UncleJam23

@zombiepie: Come on down

@allthedinos: Love that Lankum album. Something I didn't know I needed this year. Also just... just get in the damn discord. (It's not very active. It's mostly for organizing and a rare chit chat.)

The Unoffifical GB Album Club is coming back!

We've been on break for a bit. Some us were doing this. Some of us were doing that. Some of us come home every day from attending the SAG-AFTRA pickets too exhausted to function, which already doesn't help with the fact that he's generally incompetent at running a club on a video game website forum. But we're finally back and we're building a new pool of albums! So far we got 4, it's a pretty eclectic group of albums, and you're more than welcome to contribute!

If you want to join, come on down to the Discord and fill out the form! (That means you @zombiepie) There's no theme this time, so pick whatever you want and you can submit up to two. So come on down!

Okay, I know this isn't really a hottest mess contender, but I also think "Bobby Kotick bringing James Corden to an all-hands meeting" is a hot mess both conceptually and as a sentence. https://www.polygon.com/23912652/activision-all-hands-james-corden-bobby-kotick

@redwing42: I'm very afraid of this coming across as me "well, actually"-ing you, but that's actually her on piano as well as singing. Again, I bring it up not to correct, but to point out that she actually considered herself a pianist first, and her goal starting out was to play classical music and be a concert pianist. (They get into that a lot in the doc What Happened, Miss Simone?, which I feel is one of the better music docs, though be warned it's incredibly. Granted, I don't feel a huge amount of enthusiasm coming from you to be interested in watching that anyway, but still.) Instead, she got roped into playing jazz and pop and wound up going hard into the civil rights direction.

I bring all that up because I find it fascinating that you can be so great and get so much praise at doing something you never really wanted to do, particularly when it comes to art. And to go even further, Bellefonte wanted that kind of public adoration and used that lighter touch as a result. Nina didn't and went way angrier (she literally told MLK that she wasn't non-violent), and their lives wound up in such different places. It's wild.

So I picked this album because it's a top three all time favorite for me, and the reason why is that listening to this album in my dorm sophomore year made me realize what I care about when it comes to not just music, but art in general. Mainly that it's not about "good" or "bad" so much as it is about effective or non-effective.

Let's just say, to pull an example out of thin air, you're a black singer in Jim Crow America and you're performing a live cover of "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera, a power fantasy song in which a mistreated sex worker (or in this case, motel maid) fantasizes about being a secret pirate queen and taking bloody revenge on all the townspeople who have wronged her. How do you sing it?

If you want to, you could sing it pretty. You can adhere to proper standards of technically proficient singing, hit every note perfectly, and make something perfectly pleasing, and hey, it'll probably work. Or you can do what Nina did. Sing it off-kilter and strange. Bring out all the anger and sorrow at the core of the song by giving up a little bit of control. Of course, art is not a binary, and this isn't meant to be a dig at the former. But the latter will always reach my heart faster and harder.

"I Loves You Porgy" is a love song, and she sings it with warmth and longing. The pain of being torn away from Porgy is too much to bear, and she sings those parts as such. This version of "Plain Gold Ring" is a reimagining of the same song from her debut album that brings much stranger instrumentation to bring out the anguish of pining for someone who isn't available. "Go Limp" is a comedy song about two young lovers meeting at the civil rights marches, and not only does she sing it lighter, but she does some great on-stage banter too.

The lesson I learned from this album is one I think about constantly when making my own art (I'm a screenwriter). It's not about what you have. It's about how you use it. And of course, it doesn't hurt that Nina Simone is one of the greatest singers and performers of all time, and this is of course the album with the famous recording of "Mississippi Goddamn" on it. So... yeah, I think this album is basically untouchable as far as recorded music is concerned, live or otherwise.

Favorite Songs: "I Loves You Porgy," "Pirate Jenny," "Mississippi Goddamn"

Duders! Welcome to the 42nd edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, we donned our finest Hot Topic Jack Skellington shirt and we put on that black eye-liner we knew deep down we were only wearing to embarrass our elders and we got down with some emo rock. This week, hey, it's only the arguably greatest singer of all time! This week our album is Nina Simone in Concertby Nina Simone! This album was picked by yours truly, and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THIS ALBUM: Due to it being called Nina Simone in Concert, a very generic name not helped by the fact that the cover of the album says"Nina Simone in Concert" without any separation between "Nina Simone" and "In Concert," this album is listed in a bunch of places as just In Concert. The album is, however, called Nina Simone in Concert, and searching just "In Concert" gets you wrong results depending on what platform you're on blah blah blah if there's any confusion, you're looking for the one with the green album cover that ends with "Mississippi Goddamn." The links above are correct.

Anyway, here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we made a pool of albums and we pick one at random every week to listen to and discuss! This is the last album of this cycle, but if you want to get in on the next one, do so here at our Discord! Other than that, we'll be back in a few weeks or so!

Weird experience for me.

On one, I found this album a bit anemic and rudimentary. Once a song starts, rarely does it do anything unpredictable, and as I said back in the post about The Beths, your mileage will vary. In this case, I don't naturally gravitate towards this era of emo (or post-hardcore emo pop or whatever. I'm not trying to be flippant, this is genuinely not an area of music I can speak on, genre wise, with confidence) and so it didn't really carry a lot of juice for me. But I can't help but think that even if it did, this album just felt a little meat and potatoes.

On the other hand, they clearly know their way around and hook and riff. There's these moments where they show a little bit of flex. But the problem is that rarely do these moments last long enough to feel meaningful or stay in mind for long enough to leave an impact. But they were there. And because they were there, I never quite turned on the experience. "Surely, I thought, "a moment will come when this album will take off." Sadly that moment never came. But there were flashes.

So I walked away from it not disliking it, but disappointed. I saw what could've been, and I was bummed that I didn't get it. But honestly, that was better than I thought it was going to go because a few people in my life have spent the last week or so doing their damnedest to poison the well on this one. According to them, this is their sellout album. I've heard that claim about a few of their albums, but mainly this one.

I don't know. Maybe they got to me. Maybe this feeling of flatness comes from them sanding off their edges for radio. I genuinely don't know. But I have become oddly convinced that there's an AFI album I'm going to love the absolute fuck out of. The talent and the vision is clearly there. But as far as Decemberunderground goes, it just felt like there was something missing.

Favorite Songs: "Summer Shudder," "Love Like Winter," "Affliction"

Duders! Welcome to the 41st edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, we took off our shirts, we stuck our tongues out while we shredded, and even though we looked like absolute cornballs doing it, we had a lot of fun. This time, we're still rocking out, but instead of the kind of fun rocking with implied recreational drugs and overall bacchanalia, we're crashing the pit with our brooding makeup-heavy emo aesthetic because this week our album is Decemberunderground by AFI! 'Twas picked our good friend @redwing42! Links below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we pick an album at random every from a pool we created to listen to and discuss. If you want to get in on that shit, come join us in our Discord! We only have two albums left this rotation, but if you want to get in on the next one, that's where you need to go to do it. So join.

Definitely feels like the year of corporate violently shitting the bed. I realize that's kind of every year, but still.