In any case, having secured a copy for myself, despite the risk of insufferable 500ms latency, I have very little else to say about SWTOR that is negative. I’m not one for MMORPGs, as a rule – my brief stint playing World of Warcraft ended up turning into an obligation, where I felt guilty if a second of free time wasn’t spent grinding to keep up with my guildmates. I flirted with Pirates of the Burning Sea a few years ago, but it suffered the same caveats – the standard MMORPG, it seems, is just a processor of numbers, and certain people who input numbers into the processor are slightly better at it than others. That’s enough, for a lot of people – character and build optimisation, collecting pixellated adornments for an intangible digital avatar that are deemed “epic” and/or “brutal” by some collective conscious out there in the aether.

That’s the bread and butter of the MMORPG – along with a constant, addictive pressure to become better than you are. There are immutable reminders at every turn that you’ll be so much better if you just stick around for a little bit longer, get that next bit of gear or that next item. And they’re no less present in SwTOR – the immediate resemblence to a game like WoW is startling. It’s almost, you feel, just WoW with lightsabers. Initially I wondered whether that would be enough for me, as a Star Wars fan of the old school – well, as old school as someone born in the late eighties can be, so perhaps not so old school in the grand scheme of things – because I require all-too-overlooked elements to be present in videogames, things like plot, compelling characters, and immersive gameplay. I wasn’t expecting huge measures of any of these things in SWTOR – after all, it’s a MMORPG.

It is, then, enormously pleasing to say that SWTOR contains all these elements. I was drawn into the game very quickly indeed, and was astonished by how persuasive the game was when it came to immersion. Gone were the cardboard characters, instructing me to collect x items for y purpose, and in their stead were KOTOR/Mass Effect style conversations with characters that had purposeful motivations. It was incredible to actually find myself invested in the plot – the plot – that was unfolding as I worked my way through the prologue. I cared about the outcome, I considered the choices I had with great care. It was, for all intents and purposes, like playing an old single-player BioWare title like Dragon Age, except here there is the blessing and curse that is other people. For the most part, it’s fine – people exchanging tepid rehashes of interactions between arrows and knees are ignorable, and the unforgivingly ruthless way seasoned MMO players go about their business is something to become accustomed to. But it’s a joy to team up with someone and smash through an instance, especially with the role-playing element that separates SWTOR from its competitors.

Two-thirds of the letters in MMORPG tend to be ignored by those who make them – they are, rather obviously, R and P. A role-playing game is one in which you’re induced to develop more personal attributes of your character that expand and enrich his role in the game world. As an old hand at D&D, it’s such a vital component of good videogaming for me – which is why I’m so taken by SWTOR. There was one point, while questing with another player, where I realised just how well the game had been done. He was incredibly mercantile, and I was more interested in light side points – meaning that the two of us had to argue as to how we would complete quests. It reminded me of the morality conflicts while playing D&D, and it gave SWTOR incredible life and vigour.

SWTOR feels like a real videogame, not another shitty Star Wars license that would be best left alone. BioWare are good developers – if terrible marketers – and they’ve produced a true masterpiece in SWTOR. By subverting the classically overplayed experience of MMORPGs, they’ve established a highly legitimate and extremely enjoyable online multiplayer experience, in a setting that has been the stuff of nerd wet dreams for the past forty years. It’s terrific stuff, and worth all the hoops I had to jump through to play it.

He doesn’t help his image by giving into that sort of thing. As a long-time fan of him, Merchant and Pilkington, I can appreciate better than most his twisted sense of irony. I also mean appreciate in the sense of enjoy, as well as understand - put simply, Gervais is a fucking funny cunt. But the Neanderthal way in which he conducts his online affairs isn’t big and it isn’t clever, and damages my image of him as a whole. Compare this to his partner, the perennially overlooked but equally brilliant Merchant, whose confidence and modesty are reflected in his online broadcasts – it makes an interesting counterpoint to Gervais’ belligerent determination to annoy people. Gervais needs to realise that in addition to alienating fuckwits who don’t have a hope of getting it, he’s also running the risk of putting off long-time and die-hard fans.

