The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Zeitgeist”

After a nearly decade-long absence from the musical scene, Billy Cogran and his five-piece rock group, The Smashing Pumpkins, return with their brand new album, aptly titled Zeitgeist (pronounced ‘zeet-jiste’).

While I myself have never really been a fan of this sort of angsty dream psychedelic alternative hard rock combination (I think the Pumpkins would have better luck with a more Funk pop alternative hardcore sound), Zeitgeist is certainly an interesting and ultimately successful album, which is sure to please hardcore fans of The Smashing Pumpkins and James Iha alike.

Along with Cogran’s return is famed bassist, Flea, and drummer Thommy Chamberlin. The trio makes up the original lineup of the Pumpkins, although James Iha is sorely missing.

The opening song, “Doomsday Cock”, is an experimental grunge piece that harkens back to the old days of The Pumpkins, primarily their first album “Loveless.” It’s an interesting choice to open the album, seeing as the song is split into two tracks, the second being track number two, “Se7en Shades of Black.” I don’t know for the life of me why Cogran decided to split one song into two tracks, but I’m assuming both halves of the song are about the Brad Pitt film Se7en, what with that big bladey cock thing and all.

The third track on the album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” seems to be titled after their second album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” It’s an okay song I guess, but quite a tonal shift from the first song(s?). I don’t really understand why William Cogran’s voice is so fucking loud though. Go figure.

“(My Love Is) That Way” covers the fourth track, mostly a bizarre instrumental featuring what sounds like Billy Cogran dying, or possibly drinking a lot of wine. I kind of skipped this track anyway so it don’t matter.

The fifth and final (of the first five) track would be the album’s first single, “Tarantula,” a loving ode to Spider-Man and his tight, sexy suit. While the song is good for the most part, it’s pretty obvious that Cogran copied the main riff from Radiohead’s “Shrinking Universe” but I can forgive him for that, because Radiohead is so fucking awesome.

So anyway, I kind of stopped listening to the rest of the songs because House was on, and that’s a really funny show. So I’m going to give this album a patented…

Four out of Six Strings

Review of "Halo 3"

After a startlingly brief six year wait, the infamous Halo franchise makes its fabled return into the consoles of many "video-gamingers" across the country. And, as luck would have it, your very own Scott Speiderman happens to be one of those so-called gamingers who had a friend who had an Xbox 360° and watched him play a few minutes of the game, so I could review it JUST FOR YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL FUCKING SWINE. Oh, sorry, jeez.

So where does the story of the newest Halo game begin? We begin as Master Chief (now a meteor--surprisingly difficult to navigate with) crashes down on a planet that is probably earth, or possible California. Once Meteor-Chief reverts to his original form (some purple chick I think) the game begins, immediately thrusting you into walking around a space station of some sort for several minutes, and looking at a bunch of red lights. I don't know what this has to do with Halos or anything, but there are certainly more than a few lights to look at.

After a bunch of pointless bullshit involving giant talking flowers and some sort of "prophet", Master Chieftain is taken to the titular Halo, one of several, being the cheerios in the giant bowl of milk that is the universe. Turns out God (Clapton?) is very hungry and wants to eat all of them, which the Prophets refer to as some sort of great journey, which I believe involves driving a shitty car into walls for five minutes, while a bunch of purple guys shoot blue things at you.

After successfully exploding the "Halo" and rescuing one of them negros from a giant crab robot, The Chief goes back to Earf and welcomes some aliens to it. With a punch in the fuckin' face, bitches. So it turns out that Master is pretty badass, and punches a lot of purple guys and gorillas in the neck, all while saving the wonderful fauna and flora of the planet. I'm assuming Master John's green armor is some sort of environmentalist reference, and the theme of saving earth from something called a "Covenant" is about global warming. Because really, Johnny Chief could probably punch global warming so fucking hard that it would knock it through the space-time continuum back into the ice-age thus melting the ice and bringing about the end of said age so the planet can grow and evolve prosperously until this whacky time paradox comes up again and Master Chief drinks global God damn warming like a fucking beer.

The only part I didn't quite understand about Halo's gameplay was the lack of an onscreen character model. Rather than seeing The Chief you play as a floating gun. It's probably some artsy choice or some kind of epic metaphor for why guns are bad and shit but who knows anymore.

Not me.
The game comes to an end in a fun but slightly mystifying way, pitting you against the Halos themselves in a Mario Kartesque racing game.

