Audiostrobelight – The Whole Shebang (2011): A Full Handle of Action

December 22, 2011 By 3 Comments

Need a last-minute Christmas gift for yourself?

Look, Jews et al., any occasion you can come up with is fine — Scientologists have Freedom Day to look forward to on the 30th — just find a reason and make sure you’ve got The Whole Shebang ready to tap on New Year’s Eve.  This is the 2011 release from Audiostrobelight, a bunch of energetic speakerbusters from Virginia Beach, and it is going to stay up all night with you.  Remember fun?  Remember loud, dance, party, and rock-out?  Those guys remember you too, and they want you to buy Audiostrobelight’s album.

Audiostrobelight - The Whole Shebang

If you’re too busy to read this article, just check out the band’s own promo.  (Also, quit your job, you’re wasting your life!)  You’ll hear immediately what you can expect from The Whole Shebang: driving pop-punk that’s stuffed to the liner with hype, and not the empty kind.  Every song has that classic tug-of-war between fast, danceable rock and half-time breakdowns when you get to jump up and down and pump your fist and taste the sweat flying off the girls and guys all around you.  Did you see in the promo when they dropped the balloons on the audience, or the confetti and streamers?  If you aren’t into that, we can’t be friends.

“Okay,” you say, “Mr. O.,” because you and I aren’t on a first-name basis, “but the fast electronic dance-rockcore pop-punkadelia scene came and went, and hasn’t been heard from since 2005!  So why make such a big hubbub about one on-the-rise revivalist band?”  Two reasons off the top of my head.  First, I wasn’t done with that scene yet when it died.  Second, Audiostrobelight fits into the leading edge of that movement, not the middle, and looks set to evolve it into something more expansive.

Just check out their line-up:

  • Bass, guitar, guitar/keys, drums.  (Ho-hum.)
  • Dual vocalists.  (Okay, standard fare for the genre.)
  • Electric violin/mandolin.  (Now we’re talking!)

And, since you mention Yellowcard, that’s an apt comparison.  Some of these songs would’ve fit perfectly on Ocean Avenue, and Audiostrobelight also gives us plenty of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High, Cartel’s Chroma, and the rowdiest bits of Simple Plan’s No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls.  But we also get rhythms that sample the escapist banner-waving of Less Than Jake’s ska-born Anthem and the alt-metal demolition drive of The Receiving End of Sirens’ Between the Heart and the Synapse.  Variety is packaged in to keep your body parts moving four or five different ways every song, which adds significantly to The Whole Shebang‘s replay value.  Plus, Yellowcard didn’t have a mandolin.

Combine this ability with the kind of live show that the band themselves describe as “ridiculously debaucherous,” and you can see how, on the strength of their State of the Art EP from 2009, these guys have developed a ravenous fan base who gives them a run for their money in passion.  Along with Warped Tour credentials, Audiostrobelight has opened for Cobra Starship, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Anberlin, and the aforementioned Fall Out Boy, to name a few.  While they’re not national headliners yet, take them seriously when they sing, in A Fifth of Feelgood, “This town won’t be the death of me!”  (“This town” being VA Beach, which fits nicely when you remember how Less Than Jake was always repping Gainesville, FL.)

Hey, is that the first lyric I’ve dropped?  Let’s open up these seven tracks.  Because it’s always worth mentioning when a band starts their album with a song called You’re Not Funny, You Stupid Clown.  It’s well positioned: when Audiostrobelight makes it big, you’ll be able to listen back to this one and hear “Give me the chance / Give me the time,” “We ain’t on top but we ain’t bottom,” and “We’re gonna reach for the stars / We’re gonna look past mountains.”  I’d love to see that premonition come true.

A Fifth of Feelgood lays all their cards on the table.  Keys are featured, the violin is used as an effective instrument and never a gimmick, and we get smacked in the face repeatedly by the JE-JUN, JE-JE-JE-JUN, JE-JUN in the bass and drums.  They’re singing the same adolescent dreams that we were crooning along with half a decade ago.  Whether they’re giving a friend a long hard send-off in Anchors Aweigh or begging for another chance with an “old flame” in Argyle, the constant in Audiostrobelight’s pushes and pleas is emotion.  All the bands they learned from used to be called “emo,” didn’t they?