In any case, Life’s Too Short is four episodes deep, and already some rather worrying trends are surfacing. A marked similarity between Life’s Too Short and the work of Paul Fenech begins to show itself, here. Any television programme attached to Fenech is sure to contain two elements – inspiringly brazen political incorrectness, and a disjointed narrative as the plot takes a definite back seat to entertaining ethnic stereotyping. That’s the vehicle Fenech chooses for his humour – one in which a story serves only to loosely connect the situations in which humour is unfolding. It’s essentially character-based sketch comedy, with a terrible excuse for plot framing the context of what we’re watching. That’s all well and good, but while serving its purpose it keeps his programmes on a lower tier of critical acclaim.

But we’ve come to expect better things from Gervais and Merchant – not a disorganised plot providing a setting for the gags onscreen. But this is the overarching feeling of Life’s Too Short - any attempt made at an overriding narrative seems to have been abandoned in favour of more dwarf jokes. They’re terrific jokes, they really are – no one should be complaining about seeing a supposedly egomaniacal Warwick Davis stuffed into an ill-fitting bear suit – but these moments of brilliance were always much more strongly contextualised in previous work. Gervais and Merchant haven’t lost their touch when it comes to making their audience squirm and cringe delightfully, far from it – but now it seems to be at the expense of powerful narrative, which was a hallmark of The Office and no less ignored in Extras.

There are plenty of modern comedies in which plot is a mere afterthought, a simple framing device that has little bearing on the actual situations and dialogue the audience experience. It’s the done thing in B-grade comedy, and seems to be so widely accepted as to avoid criticism in most instances. But the mark of good media – in any form – is its ability to get you, to grip you and draw you under, and then to have you digging for more. To the contrary, Life’s Too Short can be skimmed. It will be enjoyed, certainly, there’s a lot in it to like – but ultimately it is an inferior product due to the lack of a convincing plot.

Gervais and Merchant should, however, be roundly applauded for their continued disregard of what many stuffy killjoys would call “appropriateness” – in that vein, Life’s Too Short goes even further than any of their other TV shows, and that’s certainly something to be encouraged. Gervais knows how to push the envelope like no other and a good deal of his fame comes from controversy – but opposed to his pugnacious stand-up spoutings, Life’s Too Short is comparatively tame. The argument will of course be made that it’s belittling dwarves of all kind, exploiting them and all the rest of it. The PC brigade can rant and rave as they like – it doesn’t stop it from being really fucking funny.

Life’s Too Short contains engaging characters, thoroughly entertaining cameos, clever backhanded reference to the Gervais oeuvre, is well-presented and has many of the hallmarks of the Gervais and Merchant comedic genius. But it can’t stand up to scrutiny of any real intensity – it’s a programme that operates within an overly convenient and altogether unconvincing framework. The tax issues, the ongoing divorce proceedings – these things should serve to drive an ongoing plot that develops towards a meaningful resolution, not just work to provide context for the gags we’re all enjoying.

I want to enjoy this programme, I want to recommend it loudly to others, I want Gervais and Merchant to succeed. But Life’s Too Short falls flat, especially when set against their earlier masterpieces. It’s not even a question of the show being judged harshly because of its forebears – in its own right, it’s a disappointment. That, of course, won’t stop me watching every minute of it.

Life’s Too Short continues on BBC Two.

Royston Vasie made it immediately clear, to those in the room perhaps wondering what the band were all about, what their deal was. 75% of the band was hidden behind impenetrably thick curtains of hair, whilst the remaining 25% had a smile that rendered his molars visible from right up the back. There was excitement, certainly, even if it were only very half-heartedly expressed. The music, however, was precise in its execution – the percussion in particular enjoyed a real depth of clarity. It was straightforward, and that’s all it needed to be – it did the job and fitted in well with the overall theme of the music. The bass licks were inventive, but began to blur into one after awhile – their unorthodoxy was rather unfortunately overshadowed by their repetition. It was as though a stroke of genius had resulted in a solid hook, but there would be no peering into the gift horse’s mouth – it was a shame, he clearly knew his way around his instrument. The originality – marred only by a single but glaringly obvious similarity to the Stones – in the bass lines would be much better served with some solid expansion.

