Justin258

I first heard this album years ago. I listened to it and Roads to the North a few times and thought “this is all right” and then didn’t stick with it. A few months ago, though, I thought about the band because of an offhand comment someone made about a panopticon (the type of prison, not the band) and I decided to listen to it again. I don’t know exactly what changed between then and now, but I think this album – and Roads to the North – are fucking excellent these days. I haven’t gone on to listen to more Panopticon because over the past few months I feel like I’m still getting a lot out of this album and Roads. And also I got back into Agalloch, because of course I did, why wouldn’t I? Why isn’t everyone? Anyway…

I think part of the reason I didn’t get way into it years ago is because I had a hard time getting into the bluegrass stuff. Banjos and shit? Psh. That’s not me. That’s never something I’d want to listen to! Well, that was then, and this is now, and I really should dig into that genre if it’s as full of fiddles and banjos doing great stuff like we see here. Hopefully it is, these influences don’t come out of nowhere.

I think what really makes this album work amazingly well for me is the contrast between its two major genres, and how they get blended together. Some of the melodic parts of Bodies Under The Falls are carried by a fiddle playing over all the black metal, especially towards the beginning, and the middle part of that song fades into a more bluegrass-y part and then back into the black metal in a way that really works for me. Come All Ye Coal Miners is a cover of a folk song and it’s entirely a bluegrass song and it might be one of my favorite songs on the album.

…which brings me to the album’s subject matter. Panopticon is a band mostly driven by one guy, Austin Lunn, and it can be a pretty political band. Here, the album has two primary themes revolving around coal mining. First, it’s about coal miners fighting for their rights in Kentucky. Come All Ye Coal Miners is an anthem about this fight, though that song isn’t just about people from Kentucky – it’s intended to be about coal miners as a whole, from Kentucky to West Virginia and wherever else coal mining was done in America. Black Soot and Red Blood leans into this album’s black metal sound way more and it’s kind of a central song in the album – ten minutes long and right smack in the middle. And smack in the middle of that song is a spoken word segment by an old man recalling how the mining companies used to abuse people and how, when they fought back against that abuse, the union that was supposed to protect them, the Catholic church that was supposed to empathize with them, the politicians that were supposed to represent them, and the coal company that was supposed to pay their living wages all worked together to press the miners down, and the only way the miners got anything was by striking and fighting together, in solidarity. I think it’s a very powerful segment… but damn if I wouldn’t give anything for Lunn to go back and remix this album such that the spoken word sample is higher in the mix. I have excellent headphones and you have to really listen to understand what’s being said, and the last bit is damn near impossible to hear regardless of how much you turn it up or what headphones you’re wearing. Is it still impactful for me? Yeah, it goddamn is, this shit happened less than a century ago. Your grandfather or great grandfather was probably alive while this was happening. This shit can just as well happen today. Freight train conductors went on strike for more sick time not too long ago and they barely got anything when they were told to go back to work. This stuff isn’t and never will be behind us, and hiding a powerful, clear statement about it from someone who experienced it behind bad mixing does no one any favors. As far as I’m concerned, this bit of news is a black mark on Biden's record. The contents of this album refer to events that have happened and can happen again.

The other half of this album is about the impact coal mining has on the landscape in Kentucky (and elsewhere). This is most present on Bodies Under The Falls,Killing The Giants As They Sleep, and Black Waters, another cover of a folk song. Killing… is guilty of the same crime that Black Soot and Red Blood is – there’s a spoken word segment in it as well. It’s significant and fits well with the album’s themes but, again, why is this hidden behind the mix so much? Is it because this is atmospheric black metal? I think that’s a bad excuse, just as the whole “give me your shittiest mic” attitude towards mixing black metal did nothing but hold the genre back (and also some of the more political leanings of early 90’s black metal but I don’t want to talk about that). I also think the “my lyrics are personal” reason doesn’t mean much when these aren’t Lunn’s lyrics but a sample of something someone else said. Or maybe Lunn said them! I don’t know, I can’t seem to find a transcript of them anywhere. It doesn’t make the section meaningless, just kind of frustrating. I suppose the kind of people who would make it that far into this album aren’t looking for something easy to listen to, but I sure would appreciate it. I don’t often get way into an album’s lyrical meaning so it’s frustrating when something comes along whose meaning I am way into purposefully hides something that should be so clear to the listener.