While Drop the Act is the most anthemic shout-along, those last two songs I mentioned might be my favorites.  Argyle gives the band the chance to show that they’re perfectly capable of bringing things down and singing sweetly; they’re just happier when it’s all about “Going pound for pound / I bring the noise like your nightmare sounds.”  And the album closes on a fade-out at the end of Anchors Aweigh with three layered vocal lines carrying three strands of feelings.  Two-man harmonies assure “You’re better off without me” while the lead undercuts the sentiment with “I never want to trace this back / And let the record show I’m happy once again” and the gang vocals chant “Anchors aweigh, my friend!”

Audiostrobelight

Where the f*** are they???

Audiostrobelight caught my attention by throwing back to beloved bands gone by, but what really hooked me was the depth of The Whole Shebang.  Every turn on my iTunes shows new traces of a band I didn’t know they had in them.  Excellent arrangements reward a careful listener, who will find every instrument playing a carefully crafted role to make you answer the call: “Let’s go / Let me see you put ‘em up right now / Tonight we’re gonna have some fun!”

Do yourself a favor this holiday season and pick up a copy for yourself.  The Whole Shebang also makes a great gift for anyone on your list who doesn’t suck.

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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: #11 Mount and Blade: Warband

December 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

11. Mount and Blade: Warband

PC game, 2009

When I think of indie games, I think of twee platformers and lo-fi tactical games. I think of Darwinia and Super Meat Boy and Atom Zombie Smasher.If you were to have asked me earlier today what my favorite indie game is, I’d have been stumped. I might have settled on Super Meat Boy — a gem I somehow sunk about 25 hours into.

But as I was reading about Mount and Blade: Warband to prepare for writing this, I was shocked to find it referred to as an indie game. I guess I just didn’t consider that the Mount and Blade series was, in fact, made by an small independendent developer. The term “indie” doesn’t refer to a small-scale aesthetic and scope, even if that’s something that most of indie games share.

The Mount and Blade series is certainly not small-scale. It doesn’t feel indie, but I think it’s kind of cool that it is. It shows that an small developer like this really can provide depth, detail, innovation, and replayability to match the big boys. And, yeah — the Mount and Blade games are easily my favorite “indie” games I’ve ever played.

It’s kind of hard to describe exactly what the Mount and Blade games are like, but here’s my best shot: They’re kind of realistic medieval RPG’s. You have a main character who battles opponents and raises an army. There are no real goals — it’s open-ended, almost a sandbox.

Like an old-school RPG, there’s an overworld with different towns you can visit and a separate battle screen. But the dynamics are a lot more complicated than something like Final Fantasy 6. While the overworlds of classic games are essentially paintings that you can maneuver around, Mount and Blade’s is a dynamic, breathing world that functions on its own.

As you wander around the Mount and Blade world — vaguely inspired by medieval Europe — you’ll constantly come across different parties doing different things: peasant farmers, bands of thieves and deserters, armies of one of the six or so kingdoms. You can engage any one of them at any time.

Whenever you go into a battle, the game generates a large battlefield based on the terrain you were on; it’s basically a zoomed-in, high-def square from the overworld. Your party takes on the opposing army, but the battle engine can handle up to 150 soldiers.

Battle itself is pretty engaging. It’s real-time, third- or first-person action. By default, you ride a horse, though you don’t have to. You attack with a sword or axe or bow or javelin or a plethora of other weapons.

The game starts pretty fun right away. You land in the world with rags and a cheap wooden weapon. Generally, a pathetic group of looters will engage you, or else you engage them. You steal their loot, which you can sell or keep. You go from town to town trying to recruit villagers or hiring mercenaries with whatever money you can collect. Slowly, you build power and momentum.

But where the game elevates from “fun” to “epic” is in the late game. In most games, you don’t encounter any new game mechanics after the first several hours. Mount and Blade is an exception; in fact, you only get a small glimpse of the game until you really starts to get powerful.

That’s when the game’s most fascinating and addictive elements open up. For one, as you accumulate wealth, there’s actually stuff to do with it other than buy loot: You can hire bigger armies, purchase real estate in cities, invest in growing towns.

But there’s an entire political aspect to the game, too. When you become strong enough, you’ll be recruited to be a mercenary for one of the five or six kingdoms. If you do well enough on the battlefield for the king, you can become a vassal, with an entire new set of objectives and mechanics.

Mount and Blade: Warband was advertised as a sequel, but it’s really more of an expansion pack or a supercharged remake. It takes the original game and adds a few features that drastically expand the game’s appeal and replayability. First, it includes a sixth kingdom to further deepen the political web.