The vocals were harsh and often drifted away from their intended direction, moving away from enthusiastic into the realm of the desperate. The accoutrements that were layered throughout backing vocals offset this somewhat, pleasantly providing accessible ornamentation. The vocals, too, seemed to distract the singer from his job as a rhythm guitarist – the provision of rhythm was tangibly shaky on occasion. The riffs were staple; the effects sometimes questionable. It was music that was difficult to gain a real interest in – up on stage there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of engagement, the swinging curtains of hair acting as a decided barrier between provider and recipient. The drummer was having a great time, and didn’t care who knew – a model his bandmates would do well to emulate. Overall, Royston Vasie wouldn’t be out of place on Rage at 2am – but they’re a better band than that. It’s not altogether clear whether they know they are, but the outline is there, waiting to be sketched in.

Papa vs Pretty, a three-piece from New South Wales, were next to ply their craft for the swelling numbers at the Hi Fi. There was no time wasted in erecting an enormous wall of sound, a much bigger output than was to be expected from just three people on stage. It was made abundantly clear that they were going to cram as much sound in as they could, and the end result suffered for it – all that was audible became a muddle of auditory information. The drummer seemed determined to get his money’s worth when it came to his ride cymbal, and while displaying excellent proficiency with the skins, just made too much noise. He wasn’t the only culprit – the sound of the band as a whole was made inaccessible by the fact that there was just too much of it.

At the quieter moments, however, some very impressive and complex vocal harmonies – often straying into three parts – were intricately crafted and exceptionally well-delivered. It was as though Matt Bellamy was singing Fleet Foxes, and it wasn’t half bad. I was inevitably disappointed, however, when these excellent vocal parts were drowned out by rather pedestrian inter-verse fills and overdone instrumentation. The song structure, too, was something of a disappointment – there was a formula, here, a way of doing things. It was shame to see such little deviation from the predictability that haunted the development of their set. By the end of it all, it was clear to see that the obvious skill of the musicians onstage was being misguided – a toned-down folk-rock band would be a much better use of the talents being showcased. There wasn’t enough space in all the noise they made to bring their best to the forefront, and turning their amps down and swapping the strat for a dreadnought would go a long way in fixing that.

The Vasco Era are a band who knows how to play to their audience, and full credit to them in that regard. It doesn’t seem, however, to come through conscious effort – perhaps they’ve just stumbled on a large group of people who are all naturally taken by the several impenetrable layers of determined irony the band immediately broadcast. Dressed absurdly, they came onstage with all the self-possessed confidence of rock stars, and the crowd duly roared its approval. The overwhelming theme of their performance was that they just don’t give a shit, which it has to be said is certainly a desirable trait in any rock band. It was unconvincing, however. It was difficult to focus on the music, so heavily ornamented as it was with distracting onstage antics. The band had decided to play dress-ups, tonight, so the audience was subjected to inexcusable minutes-long breaks between songs while costumes were changed.

It didn’t seem, however, that this perspective was shared by many in the room. The crowd ate that shit up, seemingly enraptured by the japery. People were pulled up onto the stage to dance; the set was interspersed with deconstructive narrative between every song; and the speaking voice of the singer sounded like Chris Lilley’s Daniel from Dunt. These misguided attempts to break the mould came across as laughable, but no-one seemed to care – the farce went on with the raucous endorsement of most in attendance. There was an odd sort of sincerity to it all – an upfront admission from the stage that the gig “feels like a house party” really captured the spirit of the proceedings. It was messy and informal, but if that’s set aside, it’s irritating to have to admit that it didn’t impact negatively on the quality of the music itself.

The Vasco Era’s rehearsals must be an intense affair. They knew their songs backwards – their competency with the material was palpable. Seamless, masterful transitions between songs of differing styles were pulled off without a hitch, and catchy and exciting riffs were laid down with a great deal of expertise. Distracting as it was to watch the band – the bassist flailing around like a drowning child – the music, in its own right, was impressive to hear. A lot of this was undone by the insufferable drawling of the singer, and it was a welcome change when he reined in the screaming for a few quieter songs. There was a highly endearing earnestness to his voice at times – he went from sounding like a Dan Auerbach with no concerns for his larynx to a Conor Oberst who was even less sure he believed was he was saying. It was at these times that the irony fell away, the charade was paused momentarily, and a rare glimpse into the true soul of the band was visible for all to see.

