it a try; less predictably, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I have something of a history with novels about rock groups. When I was a teenager there hardly were any. Rock music wan't seen as something adults wanted to read about, I guess, and in the days before the Young Adult genre existed, adolescents were barely even thought of as a market, other than for exploitation and media spin-offs.

Still, there were a few. All Night Stand by Thom Keyes was one that often got mentioned although, as I found out when I finally tracked down a copy, it's not very good. I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo by Nik Cohn was another. I was lucky enough to grab a copy of one of the best ever written, Mick Farren's The Tale of Willy's Rats, when it was published in 1974. It's been out of print pretty much ever since.

Nowadays, every kind of musical act from a struggling indie band to a bunch of global megastars is as likely to turn up in prose fiction as any artist, actor or creative profession - other than writer, of course. Writers just frickin' love writing about writers. Even so, books that focus on the process of being in a band still aren't that common.

What's even more unusual are fictional bands that make the transition from the page to the recording studio. I'm not talking about the kind of projects I addressed recently, where a band made up of actors features in a movie or a a TV show, then takes the whole performance on the road. That happens more often than the reverse, where musicians are hired to recreate the sound of a band that already exists (And has usually already split up.) in the pages of a novel.

Until it was announced that a scad of professional songwriters, among them Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers and Jackson Browne, would be coming up with an album's-worth of songs by Daisy Jones and the The Six, to be recorded by "instrumentalists who’ve played with Rilo Kiley, the Who, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, Elton John, Jeff Beck, the Wallflowers, and more", the only example I could think of off the top of my head was the radio adaptation of Iain Banks 1980s novel Espedair Street. 

Banks himself wrote the words and music for the imaginary band, Frozen Gold, in collaboration with Nigel Clark. It was performed for the show by a band put together for the purpose, aired twice, then was never heard again. It remains my go-to for proof you can't just find everything you want on the internet.

I read a lot of books and I rarely remember much about them afterwards, other than a fairly clear impression of whether I liked them or not and whether I thought they were any good, not necessarily in any way the same thing. I liked Daisy Jones and The Six and I thought it was good. I went on to read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which was even better.

Read is both marketed and widely thought of as a light, romantic, middlebrow writer, whose books are aimed at and appeal mostly to young women. In common with plenty of other writers caught up in that commercial bracket, she has plenty to offer readers of a much wider demographic but don't get me started on the horrors of genre marketing. With luck, the adaptation, due to appear on Amazon Prime next month as a ten episode mini-series, will introduce her work to a whole new audience. If it's any good, that is.

Adaptations of novels are tricky things even when there isn't an entire discography to spin up out of nowhere. I mentioned The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, a version of Sally Green's Half Bad that was shown on Netflix last year. I watched the whole thing with considerable enjoyment. It was a dark, grimy, glamorous, disturbing vision of a contemporary world where magic was real. It was critically well-received and sat in Netflix UK's Top Ten for a while but I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to know it's already been cancelled.

At least, as an adaptation of an extant series of novels, there's no need to guess what would have happened next; you can just go read the book. That's something I may well do, both for Half Bad and for the Netflix show I started watching a couple of days ago - Lockwood & Co.

Lockwood & Co. is based on a series of YA novels by Jonathan Stroud and for once I haven't read any of them, neither before or after publication. I thought I had. I mistakenly believed - unti l I fact-checked it - that Stroud was also the author of the long-running "Spook" series, which I did read the first of in proof a long time ago and which Mrs Bhagpuss liked enough to buy the first half-dozen or so, when she spotted them in a charity shop, although I'm not sure if she ever got around to reading any of them.

In fact, it was Joseph Delaney who wrote the Spook books, whose ghost-hunting premise and teenage protagonists appear to be all the two series have in common. Still, the imagined link to something I knew and liked was enough to catch my eye - that and the uncanny similarity between Lockwood & Co. as an organization and DC Comics' Dead Boy Detectives, originally created by Neil Gaiman and who I first encountered in the TV version of Doom Patrol.

Each team consists of two boys and a girl, all in their late teens. Both outfits act without adult supervision to investigate supernatural phenomena and solve mysteries. The main point of departure would seem to be that both Dead Boy Detectives are, as the name suggests, dead, while Lockwood and his pal are most decidedly still alive.

As I write, Lockwood & Co. is #1 in Netflix UK's Top Ten. I've seen the first two episodes and they are fast, fun and already a good deal less frothy than I was expecting. The set-up, a roughly contemporary Britain in which angry, incoherant ghosts have been ruling the night and killing millions for over half a century, certainly gets points for originality from me. If it's been done quite this way before, I haven't seen it.

As well as what look like solid viewing figures, the show also has both audience and critical acclaim. As Forbes fumes, though, this means nothing when it comes to whether we'll ever get to see a second season. In that article, Paul Tassi makes the same point that's been raised here several times - writers of these shows are just going to have to learn to deal with the massive uncertainty over whether they'll get to continue their stories and stop ending every season with a cliffhanger, whose resolution, more likely than not, will never come.

As I've said, though, fear of an unresolved narrative is not going to put me off  trying new shows. And, once again, in this case there's a safety net. If the show doesn't get picked up for a second (Or third, or fourth...) season, I'll just have to read the books.

Always assuming, of course, that the adaptation stays faithful enough to the original make that a rational option. It's not always the case as, by absolutely all accounts I've seen, the newest take on the Scooby Gang demonstrates.

But I've gone on long enough. Velma will have to wait, along with Syberia. Probably just as well.

Friday Next

Until last night, I thought I had at least one post nailed down for the end of this week. It's the beginning of the month so I thought I'd get at least a thousand words out of Amazon's latest drop of free games to Prime. 

It's a fun post to write and best of all, I can usually outsource a chunk of the work to whoever writes the official descriptions. Sure, it's a bit of a faff, cutting and pasting and adding all the links, but I enjoy it. It's a bit like scrapbooking, only you don't have to pick bits paper out of the carpet for days afterwards.

Remembering Amazon's scattershot approach when it comes to revealing the new games, for once I remembered to check the web page in good time. I tried on the last day of January and the first day of February, without success. Nothing unusual about that. Sometimes the announcement doesn't come until the third or fourth of the month.

For some reason, though, this time it occured to me to google and see if anyone else had information to share. Boy, did they...

A quick search for "Free Amazon Prime games February 2023" brought a torrent of results. It seems everyone from Forbes to India Today just can't wait to let their readers know what to expect. All of them had the full list of February's nine free games along with something more important than a simple reveal of the titles. As Forbes explains:

"Rather than make them all available at once, as has been the case in the past, the freebies will be spread out over the month." 

They also had a schedule. And thumbnail descriptions. If I was to cut and paste the whole thing it would pretty much fill the post for me. It's tempting but I'm not that cheap. You can click through the link if you're curious.

Instead, I'll content myself with borrowing just the names and dates from Gamespot, who have them neatly bullet-pointed:

• February 2
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition
  • Onsen Master
• February 9
  • Aerial_Knight's Never Yield
    
  • Divine Knockout
• February 16
  • One Hand Clapping
  • BATS: Bloodsucker Anti-Terror Squad
• February 23
  • Space Crew: Legendary edition
  • Tunche
  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this new development. Oh, I know how I feel about the games - totally uninterested. I'm no fan of the Elder Scrolls franchise. I can just about cope with ESO but the rest of them I can more than happily live without. And that's the best of the bunch.

I read the Steam descriptions of the rest of them and there wasn't one I'd consider playing in the depths of a gaming drought. Customer management in a hot springs resort? Solving puzzles by singing and humming into your microphone? Trading in organs? This is supposed to be entertainment?!

So much for the new content. How about the change in distribution? Don't rush me - I'm still thinking...

 

On the one hand, I really liked getting a whole bunch of games dropped on me at the beginning of every month. It felt like an event. It also gave me a good, solid post that I always enjoy putting together, even if the lack of response always suggested it was a bit of a self-indulgent pleasure.

On the other, now I'll get a nice surprise each week (Always assuming I don't peek.) and I can almost certainly spin something up out of every one of them, should I not have anything better to write about. It would certainly make an excellent sub-section in a Friday Grab-Bag, if nothing more.

Of course, the games would have to be a lot more to my taste for it to feel worth the trouble. Another month like this one and I might just stop bothering to look altogether, let alone write a post. 

That's about al I have to say, except to note one other interesting aspect of the February package:

"To celebrate Black History Month, Amazon Prime Gaming has included four titles (Onsen Master, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield, BATS: Bloodsucker Anti-Terror Squad, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator) developed by Black developers in the February lineup."

That's a solid move. I look forward to more socially-aware giveaways in future.

 

As far as the in-game reward program goes, nothing has changed. It's still a melange of boosts and cosmetics for dozens of disparate titles. I skimmed the offer but didn't find anything worth mentioning, far less claiming.

All in all, then, a barren month for me. Never mind. Steam's next Steam NextFest starts on Monday. It's usually way more fun and I bet I can get a whole load of posts out of that one!