Next, it introduces a multiplayer component. You can play with up to 64 players in a single battle. The multiplayer battles don’t include the RPG elements; instead, they focus on a single battle. Still, it’s a fascinating and thrilling tactical experience.

Warband also expands the late game options even more. Beyond becoming a vassal, you can rise through the ranks within the kingdom’s elite and become a general or rule over different towns. You can even be made the heir of the throne and become the king.

Or, if you have a more independent streak, you can start your own faction. Just as any real-life rebellion movement, it’s hard going at first; be prepared to actively defend your towns and castles for weeks. But it’s extremely satisfying to slowly expand your boundaries, develop a military, promote your trusted soldiers to self-controlling officers who run their own brigades and follow you to a battlefront.

Each higher level of the game has its own set of balanced mechanics. There are so many features and ways to play, it’s almost intimidating. But the game eases you into it. That’s what makes the gradually expanding scope of the game so accessible and addictive: Just when you figure out how to do something well, there’s a new set of variables to deal with.

And a bit of icing on the cake is that the game is fully moddable, with dozens of great, game-changing mods available for download: Expand the economic structure and play strictly as a merchant. Introduce naval warfare. Immerse yourself in a fully created world with a deep backstory and expansive cast of character. I even played a Game of Thrones full conversion, leading an army from Winterfell to Lannisport and taking on Tywin Lannister myself.

It’s not as polished or cinematic as something like Skyrim, but Mount and Blade is at least as ambitious and deep. The series, especially Warband, gets my highest recommendation.

Previously: #12 Grantland

Up next: Rides Rides Rides! Games Games Games!

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A Few Of My Favorite Things 2011: #12 Grantland

December 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

12. Grantland

Sports and pop culture web site (debuted 06/2011)

When you visit www.grantland.com, you’re greeted with contrasting images: At the center, you have the elegant, classicly-styled heading. All around it, though, you have obnoxious Subway or Lexus ads.You can dig even deeper into the site’s contradictions, starting with the name of the site. Why call the site Grantland? One of the oldest great sportswriters is the namesake for a decidedly modern take on sportswriting.
It got me wondering: Does Grantland have a personality crisis? At a cursory glance, it’s hard to tell if the site wants to be a serious, respected analysis and criticism or if it wants to indulgent fun.When ESPN first opened Grantland in June, these questions nagged at me. I just couldn’t figure out what the site was. The name is catchy and brandable, and the look is delightfully elegant — but everything felt a little bit off. That old-fashioned baseball banner at the top of of a site works with some of the articles, but not so much with the site’s trivialities, like the weekly discussion of trashy reality TV and cheap shots at struggling quarterbacks.But as I thought more about it, I decided I actually valued the incongruities and vague mission statement. They’re all a part of a site that’s willing to sprawl and try different things. They add up to a site that brilliantly tries to push forward — deeper, longer articles from unexpected sources about a multitude of topics — as it restrains in other areas: There are no videos, few bright colors, no widgets or social media. Just content.

When Grantland is on, it’s almost thrilling how much it syncs with my brain and how happy it makes me. The edges of the sports world and the pop culture world blur together. The systems and statistics and structures of sports overlap with the narratives and emotional appraisal and critical thinking of arts and entertainment writing. The writers ramble on  in too much detail, come up with crazy theories, rank things pointlessly, celebrate tiny passions (and I mean all of that in a good way). It’s usually fun and it’s usually smart.

Of course, the man in charge of it is the one who popularized the all-encompassing writing style that Grantland: Bill Simmons. The site is his grand project, and he seems to view it as the culmination of his professional life.

I was hitting 40, and I was like, “What do I want to do long-term?” I always wanted to create a site that was sports and pop culture. 30 for 30 had a big impact because I loved how that was about finding, empowering and working with these incredible directors, and I thought the same thing could work for writers. I researched different sites and looked through all of my favorite magazines and tried to find people who were on their way up.

(from The Hollywood Reporter)

And right there you can see some the contradictions and a philosophical blurring of edges between arts (documentaries, writing) and sports (treating writers and directors almost like minor league prospects).Not every article really catches me, but at worst Grantland gives me a few substantial and thoughtful articles to read every day. Every so often, though — like whenever Chuck Klosterman writes or the guy from Shit My Dad Says reflects on his failed sitcoms — the site has me scratching my head, or crying with laughter, or (now and again) actually crying.
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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: #13 Larry and His Flask

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

#13 Larry And His Flask

Self-described “hillbilly band”

I remember reading an article somewhere — maybe it was in the thought-provoking Ripped — that the role of opening acts has greatly diminished in the past forty years.