These moments, as enjoyable as they were, were few and far between. For the most part it was hard-hitting gain from the guitar and stomping pulses from the bass and drums. It was animating, and it was enlivening – but it wasn’t at any point at risk of being taken seriously. They played loose-and-fast with what should have been meticulous pacing – starting songs without the entire band, incongruent diminuendos. Each song would start with a heady optimism, but then descend into folly or just fall flat at some point. There were exceptions, surely, but they weren’t enough to prevent a firm boredom from setting in after an hour had passed. The same product was flogged, all night – and for those who were buying, it was very obviously a great time. For the rest, however, it was an overly casual and unpersuasive performance that would have been better delivered with more of the heartfelt honesty that was the shining highlight of the entire night.

The Vasco Era’s tour with Papa vs. Pretty continues throughout November.

Via Last.fm

I saw Surfer Blood in Toronto in early 2010, and was lucky enough to hang out with them at a bar. It was a very humanising experience – the way rockstars are so readily put up on pedestals was profoundly challenged that night. Here were five dudes, not so much older than me – kind of nerdy, mildly awkward when it came to conversation. The cool that was dripping off them on stage all seemed to evaporate as soon as conversation began. The absurd confidence they had with their guitars didn’t seem to extend itself into the realm of social interaction. This has small enough bearing on them as a band, of course – their first album is legendary and will remain so – it was however a very interesting experience to realise that these guys were normal. They’d worked hard towards a vision, and had achieved it, and now had to put up with dickheads grilling them on every aspect of their careers in a shitty Canadian bar. Lucky them.

I was excited for Tarot Classics, with good reason. Astro Coast probably goes beyond Heartland and High Violet in terms of what 2010 offered up for us all, and any consequent recording from these guys was bound to be met with keen anticipation. Perhaps we’re all to become the victims of stupidly raised expectations, because their follow-up EP does not do the tone set by their first album justice. It’s a tragedy, it really is – but that’s how it is. Surfer Blood’s biggest enemy in this situation was themselves - they had to produce a sequel worthy of Astro Coast, and that’s not a task to be taken lightly.

Where Astro Coast pushed boundaries and compelled people to get down, Tarot Classics comes across as lazy and poorly-considered. All the power has gone, the forceful and hard-hitting riffs and licks have all given way to indolent bar chords; the determined and enthusiastic percussive brilliance has been replaced with lugubrious and slovenly ride cymbals and Casio-sounding clicks and whirrs. Synthesisers are used and abused, reverb is cranked to 11 in what seems to be a vigorous rethinking of the old less is more mentality. It’s disappointing – to see a band whose guitarist can legitimately play riffs with his fucking teeth descend to an unchallenging and uninspiring platform, where their former brilliance is marred by such languid output. Drinking Problem sounds like the background music for a fucking Tarzan video game.

For Surfer Blood, it seems that lyrics were never something that came into play in any meaningful sense, and that’s fine – it’s not the responsibility of every band to sate the appetites of cryptoids who pore over Okkervil River lyric sheets. Pitts certainly added something, however, with his throaty screams to swim/to reach the end. It was rousing, if mostly incomprehensible, stuff – it was the final necessary element in the construction of their exciting style. But here Pitts seems to have more to say than time in which to say it – scarcely pausing for breath all the way through Miranda, a song whose introduction suggests that the dickhead from Nickelback is about to start bellowing at us all. Similarly, I’m Not Ready is positively sloppy, from content to execution – Pitts’ former similarities to a young Morrissey now seem ludicrous.

Tarot Classics is eleven tracks long – absurd, for an EP, until you realise that seven - seven - of the tracks are remixes. The four actual songs are outnumbered almost two-to-one by their instantly forgettable derivatives. This doesn’t bode well, this isn’t a trend to be encouraged. Aesop Rock once bolstered the magnificent Heretic Pride with a reinterpretation of Lovecraft in Brooklyn, and the world should be grateful he did – but it stopped there. The stems of a song aren’t something to be distributed like postcards on a holiday. Collaboration does wonderful things for one’s musical networks, I’m sure, but the extent of this musical incest is laughable.

