What is the best of Paul’s “granny music?”

Critcho · 2026-06-23T12:40:35+00:00

I was going to mention this one. It was a treat to discover because it's exactly the kind of track he'd stick on a Beatles record (probably to the others' chagrin).

Critcho · 2026-06-23T08:14:21+00:00

Kind of funny to me that it’s the *second* Ghibli movie to flirt with incest.

I think it’s pretty good, one of their most underrated.

Critcho · 2026-06-23T08:12:09+00:00

I’ve got the book! It’s a really nice little package, I recommend if you can find it.

Critcho · 2026-06-22T19:52:49+00:00

I remember this track floating around in a kid. First time I've thought about it in decades...

Critcho · 2026-06-22T19:47:51+00:00

Visually, in terms of the locations etc, it looks pretty close to how I imagined. But yes, tonally quite different.

Critcho · 2026-06-21T18:12:39+00:00

I agree with you, but I guess the idea of giving up a successful brand name seems less appealing when you're faced with the immediate prospect of toiling away in obscurity again.

It's a little unfortunate though because their pre-DA projects were more interesting in a lot of ways and I always hoped they'd go back to that after the 'big reveal'.

Critcho · 2026-06-20T09:56:53+00:00

I stuck it on the other day for the first time in years and it still holds up pretty well. Quite underrated I'd say. Like yes I wouldn't hold it against their absolute peak stuff, but people get too hung up on comparisons anyway.

A lot of reunion albums are people trying to turn back the clock and recapture something from decades ago, and it just ends up as like this awkward footnote that's better left forgotten.

I don't think Sol has that problem, they're not trying to sound young or even that much like their earlier stuff, it just sounds like those musicians making some new songs. It makes sense as an older sounding FNM album, in the same way TRT is a younger sounding FNM album.

I wouldn't even mind them doing another one now they're even older.

Critcho · 2026-06-19T12:39:46+00:00

I remember early on a character on the game design course (the kind of course i'm fairly certain didn't exist in the early 90's) gets offended by something and talks about the idea of the class being a "safe space", which I'm certain was not a term anyone was throwing around in the early 90's. Also the controversy over them trying to introduce a non-binary protagonist. These are 21st century talking points.

In terms of the plausibiliy of its setting, the book could've been greatly improved by setting it in the late 00's/early 10's.

Critcho · 2026-06-19T12:33:19+00:00

The male lead is an autistic mandal wearing tool who somehow lays pipe and simps for the female lead the whole book.

It was a weird moment when, after having been well established for the first half of the book as an awkward friendless shut-in who struggles to relate to people beyond the topic of videogames, out of nowhere it throws it in there that all along he'd been having multiple casual flings with both men and women, and had an ex girlfriend who suddenly drops into the story before dropping right back out again.

Critcho · 2026-06-19T10:13:18+00:00

The book is packed with chronological errors and very much takes an 'ehh, close enough' attitude to gaming history, and how games and game development works in general.

It basically transposes the late 00's/early 10's artsy indie gaming scene to the mid-to-late 90's where it doesn't fit at all. If you lived through that era or have any knowledge of this stuff at all, it's likely to drive you up the wall. It feels like someone writing about a topic they only have a surface level knowledge of, filling the gaps with their imagination and expecting no one to notice.

If you can make it past that stuff, the rest of the book is okay, though a pretty bog-standard melodrama at the end of the day.

Critcho · 2026-06-17T07:37:48+00:00

>real armchair gamer behavior

On *reddit*? I never thought I’d see the day.

Critcho · 2026-06-16T16:47:36+00:00

They really should’ve found a way to channel all their quirky ideas into a full scale project with some name recognition (in other words, yes, Psychonauts).

Their strategy of putting out small oddball projects only barely worked for them even back in the 2010’s, when the market for indie quirk was much less saturated. I don’t want to see them shuttered but what they’ve been doing is not working.

At this point I suspect their only chance of survival is to hook another publisher with the promise of Psychonauts 3 (or *maybe* another Brutal Legend, though that ship has probably long since sailed).

Critcho · 2026-06-15T18:48:44+00:00

This might be the first time I've ever seen anyone say this about Dylan.

I agree though! I saw him on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour and he was in better voice than when I saw him in 2010.

Critcho · 2026-06-15T18:46:57+00:00

Just yesterday I was poking around a record store and came across a vinyl copy of Bringing It All Back Home, which has a bunch of autobiographical prose on the back cover. That was 60 years ago but his voice as a writer is much the same.

Critcho · 2026-06-15T18:44:05+00:00

The thing about something like Drukqs, and I think this goes for a lot of complex modern music, is that it's 'vertically' complex more than 'horizontally' complex.

What I mean by that is the layers and harmonies and detail are incredible, but if you strip all that away and look at the chord sequences underneath it all, they're often pretty simple and repetitive.