During the adolescence of rock, people were often just as curious to see the opening act as they were excited to see the headliners — according to the writer. The opening acts of major bands served as a sort of farm system, allowing bands to build buzz as they improved their craft on the road.

Nowadays, the article generalized, people just show up about an hour after the start time listed on the ticket in order to arrive when main act goes up on stage. Opening acts are a largely unnecessary relic of the past. As technology improves and barriers to discovering new bands fall, the necessity of building buzz on the road diminishes.

But the most unexpected, joyful musical discovery of the year for me was the opening act for a concert of one of my all time favorite bands, Streetlight Manifesto.

The show had two opening acts. The first was forgettable. The second one, however, immediately caught my attention when it went up on stage wielding a rather unusual instrumentation: banjo, mandolin, string bass, standing drum kit.

Then they started playing, something like this:

The following progression approximates my reaction.

The Streetlight show afterwards was great, but after the show I went to the Larry and His Flask booth. I bought a T-shirt, met the bass player, and genuinely thanked them for rocking my world that night. When I went home, I downloaded their free EP and found YouTube clips of their shows. I looked up their future show dates and learned more about them.

In short, I lived the “opening act” experience as it was originally conceived.

Larry and His Flask will never rank as a historic favorite of mine, but the band is a gem. They have the trappings of both a bluegrass band (instrumentation, attitude) and a Jersey ska/punk band (composition, scene). It’s a blend that, frankly, seems like such an obvious recipe for success that I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before I heard them. You can buy the first album (since their reinvention; they started life as a straight-ahead punk band) on iTunes, among other platforms. It’s also on Spotify and Grooveshark.

Larry and His Flask earn their spot on this list for filling an inventive musical niche with expert craft and a killer show, but also for reminding me of the joy of the unexpected discovery. I so often find music based off of raving reviews or other positive recommendations. Sometimes it’s more fun to have low expectations surpassed than high expectations matched.

Previously: #14 Portal 2

Up next: Simmons starts a silly site

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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: #14 Portal 2

December 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

#14 Portal 2

Video game, 2011

I normally don’t buy games near their release dates, but Portal 2 was an exception for a few reasons. First, I got it on sale quite early in its release cycle at $30, a far cry from the $60 of most new games. Also, my friend Hunter offered to play the co-op game with me.

But the main reason I didn’t wait to buy Portal 2 is because the original is freaking awesome. If you read about video games at all, you know the story: An add-on to a Half Life pack ends up stealing the show, winning numerous awards, and going down as one of the most important games of the decade.

Strangely, the original Portal reminded me of another underdog landmark: 1977’s Star Wars. Both have the feeling of a ramshackle, unexpected work of genius over which the stars magically align. The end product feels completely original and fresh, almost pivotal.

The design in Portal, particularly the final chapter, is brilliant. It guides you without ever making you feel like you’re being guided. Even a single poorly designed moment could have ruined the immersion, but it never happened, right down to the balls-to-the-walls ending.

Best of all, the original is packed with personality and humor often absent from video games. Antagonist GladOS, dark and hilarious, steals the show.

Portal clocks in at a scant three hours, assuming you don’t diddle around too much. Full of dark humor, mind-bending puzzles, and a heart-racing ending that won over even the harshest critics, Portal feels something like the gaming zeitgeist of the late aughts. The “Still Alive” credits song seals the deal.

Oh yeah… the sequel? It’s great. More of everything that made the original fantastic. The game is about four times as long. The puzzles are expanded with physics-altering surface gels. GladOS gets more charact development. We meet a few new characters, most memorably Cave Johnson voiced by JK Simmons.

It lacks the impact of the original because the expectations are higher and the series tropes are now in place: Increasingly complex puzzles, increasingly funny voiceovers by GladOS, fantastic ending, etc. Speaking of the ending, I’ll say it actually outshines the original. Cinematic, well-designed, and epic, the ending includes a few absolutely unforgettable moments.

The world also feels bigger and more interesting. The new exploration bits are pretty bland on a gameplay level compared to the best puzzles, but I actually enjoyed exploring the world and unraveling how it went to hell.