Good things may yet still come from Surfer Blood, and no-one’s fingers are crossed tighter than my own. They’ve proven themselves to be men of incredible talent, and sub-par offerings such as Tarot Classics do more harm than good. They’ve got the capacity for excellent music, and the legions of Astro Coast diehards are sure to hope for better things in the future.

Purists will argue that games are ruined when features are removed – the axing of Medium Armour as a skill, or the removal of pauldrons. But a purist will also tear his larynx in protest when features are added - fast travel, the lockpicking “minigame”. This doesn’t hold, when examined objectively. What these people seem to want is more Morrowind. Bethesda are faced with an impossible situation – it doesn’t matter what they release, people will complain about it. It’s a terrible shame, because these idiots detract from just how fantastic the games are. Elder Scrolls games are held to a higher standard than other games, purely because of how good they are in their own right. People are quibbling, then, about the number that follows the decimal point and the nine. I loved Morrowind, I loved Oblivion, and now that Skyrim is here, I love it too. What a terribly pedestrian view to take! The mark of truly discerning taste is being able to find fault in everything, and the best video game critics are the ones who seem to hate playing video games. It’s a fundamentally fucked mentality.

I’m one week and thirty-five hours into Skyrim. I don’t regret a second of the wasted sunshine and abandoned social events; it’s been worth it. The game is incredible – it goes without saying – and here is a brief synopsis of my experience so far.

1. The skills system works 

I was initially sceptical of the approach taken to skills within Skyrim – the removal of attributes I found to be a highly questionable decision. However within the first few hours I realised the brilliance of it. I was enjoying my experience so much more because my character could do whatever he wanted, without being restricted by the automatic failure mandated by a low score in a relevant attribute. This, truly, is free-form gaming.

Bethesda’s goal seems to have been to streamline the skills system, and they’ve done that. Streamlining, however, is nothing more than a euphemism for simplification, when it comes to this sort of thing. And yes, the game is simpler. But that’s not always a bad thing – those up in arms about the fact you can’t wield a spear in Skyrim have the most backward priorities. It just doesn’t fucking matter. The fact that I can cherry-pick the skills I want to use, use them, and see direct improvement in them is incredibly rewarding. Attributes were good fun for optimisation and stressing over character builds, but the game is that much better due to their removal. As casual as that makes me sound.

2. There are too many quests

My journal is overloaded with shit I have to do. The PC is Skyrim must be the most helpful dude out there – determined to right the tiny wrongs of every single fucking NPCs lives. I have no right to complain about something like this – there is no justification for whinging about too much content. However I find it very stressful indeed to have about forty quests waiting patiently in my journal, and I can’t help that. I want to help people, but I’m but one Bosmer. This isn’t really a legitimate grievance – nonetheless, I am constantly stressed out, wherever I go, because I’m terrified of not doing something I need to in that area.

3. The crafting system is the most rewarding part of the game

Collecting amber and ore in Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion was excellent fun, and was ultimately rewarded with a set of terrific armour and weaponry. It’s more or less the easiest way to reward gamers – especially packrat gamers – by giving them a different set of pixels to adorn their avatar, a real sense of fulfilment is then granted to the sucker who has been lugging this heavy shit around for hours. But in Skyrim, this paradigm is extended wonderfully, through the crafting system.

As rewarding as wearing armour that was composed of items I collected myself, the satisfaction felt when showing off a set of armour that I myself created goes so far beyond anything from the Shivering Isles. Sourcing the leather and right kinds of ore in the wilderness, then coming back to Whiterun’s forge and putting that shit together was a huge source of enjoyment for me – not least of which when I was walking around in the very bones of my vanquished foes. A legitimate complaint has been made that you can’t engage the services of blacksmiths to make these things for you, with the provision of proper prerequisites – my advice, however, is do it yourself. Forging is altogether an incredibly rewarding aspect of the game.

4. Fast travel threatens to ruin open world games

I had to make myself a hard-and-fast rule, about ten hours in – I was not allowed to fast travel, for any reason. The game was becoming a series of ticks on a Things To Do list – I was given a quest, I’d open the map and zoom to the destination (or nearest explored location) and get that shit over with. The magic of these open world games was instantly lost – as soon as I stopped fast-travelling, I would have the most amazing adventures. The rather overwrought idiom that “it’s not the destination but the journey” rings very true here – all of a sudden, I was engaging with dragons, discovering lost hamlets, chasing snow foxes, fleeing from giants – all the things that make an open world game what it is.