As far as how this complaint compares to Lunn’s screamed black metal lyrics… I have less of a problem with those because I figured I’d have to look them up anyway. I guess that’s hypocritical of me to just shrug when the lyrics are difficult to decipher and then complain when the spoken word is difficult to decipher… but that’s where my personal opinion has landed. I dunno, it’s black metal, and John Haughm isn’t the vocalist so you can’t understand anything anyway (it’s kind of incredible how much clearer The Mantle’s vocals are than the vast majority of the genre).

Anyway, look, ultimately the complaints about the spoken word being low in mix are really me just railing against genre convention. The rest of the album, as I’ve mentioned, is just spot-fucking-on for me. It is at times peaceful, at times furious, at times mournful, and it does a great job of carrying me through that journey. I think purely in terms of music Roads to the North is a better album, but - as you can see from all I've written - this album has gotten me thinking about things that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise thought much about.

Anyway, I think the Wikipedia articles on the Harlan County War is worth reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War

As well as perhaps looking up a later strike in the same area covered in a documentary called “Harlan County, USA”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA

As for songs… I suppose my favorite song of the whole lot is Bodies Under The Falls but frankly you should just listen to the whole thing.

EDIT: You know what, I should add, they have a cover of Which Side Are You On and I think it's very forgettable. So much so that I wrote this whole thing and didn't even think about that song while listening to the album again. I don't think it's awful or unlistenable, it just doesn't do anything for me, as opposed to its closest cousin on this album Come All Ye Coal Miners, which does a lot for me.

I was not a huge fan of this one.

So, a lot of what I dislike about this comes down to the vocals. They don’t work for me. I guess this is just R&B style vocals? A little bit of rapping here and there? We’ve had a few rap albums before and this winds up being a similar story to the rap albums I’ve listened to – at worst, I’m OK with what all the instruments are doing, at best I actually kinda really like it, but something about the vocals makes by brain go “please make this person shut up” and that ruins any interest I might have had in the song as a whole.

I understand that most people would find that odd when put up against my usual metal interests, but there’s something about the cadence of the vocals that don’t work for me. They’re all punchy in the wrong places and far too often, if that makes any sense. “Wrong” for my brain, not “wrong” as in “bad”, I don’t think any part of this album is bad in any kind of “objective” sense (at least as far as that term can go when talking about art). I just think that me trying to like this style of singing is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I’d like to say that I can look past the vocals and just listen to the music, but I can’t do that – those vocals are placed front and center and given the most attention. They’re what your brain is meant to focus on first and foremost, they’re the star of the show, and nothing else ever takes precedence over them.

“Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” is a fantastic name for anything, though.

The closest thing to this album that we listened to was “Transient” by Gaelle, and I think I liked that a lot more than this. At this moment, I’ve begun to listen to the first song on it and… yeah, this works for me way better. I remember my feelings on this album being up and down, though.

Huh. I never thought about it that way. I always considered rolling a new world as "replaying" it, but I suppose it's not the same thing as starting a new Skyrim character.

I find that I replay games less now that I'm in my thirties and own a home. Oh, I still do occasionally, but usually when I replay a game I do something different, and I don't just mean turn up the difficulty. With something like Factorio/Satisfactory/Minecraft, you just give yourself a different project. With something like Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, you try different character builds and make different choices. If it's not something like that there must have been a long time between then and now for me to replay it, either that or it's Halo. I seem capable of replaying Bungie-era Halo campaigns pretty much infinitely without getting bored.

Also, I find myself most engaged by big games with lots of stuff going on gameplay-wise. When I get home from work I don't want to look at a list of games and figure out what to play, I just want to double-click something and go, and if I already know how to play something... great! I can just keep doing that! Picking something new every week or two and learning the ropes for it just sounds stressful. Give me something I can snack on for a month or two (but not infinitely, I don't like games that try to keep your attention for an infinite amount of time).