Put simply, Portal 2 a very worthy sequel for a fantastic original. It vastly expands and deepens the experience. It’s not quite The Empire Strikes Back, but it’s just as enjoyable and memorable as the era-defining Portal.

Previously: #15 LOST

Up next: A hillbilly band steals my heart at a Streetlight show

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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: #15 LOST

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

#15 LOST

TV series, 2004-2010

(The soundtrack to this article)

Lost is kind of a great show. It’s also kind of a terrible one.

On the one hand, it’s remarkably cinematic and thrilling. Its cast of characters is varied and well-drawn. You’ll come to love and hate the many members of this cast; you’ll celebrate their victories and suffer their defeats. They react, overall, pretty plausibly to the show’s outlandish premises. There’s also an intriguing set-up that proves full of mysteries, many of which are unraveled with expert pace and tension.

On the other hand, Lost botches its self-mythology and convoluted sci-fi explanations by constantly blowing up the scope and twisting somewhere strange (a quick rundown of the first four seasons). Worse, it really tries to make you care deeply about all of the zaniness.

I normally praise shows for pushing their boundaries later in the series, but Lost is the exception. My fiancee and I gave up a bit into the fifth season because we didn’t care about the mystery of “the island” and its inhabitants anymore. An entire premise-altering twist could occur any week, and often did, so it stopped affecting me. The scope of the show got blown up so many times that it didn’t raise the stakes, it just raised the silliness.

And yet… I can’t help but love Lost. It’s goofy and over-dramatic. It’s also tons of fun. Maybe I enjoyed it so much because I watched it with someone I love, and we made fun of it together. But there’s something magnetic about the show at its best: Exploring great characters, watching them bounce off of each other in a mixed-up, muddled-up, messed-up world.

Jack is the central character (to the point that we hypothesized his name was “Dr. Jack Lost” for awhile), and his arc takes center stage. I didn’t always like him, but I liked that the writers tried to take him different places throughout the series. His emergence as group leader then devolution into an alcoholic, paranoid madman  – and presumably back if I ever finish the series — served as a strong core.

But it’s the prolific cast of other major characters that really makes the show tick. To name a few of the big ones: Kate can consistently serve up nice love-triangle-of-the-week. Locke is a hyper-intense shaman who believes everything so strongly that you have no choice but to go along with him. Sawyer is a tragic, southern James Dean — a swaggering, self-destructive rebel. Hurley is Hurley. And there were dozens more by the time I stopped watching.

The show often worked best when its plots were simple. Many of the best plots — the first season comes to mind — had less to do with solving a mystery and more about digging deeper into the characters’ motivations. The simple plots became decreasingly common as the show ran its course. But when I think back on Lost, I’ll fondly remember exciting adventures with great, complex characters. A great example:

Previously: Honorable mentions

Up next: I’m making a note here: huge success

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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: Honorable Mentions

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things.

Before I jump into my top fifteen for 2011 — read the overview here — I wanted to discuss a few items that I chose not to include on the list for one reason or another.

Parks and Recreation

This is a brilliant sitcom that made “The Leap” in 2011 — from great to one of the greatest.

It’s a show that seems to fire on all cylinders week in, week out. It doesn’t have the varietyof Community or Louie (though its incredible polish and tonal consistency mask quite a bit of experimentation). Instead, it thrives on television’s best comic writing and acting, a fleshed-out setting full of vivid minor characters, and a deep love for public service and everyday people.

This banner year included highlights such as the Harvest Festival, an unforgettable flu season (“Stop— POOPING!”), April and Andy’s surprise wedding, and heart-rending reunion between Leslie and Ben at Indiana’s smallest park. And those are only a few of the highlights.

Suffice it to say that Parks and Recreation would be near the top of my 2011 list if I deemed it eligible.

Community

Growing ever more ambitious, Community scored a high batting average in 2011, which coincided with the second half of its second season and the first half of its third season.

Unlike the uniform Parks and Recreation, Community thrives on the fact that it can be a completely different show from one week to the next. A consistency of character and humanity run underneath even the most bizarre episodes, but the structural design of this show can radically alter every seven days.

While Parks and Rec has leapt it as my favorite comedy on television, that show can’t claim such out-of-left-field classics as Paradigms of Human Memory — a clip show where all the clips were new — or Remedial Chaos Theory — a multi-timeline comic masterpiece.

NBA 2K12

Technically, NBA 2K12 is eligible for this list. And I did enjoy it enough that it should be included on this list. But I chose to exclude it for a couple of reasons.

First, this is basically a makeover, tweak, and roster update to NBA 2K11. (I don’t mean this as an insult; it’s exactly what I wanted. This series is one of my favorites ever.) Thus, it’s mostly an extension of a game that was on last year’s list.

Second, there’s only so much to talk about. I play Dynasty mode for hours on end, managing an NBA roster. There’s a lot of strategy involved; you can’t just accumulate the most talent, you have to balance playing time and budgets to keep everyone happy.

But it’s basically a sports nerd’s pastime, and there’s not much more to it than what I explained in the previous paragraph.

So: Sorry, NBA 2K12. You didn’t make the cut.

The Office (BBC)

I watched The Office UK during the last week of December 2010, so it only narrowly missed the 2011 window I set for this series. But if I had held off a week to watch this series, it’d be near the top of this list.

While the US version of The Office remains one of my favorite series ever, I totally understand everyone who says the original is superior. Per episode, it definitely is: It cuts deeper into the themes of the series at a more rapid pace, making it a lot more effective.

Even more impressive is just how unexpected and original it was. This pair of comedians, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, starterd with what could have been a one-note sitcom premise — a wretched boss makes his employees miserable. They turned it into a three-dimensional character study (of not just the boss, but of his employees who are just as lost as he is) and a formal innovation.

After The Office, not only were mockumentaries acceptable formats for television comedy, but the whole assumption that sitcoms had to be simple and structurally uninventive (setup-setup-punchilne) was blown up. I’d rank it behind only The Sopranos as the most obviously influential TV series of the aughts.

“Materpiece Collection” and “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”

I went through two seriously music taste-broadening experiments in 2011.

The first was to find an overview of the greatest orchestral music of all time. I found this collection online, listened all the way through multiple times, and have found other classical music I enjoy since then.

Later in the year, I went song-for-song through Rolling Stone’s imperfect but compelling list of the 500 “greatest” rock and roll songs of all time. It gave me an overview of many of the greatest tracks of the past 50 years. Don’t take the rankings or inclusions/exclusions too seriously; this type of list is prone to trendiness and groupthink.

Still, it was utterly compelling to delve deep into the canon of many of rock’s most influential and well-regarded songs.

I decided not to include either of these mixes, because “classical music” and “classic rock” are entries that would be a bit too broad even for my list.

Next up: We have to go back and take a look at a show my fiancee and I watched together this year

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A Few of My Favorite Things 2011: Overview and Introduction

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

At the end of 2010, I made a post counting down my top 25 favorite things from that year. It was a fun and revelatory process to reflect on what had affected me during the previous twelve months. Now that 2011 is wrapping up, I’d like to put together another end-of-year discussion of the year’s most meaningful media to me.

But there’s a problem: My calendar for media consumption is not necessarily in line with the actual calendar. In 2010, it made sense to limit my list to items released that year because most of my favorite movie-TV-music-game-etc. experiences happened to line up with the 2010 release calendar.

2011 is a different story. Due to some combination of my laziness in keeping up with what’s current and finally catching up on stuff that I’ve been putting off, very little of my attention in 2011 was on media released this year.

So I’ve decided to do something a little bit different. It’s still a countdown of my favorite things from this past year, but now it’s a countdown of my favorite things from my past year. That is — I’m making no release date restrictions on the items contained herein.

I know this set-up makes my list less relevant, more sporadic, less compatible with lists everyone else makes. It’s less useful as a analysis of 2011 and more a personal memoir. Whatever. If it bothers you at all, just think of it as a series of reviews.

The rules

  • Fifteen items on the list
  • I had to have experienced — read, watched, listened, played — this item for the first time in 2011, regardless of release date. This eliminates all-time favorites I revisited. It also eliminates Parks and Recreation and Community, two shows I again loved and would be near the top like in last year’s list.
  • I’m allowed to be as inconsistent as I want. For example, a band is on this list. So are a couple of albums. Similarly, there are a couple of TV series and also some TV seasons.
  • I will publish one article discussing one item per day. That puts #1’s published date on 12/31. (edit: slight delay in releasing these, but I’ll finish) And I promise that I will actually finish this series, unlike a couple of other attempts at ambitious projects I undertook in 2011.

I’ll link to the entries below:

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