Open world games are so much more than point-A-to-point-B straightforwardness, but the fast travel option means that laziness can and often will lose out. There’s a simple enough counter to this – don’t use it - but that in itself isn’t enough. People will use it, because people are lazy. The feature should be removed. In Morrowind, we all made do with Silt Striders, boats, and Intervention spells. It was interesting to see the return of in-game fast travel through wagons – but why waste 50 gold when you can just open your map? It would be terrific to see the revival of fixed fast-travel points in lieu of universal fast-travel – and while Mark and Recall are perhaps best left as gamebreaking memories, Intervention spells would make a welcome return.

5. Hoarding items is doing me serious psychological damage

I don’t know what it is, but I am totally unable to discard items. My inventory becomes cluttered within seconds of stepping outside a city, and then whenever my encumbrance level is met, I can’t simply leave the items I don’t want by the roadside. No, I have to trudge back to the nearest vendors and dispose of all my hard-gotten gains for the piddling amounts of gold they offer me. I achieved Golden Touch ages ago, but I still obsessively squeeze every gold piece out of every item I can. It is at the point where I am getting stressed out about not being able to relieve a corpse of its valuables. I’m not nearly so bad in real life – I don’t know where this compulsive hoarding tendency comes from, and nor do I like it.

Don’t think for a moment that there won’t be more on Skyrim.

Often, good bands will grab your attention with some element of their musical output – perhaps more parts of your body are inadvertently moving in time, or perhaps for the rest of the day you find yourself humming snatches of a particularly catchy chorus. Neither was the case with the Long Winters – their music isn’t particularly catchy, nor is it overly danceable. These aren’t dealbreakers, of course – but it does raise the question: what aspect then gets you? It ensnares you immediately, and doesn’t even bother to explain why it has.

Via Wikipedia

Lyrically, John Roderick is hardly the voice of a generation, or even anything close – all too often his lyrics come across as pedestrian. The album When I Pretend to Fall is filled with phrases that are trite enough to rival Owl City – but taking that into a broader account, it’s possible to see why he can be so lyrically uninspiring. Roderick enjoys the maddest of props from respectable bands across the board – he’s worked with everyone from the Decemberists to Death Cab, and is widely respected as a veteran of Seattle alternative rock. You can see why, straight away – his easy confidence is projected through the demeanour of his voice. This is my work, he says, this is what I do. There’s a lot to be said for a perspective like that; Roderick doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who hangs himself up on the delicate minutiae of his output. He’s written his lyrics, and they’ll do.

Fortunately for those of us weaned on J. Darnielle and S. Stevens – those of us for whom music without legitimate lyrical content falls unforgivably flat – Roderick bucks up his ideas in the band’s finest effort, Putting the Days to Bed. The masterpiece one-two hit that closes the album, Teaspoon and Ultimatum, are as flashy as Roderick gets when it comes to lyrical depth, and it’s worth putting up with the stunted ending of Hindsight - the definite low point on an otherwise well-constructed album – to experience the album’s closing contributions. Roderick’s perspective seems to have changed, between Pretend to Fall and Days to Bed, and it’s not altogether a straightforward change for the better.

When first rolling an RPG character, one is generously granted a number of points - abstract representations of as-yet uninvested talents. The eternal drawback, when it comes to these points, is that there are never quite enough of them. Decisions must be made – painful, exhausting decisions that cripple the determined optimiser within us all – as to in which area these points are best invested. When rolling Pretend to Fall, Roderick threw all his points behind Rhythmical Complexity and Clever Instrumentation, not leaving many over for Lyrical Refinement. Learning from this, he rejigged his approach with Days to Bed, and made sure to keep some in reserve for lyrical considerations. The trade-off, however, is somewhat unhappy. The engaging complexities in tracks like Shapes and Cinnamon are what lends the music its character – the management of concurrent 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures in Cinnamon is absolutely masterful, and the unnavigable rhythms in Shapes are head-spinning in their apparent ease.