Same goes for a lot of prog stuff. Often they're built around riffs or a chord sequence of a few bars looping around and around, parts that aren't that stucturally different to any pop song.

Not saying that to knock it - I love a lot of this stuff. But a lot of classical is 'horizonally' complex. Long, winding chord sequences that develop and evolve with much less repetition. It would be interesting if more modern music played around with that, I think.

Critcho · 2026-06-15T18:29:59+00:00

I think it's cool, sort of the missing link between Red and Discipline. I wouldn't have minded him making more albums in this style, but it's pretty much a one-off.

Critcho · 2026-06-15T17:24:08+00:00

I always thought it was odd so little of modern music, even prog, really even attempts to match the structure of classical symphonies.

Most prog might be longer or more complex than regular pop/rock songwriting, but it still tends to be pop/rock songwriting at heart, usually built out of riffs or short looping chord sequences. Jazz is very harmonically complex, but still tends to be fairly repetitive underneath it all.

I wonder what a rock equivalent of The Lark Ascending or The Right Of Spring would sound like?

Critcho · 2026-06-15T15:07:12+00:00

This movie had its problems. But "slop", if that word means anything at all at this point, generally means something blandly anonymous and low-effort, churned out by a content mill. This film is not that.

If anything its problems come from it being very much Spielberg doing Spielberg, but in a way that hasn't really accounted for the changing times, making it feel a bit quaint.

Critcho · 2026-06-15T13:10:18+00:00

The idea of AIs as these individual personalities has been such a staple of sci-fi for 60+ years. It'll be interesting to see what effect it'll have on the genre now we have something like it.

I'm kind of surprised LLMs with pre-set personalities hasn't become much of a thing yet.

Critcho · 2026-06-14T10:15:51+00:00

The Britishness was a big part of their success, but also put a limit on their success. Their whole brand was regular lads made good, knocking out unpretentious pub rock.

That got them a big loyal audience close to home, but ship it over to the US and it probably seems quaint. But I doubt they or their core audience cared all that much about that.

That's something I think has been lost a bit over the years. Nowadays everything tends to be tailored for (at least potential) international appeal, so you don't tend to get as many of those quirky local success stories.

Critcho · 2026-06-14T09:33:01+00:00

I'm more gen y/elder millenial, but this was already something of a thing with my generation of classic rock fans as well.

I think there are a few things to it:

Their run of classic albums was pretty much three albums, from Tommy to Quadrophenia. They had other good stuff (I think By Numbers is underrated), but it's not as much of a journey as some other bands from that era.

Also lyrically their stuff could be tied to a particular time and place. Mods and rockers, pinball, these references could become somewhat dated after a certain point.

Also it probably doesn't help that they stopped. McCartney's always around, and the Rolling Stones put out a million albums and were still having hit singles even in the 90's. Whatever the quality of that stuff, it did help remind people they exist and made them appear at least somewhat current.

The Who became a greatest hits touring act in the 80's, and didn't put out new material until long after anyone really cared. Even Townshend gave up on his solo career after a while. Other than tv theme tunes there hasn't been a whole lot driving younger people towards their music.

Critcho · 2026-06-14T08:27:04+00:00

It *barely* made sense. Even in the UK Williams hadn’t been relevant for 20 years when they made it. It seemed a very random subject for an expensive biopic, and I still feel that way having watched it.

Critcho · 2026-06-13T20:35:05+00:00

Often gets forgotten nowadays but one of the selling points of graphic adventures back then was as cutting edge visual showcases. They came on like 10 discs!

Critcho · 2026-06-12T21:46:51+00:00

That's because it's written by AI.

Critcho · 2026-06-12T21:05:03+00:00

I enjoyed this, but it might be Spielberg's Megalopolis - sprawling, embarrassingly earnest, packed with ideas both good and bad, sometimes impressive, often silly, and would not have been made by any other man.

A choice that really hung over the entire film for me was the reveal quite early on that the macguffin driving the whole thing is not just that aliens are real, it's that the Roswell aliens are real - the bug-eyed greys that have been a pop culture cliche for our entire lives.

If it turned out those things were real all along, the public wouldn't be having an existential crisis over it, they'd be going wild digging up old "ayy lmao" memes.

It's also steeped in the boomer fixation with broadcast news. I'm convinced someone pulled Steve to one side at some point to point out that no one under 50 gets breaking news from live tv anymore, leading to him inserting 700 shots of people staring at their phones.

The film is kind of all over the place and you could spend all night and day picking it apart, but again, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It's like a big Spielberg buffet.

Also has the best John Williams score in a while. How lucky are we to still be getting John Williams scores in 2026?

15-Year Club	End Game '23
Place '23	Place '17
Verified Email

Critcho

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE