T w e n t y S i d e d
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This came in the mail today. Like I said, this is my first new CD in about half a decade. There just hasn’t been much new music that made me want to pay full price for an album. Until now.
This is an innovative album full of infectious hooks and solid beats. Notable tracks include Organix, which has a fun rhyme and a punchline ending. JZ75 is another impressive track, where the group’s high-speed, high-bandwidth delivery will make you wonder if they really are machines. Precogni2 and Precognito are variations on the same brilliant lyrics, both of which are essential. Finally, Fuzzy Dice and Ford vs. Chevy are witty and fun tracks. The tracks are short but plentiful, keeping things fresh and coming at you from a lot of different angles.
Lead vocalist Wheelie Cyberman comes up with numerous complex and ever-changing Rhymes, while Bass player Stumblebee shows a great skill at coming up with basslines that puts the whole album on wheels.
The only nitpick is that a few tracks end with about 30 seconds of Japaneese(?) chatter and static. I’m not sure where they were going with this. It’s short and amusing at first, but after a few trips through the album I was anxious for them to end and get back to the fun.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Joker's Last Laugh
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
I thought cybertron whas were the transformers live
o rly?
Is the track Fuzzy Dice in any way a reference to the amazing sci-fi novel of the same name, by Paul di Filippo?
No, it’s about a cab driver.
I’ve never been into Transformers (I grew up with Beast Wars, myself), but this is a really cool band! It’s funny how Shamus’ writing is exposing me to new and interesting stuff even after his death. So much so that it’s making me write in a dead thread 18 years after the fact :D
What’s really interesting to me, though, is the perspective a post like this gives on early 2000’s Internet culture. Back then, it was so novel to have a band singing about nerd-adjacent subject matter. This was happening just as the likes of Spoony, AVGN, and Nostalgia Critic were rising to prominence. A big part of their appeal was the fact that they were talking about the kind of stuff you didn’t see on TV and other mainstream media. People had such a strong desire to talk about this stuff that they were willing to overlook the amateurish production values.
Of course, many of those people were actual kids who were awed by the fact that they could watch videos about nerd stuff with copious amounts of swearing. I mean, what’s cooler than that :D
Of course, almost 20 years on, the market is completely different. “Nerd culture” is mainstream now, and has been for more than a decade. A band like this would never make an impression nowadays, let alone release several albums. And that’s without even touching on the abysmal state the music industry is in.
Simpler times…