Days to Bed lacks these intricacies, settling for more of a middle ground. It’s a shame, in a way – but still doesn’t prevent Days to Bed from being the better album. There aren’t too many bells and whistles, the stylistic approaches sometimes differ but never really scramble the overall sound the band puts out. The instrumentation is never particularly lush, and happily avoids being heavy-handed – the odd brass section is tacked on here and there, and strings often fill in what otherwise would be a small void in the music – but it never even flirts with the idea of being overdone. This approach seems to be typical of Roderick and his cohorts – they’re a group of people who know when to stop. They’d never piss away a pay packet at the poker tables – they’d stand up, declare themselves to be out, content with what they’d achieved. It’s a rare thing outside those who consider themselves musical minimalists. The Long Winters are by no account minimalistic – they’re just acutely aware of the extent of what constitutes a good song.

At first, much of their corpus comes across as rigidly traditional in its construction – the standard four-man set up, verse chorus verse chorus. It’s a tried-and-true formula that serves bands incredibly well. Tinkering with these formulas – while occasionally turning you into a genius - often results in disaster, and the Long Winters seem to be cognisant of that fact. Their tinkering goes only as far as it needs to. It’s not conservative caution, it’s not a band that’s terrified outside a well-defined comfort zone – it instead comes from being pointedly aware of the desirable boundaries. They know what they’re trying to do, and they do it well. Why fuck with that?

It’s music to aspire to – prototypical in its approach to unpretentious and accessible rock. It’s music that conjures a sense of being achievable - leaving you with a sense that you could make music as good as this. That may sound like something of an insult, but it’s not meant as such – the traditional way in which this band forges their sound lends itself to vicarious inspiration. It’s never intimidating, and never overwhelming; it’s music that can be processed and enjoyed for what it is. It’s music that makes you want to pick up your guitar. The Long Winters are a band that are all too easy to overlook, and I can certainly see why. The advice to take here, then: don’t.

It’s easy enough for me to make the distinction between me as a 19 year old and me today – it was over two years ago, and quite clearly things have changed since then. But the continuum along which they changed is not so easily divisible. Certainly in that time, sufficient changes have taken place for me to be able to say I’m not like that any more – but tracking down the point at which this transition is properly made is an impossible task. Certainly there are focal points of our lives which we can say changed us in profound ways – but never to the point that we disassociate ourselves with the person we were the day before. Essentially, the way in which our pasts are infinitely divisible means that it’s pointless to attempt to form a clear cleavage around two distinct points on this continuum. I used to be about a foot long, and scream like a banshee whenever I was hungry. Now, I’m about six times as long – things have changed. I’m still the same organism, with the same name and identity, but my wailings for food now are largely considered inappropriate. I won’t try to penetrate the divisibility of this scale. Let the record show, however, that I never got Pictures for Sad Children, and I still don’t. It’s mostly ridiculous.

The point that I’m rather laboriously coming to with all this is that there is a host of old material sitting around on this blog, the leavings of this 19 year old that I used to know so well. His perspective – so completely irrefutable at the time – is not something I’m particularly keen to dismiss or do away with. I’m not ashamed of his perspective, and the fact that it was at one point mine – but so often, we distance ourselves from the people we used to be. It’s not an easy thing to admit one’s failings, and without the benefit of sufficient life experience, our failings are all too easy to overlook. In the years to come, I may very well come back and examine these very words here and silently shake my head in embarrassment.

But I trust that person to treat these words – however poorly they may reflect upon him – with a deal of respect. Just as that 19 year old trusted me, now, to treat his words with respect. The idea of a clean slate – no years-old perspective contextualising the words I write today – is quite an attractive prospect. Perhaps I should find another platform and speak from that, and leave this to gather cobwebs and stand as evidence of how I used to be. But that seems incredibly disrespectful to the memory of someone I used to know so well. I know that he would feel betrayed, were I to abandon him like that – and I know that in the years to come, if I don’t treat what I write here with a certain level of respect, I’ll feel as if I’m letting myself down.