And while the ending is quite strange, the music of the game is certainly very Clapton. There's a lot of cool orchestral and rock stuff, and being that it sounds good that usually means it was done by Eric "Messiah" Clapton. The sounds kick in at the right times, and sometimes your gun shoots guitar riffs which is crazy fun times.

All in all, Halo 3 is a lengthy and strange trip through the minds of cloth-covered rubber cord enthusiasts and is sure to sell like five million fuckin' thousand copies and all that cool shit, most likely so these developers can buy more of their fabled cords. I can't completely recommend the game, though, due to a few nasty faults in the game design. The first, and probably biggest, problem comes in the fact that you can only carry two weapons at a time. What the fuck is up with that? Most times I've ever played a game I could carry like twenty weapons and shit so I don't know what they were thinking with that one. This leads to another problem, which is that sometimes the weapons you have run out of ammo-unition and there isn't always some lying around on the ground (also why do my feet reload my weapons?). There are, of course, like a fuckin' hundred guns and shit laying all over the ground like a nine-year-olds room and it would REALLY improve the game if I could actually pick all these guns up but no there's just a bunch of words and symbols that keep appearing on the screen and nobody knows what the fuck.

Anyways, Halo 3 is good but could be improved so I'll be giving it...

Four out of Six Space Cheerios

Review of My OK Computer Review

Today I thought I’d give a review of my previous review of Radiohead’s OK Computer album, an album created with loving care by the masterful hands of Thom Yorke and guitarist James Marshall Hendrix.

The first thing you’ll notice about my brilliant review is my comparison of Eric “Christ” Clapton and Radiohead’s airy guitar notes, scattered throughout most songs like an errant wind. The review then continues on to discuss the deeper meanings behind the lyrics of their famous hit, “Creep” and its psychological effect on former singer Beck Hansen (later replaced by Thom Yorke, although you can still hear Beck’s vocals on certain songs, especially “Lost Cause” off of Radiohead’s Sea Change album).

It’s obvious to those who have read the review how much quality and research was put into making it the best and most accurate review possible, and the next sections are no exception to that rule.

If you can read between the lines of this review, and few probably have the encyclopedic knowledge as I do, you’ll be able to pick out some of the deeper and more anthropological implications of the music and its overall effects on the industry, as well as the connections between how machines dehumanize mankind and Radiohead’s support of this concept. The review consistently stays on track with this fact and analyzes it in great extent, which is why it’s such a badass review, almost as if it were written by Snake Plissken himself!

Although my review is, for the most part, flawless, I cannot in good conscience give it a perfect score due to slight personal bias. I don’t believe it’s anything too intrusive, but I am most likely prone to rate my own content a bit higher than others, so I’ve knocked off what I will hereon refer to as “Bias Points.”

Four out of Six Reviewses.

Fight Club

Fight Club is a really confusing movie, to say the least. Written and directed by David Fincher (Alien 3, Panic! At the Disco, and most recently Zodiacs), Fight Club stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as two detectives trying to undercover the mysterious secret behind “the game”, a supposed underground boxing ring started by a guy named Tyler Durden.

Brad Pitt plays the title role as “Tyler Durden” who also narrates the film, as our protagonist shares the same name with the leader of “Project Mayhem” which is the whole “game” thing that this club of fighting centers around. The soundtrack was done by The Pixies as the song “Where is My Mind” is in every fucking scene in the movie and gets really distracting.

Anyway, Durden and Morgan Freeman (playing against type in this film as a “wise African American) go on the hunt for Kirk Douglas, currently knee-deep in the “game” that they keep talking about (although they never really explain what the hell the game is in the first place). We first meet Douglas as he’s giving the rules of this so-called Fight Club, of which there are eight (one of which I remember).

At this point in the film, we start to see some very obvious cracks in the character of Jack Torrence, leading up to the brilliant reveal of the novel he’s been writing during most of the movie. Shelley Duvall’s reaction is acting genius.

Confusing plot aside, Fincher’s directing is fairly sharp. I don’t know why he chose to film the entire movie through a green piece of plastic, but it works for the most part and highlights the other shades of green brought out in the stunning art direction provided by famed painter Pablo Picasso.

The major turning point in the movie comes when we discover that Morgan Freeman is actually the same person as Michael Douglas, who is also the same person as Edward Norton (who does not appear in this film), and the brilliant cameo by Meat Loaf really change the tone of the film from “romantic comedy” to “romantic-western.”

