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This blog is a blog of firsts, the first blog I have blogged for more than one day, the first time I have written a music review, and now the first time I comment about gaming (although I have written a gaming review before). You see, some people’s spare times are occupied my watching TV (so is mine) speaking to friends through texting/social networking/emailing/phoning/instant messaging/real life (so is mine) and sleeping (unsurprisingly, so is mine). However, I also play World of Warcraft. Why? Well if I didn’t I would find myself with not alot to do.
Now, I said I didn’t want to bog this blog down with personal stuff, so that’s enough about my life. For those that have not heard of/don’t know alot about World of Warcraft, it’s basically a big online game where lots of people mill about talking to each other and questing with each other, doing such things as killing nasty monsters and delivering mysterious packages to mysterious characters. I have been at the end-game (the top level of the game, you progress level on level through the game) for around two months, and partake in what is known as raiding, where a group of ten or more group together and go to special instanced dungeons, where nobody from the main game world out of this group can enter.
It’s time-consuming, hard, and expensive with regards to the in-game economy. But, it teaches me the values of concentration, reflexes and organisation. At its base, World of Warcraft is just a spreadsheet with colourful graphics, but this spreadsheet can teach me alot simply due to the human interaction and therefore randomness involved. That’s what I love about it, I love talking to people, and I love interacting with people, and gaming for me is not about being a geek or a nerd, it’s about socialising, it’s about learning, about myself and others.
The raid I commonly partake on, maybe two or three times a week, maybe none, is called Karazhan. It requires ten experienced adventurers to complete, but takes many months to complete. An average night of it will probably last around four hours, maybe less, maybe more, and I go mainly for the fact that it really does improve my concentration levels well at the same time, advancing me in the game. I think World of Warcraft shouldn’t be called a game, more a tool, if you wish, just a tool for talking (some people spend all their time socialising) or for learning, perhaps getting a basic understanding of economics (through the relatively basic in-game economy) or improving your maths skills by trying to work out how much you can sell an item for or which item is better for you. As it is a bit of a spreadsheet with graphics, it is lacking a calculator, so if you so choose, it can be used to improve your maths skills.
So there we have it, I play a game which to me, isn’t a game. To someone else it may be, but for me, it’s a tool. A tool to ‘improve’ myself and to socialise, but a fun one nonetheless.
One of the first few lines of opener, We Used To Vacation, “Still things could be much worse” immediately sets the mind alight. How could things be much worse? What led to things being so bad in the first place? Robbers & Cowards is very much an album of discovery, each song leading you through with infectious hooks and sublimely paced melodies to the next song, the next story.
Mystery, like stepping into a dark cave, has a firm hold on songs such as the ever-so-catchy Hang Me Up To Dry with its fantastic riff driving all the way through. Seemingly disparate streams of thought echo around the listener’s head, the more you hear, the more confused you are. However, the songs themselves all seem to follow a set path, the odd bit of clashing piano adding a random Maroon 5-esque sound to the proceedings. The problem is, the unexpected soon comes to be expected. It’s an album that is broken and lost while simultaneously being as structured as they come. An album struggling with its identity.
Songs like God, Make Up Your Mind illustrate this philosophy of random yet not so random; the strange lyrics which you just know have a deeper meaning “from New York to New Orleans, played alphabet”; the piano introing deep within the song; an unexpected but seamless transition to a heavier sound, back to chilling out in the summer sun. The lo-fi intro, the slightly whining, slightly relaxed voice, conjuring images of cocktails on a Hawaiian beach; staring at the sky with a content mind yet for some reason, not everything’s perfect.
It’s a good metaphor for the album as a whole, sometimes lo-fi, sometimes rocking, sometimes catchy, sometimes random, sometimes delivering the unexpected, yet something is wrong. It isn’t quite an album of contrasts, although thats what it wants to be, it keeps the listener on rails, delivering song after song in a similar yet crucially just different vein, but an ominous cloud of not quite getting it right is hovering just above.
In fact, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. “There’s nothing to do here, some just whine and complain” in Hospital Beds is quite right, it’s an album that is whining and complaining, but so am I, later in the song “Joy and misery” is mentioned, and that’s what this album truly is. Joy and misery. And that’s why it doesn’t work. Just at that moment when your sensations are soaring, when your mind is on fire with possibilities, when you can see the happiness and the hope, a song or a melody or a lyric will be introduced to dampen those emotions. Yes, life has its ups and downs but Robbers & Cowards is attempting to be two things at once, and to a certain extent, completely failing. You just can’t be a robber and a coward.
3/5
Good morning world…
Well what blog starts without a welcoming post, I may be welcoming myself to no-one at present, and this blog could end up like all my other blogs, just another forgotten website in the web that is my mind, but on the off chance that I carry through with it, and do what I intend to do (reviews on all sorts, comments on all sorts, but less of the personal mumbo-jumbo) then I may be looking back at this very post in one or two years with a smile on my face. Maybe. So hello blogging world! Wherever you are, and hello future me!
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