Sentimentality is certainly something I’ve stood accused of being overly fond of, and I don’t see the point in denying it. In showing such diligent respect for my two-year old views on things, perhaps I’m damaging the quality of my portfolio through pandering to someone who can’t even voice his opinion any more. However, at the end of it all, I don’t feel as if sentimentality is undoing me, here. This goes beyond sentimentality – it tackles a deeper issue, which is the recognition and acceptance of the pasts we all used to have. Each and every person is forced, every day, to live with the people they have been, not just who they are today. In my case, that might not be particularly difficult – I’ve never killed anyone, I don’t have horrendous amounts of guilt to cope with or anything of the sort – but when it comes to showing some respect to a 19 year old who has so profoundly influenced the person I am today, I will stick by his addled ramblings on political correctness, and his slapdash attempts at originality and humour. As embarrassing as he is to me now, I owe him more than I realise.

I still write a lot – every day, as it happens, in a diary – but there’s no audience for this writing and as such it tends to be rather unpolished and somewhat inexpressive. Well, I imagine it would be. I know what I mean, I know what abstract concepts I’m attempting to invoke when setting down a certain combination of words. Accessibility, I suppose, is the crux of the issue with my writing – I don’t write for anyone other that myself. You might make the case that that’s a definite positive, and it’s a strong case to make; but the value of such writing – writing that is unilaterally aimed at a single person, without consideration for broad accessibility – is difficult to pin down. It depends where you’re putting the goalposts. When I aim to write for myself and myself only, I do very well. But it’s hardly an audience that’s going to develop and challenge me stylistically. There’s worth to it, certainly, but people aren’t impressed by a tennis player’s technique if all he’s doing is hitting balls to himself, against a wall.

There’s an interesting contradiction I have to face daily in managing my motivations. Often I’m faced with one of two reasons to do something – I do it either because I want to do it, or because I need to do it. I’m scarcely breaking any ground in having to address such a dichotomy, it’s a fairly common experience. When there’s a direct conflict between these two things – as there so often is – it necessitates an exhaustive evaluation and final decision, as mutual exclusivity cuts away like Occam’s Razor at our desires and responsibilities. But when these motivations come into conflict with themselves, it’s often a very tricky situation to deal with.

For example: writing. I’ve wanted to start writing again for a long time, I’ve been meaning to put pen to paper – or fingertip to keyboard, if you like – for a good while. Two and a half years is a long time, but within that time I’ve had a consistent desire to start writing again, and this platform has nagged me as an appropriate vehicle in which to proceed. But, I haven’t. And that’s because me wanting to write has always been eclipsed by me wanting to do something else, something with perhaps a more immediate payoff, or something that isn’t quite as intimidating as a blank text field on a computer screen. I suppose it’s a relatively straightforward cleavage – long-term fulfilment taking a back seat to short-term enjoyment. Hardly a shocking state of affairs.

The difficulty arises in trying to ascertain what I want more, then and there. Certainly, I want to write. That, by this stage, is a given. But it’s all the other things that writing invokes – deciding upon topics, worrying about whether a discussion you’re exploring is frivolous and superficial, and being constantly concerned about the pointlessness of the writing itself when it comes to audience. What is the point, I asked myself, in publishing these writings online, when I could instead restrict myself to personal writing and not worry about the daily statistics WordPress so heartlessly forces upon me at every visit, reminding me of my obscurity? These things all stand in the way of what I want to do, they are all reasons that stop me. And the difficult part is, I have a range of other things I also want to do, and they end up winning out. These guilt-inducing fallback positions are just as much a retardation of my long-term objectives as the real obstacles themselves. Being put off by a blank text field is only underpinned by the fact that there’s an Xbox game going begging in the loungeroom.

That’s the rub. Doing certain things – eating better, exercising, reading more – these are all things we want to do. But then video games and afternoons in cafes are things we want to do as well – and they’re so much easier. You’d think it would be simple – if you want to do something, you do it. But when the reason you’re not doing something you want to do is because you’re doing something else that you legitimately want to do – these waters become impossibly murky and impenetrable. Perhaps I’m complicating this unnecessarily, perhaps it is as simple as long term vs. short term objectives. I don’t think so, however. When I justify my actions by telling myself I wanted to do something, it doesn’t always stand up. Because I feel like I should have instead done something else, something I also wanted to do.

In any case: for better or worse, this conflict has meant a long break in me writing for an audience. This text field, full as it is with my questionable prose, stands as a testament to the force of my willpower. In order to do something that I want to do, I’ve had to overcome doing other things that I want to do as well. Talk about fucking first world problems.