While I mostly enjoyed the film, I was put off by the homoerotic sex sequence between Pitt and Freeman, made all the worse by the decapitated head of a woman in the box. Fincher’s fetishy obsessions are evident all too much in this scene and really break the flow of the movie. After the weirdness of that particular sequence, the film comes back on track and barrels towards the end a bit briskly, but the closing parts of the film mostly tie together the loose ends (with some plot holes glaring—ie; if Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were the same person, how did they talk to one another?).

Even with its flaws, Flight Club is a very fascinating look into the collapsing human psyche and a smartly veiled allegory for racism and incest in the south (much like the brilliant work of eroticism before it, “Deliverance”).

Four out of Six Thumbs Up

Fight Club is rated PG-13 for strong graphic brutal nonstop bloody sex and thematic elements.

OK Computer by Radio Head

Ah, Radiohead. At one point in time I used to consider them to be the best band in the entire universe, next to Eric “God” Clapton, but those times passed once Radiohead released this monstrosity into the world, with the demonic tongue of Tom Yoke and the airy guitaristry of Jimmy Greenbalm.

The main problem with OK Computer, and music in general, is that there’s too much fucking noise in the songs. I mean seriously, what the fuck is up with all that clicking and what sounds like Greenbalm setting his guitar on fire before the chorus to “Creeper” is really beyond me. And sadly, “Creeper” is likely the best song on OK Computer, and even more likely to be played endlessly by Yoke & company.

But getting back on track, the first track that the album begins with is a somber piece known in some languages as “Airbag.” What the song has to do with vehicles and shit I really don’t know, but I think Greenbalm accidentally plugged a cello into his amp rather than a guitar, and that first mistake kind of ruins the rest of the song. I mean what the hell, cellos have no place in rock and rolling music, especially not in an album from 2000 like this one. I don’t get it. Whatever.

Anyway, Clapton is really fucking amazing and it’s pretty clear to me that Radioheads stole the riff from “Paranoid Android” from Eric Clapton. I mean, I haven’t actually ever heard Clapton playing that song but by God if it sounds good it’s probably Clapton. (Little known fact: Clapton actually simultaneously played all of the guitar parts to “Layla” live once, but it blew peoples eyes out in its awesomeness thus was not ever recorded.)

I skipped the next track and then got to track five somehow, which is called “Let Down” and boy howdy does that describe this album to a T. I don’t know what Yoke was thinking with this one, rather than shifting more towards the sound of their previous effort, “Hail to the Kid,” Tom options to basically copy Clapton AGAIN. This time he sets his sights on Clapton’s seminal masterpiece, “Champagne Supernova,” (and no fuck you it’s not a fucking Oasis song) complete with the exact same chord-progression. To his credit, Yoke did change the lyrics a bit, but the melody to the song is actually just “Champagne Supernova” played in reverse with like a shitton of reverb effects and stuff on it.

The next song is actually a cover of NWA’s “Fuck the Police”, with a sample from Vanilla Ice’s hit “Cop Killer.” To avoid lawsuits, Radio Hat changed the name of the song to “Karma Police” probably because no one knows what the hell a karma is anyway ( I believe it’s something from the cartoon Naruto). Actually it’s a pretty kickass cover and a highlight of an otherwise stagnating album, only hampered by the fact that whoever that dude from NWA was didn’t sing it.

I skipped “Fitter Happier” mostly because about two minutes in I realized that someone just left their robot on in the recording studio and it was really dumb anyway. OK Computer indeed.

“Electronating” is the title of the following song, a song in which Tom Yoke yells about going backwards or forwards or something because he can’t make up his damned mind when it comes to directions. Pretty pitiful.

“Climbing Up The Walls” accurately describes the feeling of listening to OK Comodore at any length greater than four minutes and forty-five seconds, which is the exact length of this song in an ironic twist, also being the best song on the album because it features Slash of Guns N’ Roses (and more recently Lincoln Park) on vocals.

And as we reach the final track on the album, since all the ones in between this and “Climbing up the Walls” are just static, we come to the closure that is OK Computer. I forget what the name of this song is but I don’t give two shits since it’s a pretty boring song and I can’t understand anything Tom Yoke sings as it is.

While I didn’t particularly like the album, I can see why the critics are jumping all over it, since most of them probably haven’t listened to Eric Clapton.

Four out of Six Chords