For Skyrim... my favorite playthrough of that game was one where I put a hundred hours into it over a month, something I don't think I've done since. I bumped the difficulty up one notch and specifically tried to play without fast traveling. I would pay for carts to take me somewhere, sure, but the map was for navigation. The higher difficulty makes you engage with that game's systems more than you would on normal, where just mashing the attack button over and over and sometimes drinking a potion wins everything, and that made gameplay much more engaging. I won't claim it's a great combat system or a deep RPG or anything, but it still felt like there was a lot more to it than most people give Skyrim credit for. That, and I also played through the DLC and wound up exploring a lot more of the sidequests than I ever had before. This was like six or seven years ago and talking about it now makes me kinda want to play Skyrim again...

The "playing bad games ironically" schtick might be funny for a little while but eventually you've got to genuinely enjoy something.

I recall 2014 being a good year in games for me. The highlight of that year was Wolfenstein: The New Order (you talk about Shadow of Mordor being overrated, I'd tell you that W: TNO deserves to be talked about as a highlight in FPS campaigns, especially when it comes to story). Dark Souls 2 came out that year. Shovel Knight came out that year. I enjoyed Titanfall at the time, though I never played tons of the original.

I also graduated college and got a job. I'd later come to hate that job, but also education was over (or so I thought, you never actually stop learning) and earning a bigger paycheck than I ever earned while living with my parents so that might have something to do with me having a slightly brighter outlook on games that year.

I do think we tend to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses pretty much all the time, though. We tend to keep the things that remind us of the good times and we try not to dwell on the things that caused us stress and pain, which makes the past sometimes look nicer than it really was. So, yeah, I'd say any time in our past is a time we are prone to become nostalgic towards.

As for years I actually feel most nostalgic for... uh... I don't know which one to pick. I find myself not really keeping up with the newest releases as much anymore. I play a few on release, most notably Baldur's Gate 3 last year (I'm going to do another playthrough of that whenever they finish patching it and/or they release some kind of enhanced edition). There was a few years in the late 2010's where I played almost nothing new and instead just replayed Dark Souls and Skyrim and some other older favorites over and over again. And I don't regret doing that, it's kinda the thing I wanted to do at the time, but I don't feel all that much nostalgia for things from that era, except maybe Prey 2017 and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and maybe some others here and there. I played Pillars of Eternity 2 years later and I think that game's incredible, though, I'd probably have a lot of nostalgia for it if I'd played it at release.

I think there are two things you could do to get into this game. The first is crank the difficulty all the way up so that you have to really engage with its systems - there's enough going on here that even if you hate the way 5E works in tabletop you could still find some fun in figuring out how to exploit this game.

The second is crank the difficulty all the way down, make it as easy as possible, and just soak in the world and story. Frankly, I'd tell you that the presentation, story, characters, and world are the biggest draws here - if DnD mechanics are going to be the thing that makes or breaks this game for you, there's a little game out there called Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for you.

I guess this really depends on what you hate about 5E. - if you just think it's too simple, a difficulty that forces you to make the most of everything you have might alleviate that. If you just hate the way 5E works, then cranking the difficulty up is just going to exacerbate that.

Also Baldur's Gate 3 might not be a game for you.

I understand this is what Mass Effect is famous for, but also Mass Effect really just simplifies its dialog choices down to a six-slice pie wheel on the bottom of the screen, and only two of those slices ever actually mattered. And I loved Mass Effect! But I feel like Dragon Age Origins would be a better comparison, and even better than that would be the game that Bioware made and then cribbed from for the next decade and a half - Baldur's Gate 2.

Only the truest of gamers can play and enjoy garbage alongside the good stuff.

...seriously, I don't personally play many bad video games but I know some people who do and they seem even more appreciative of genuinely good games.

This sounds a bit like you projecting.

Yes, I have games I haven't gotten around to, some of them have been sitting around for years. At the same time, I have other games that have been sitting around, also sometimes for years, that I finally got around to and finished and loved. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are good examples. Dishonored 2 is a game I bought, played for a bit, and didn't actually finish until a year later. I'm trying to get better about this, but there will probably always be something that I've been meaning to get around to.

Regarding the thread topic, I'm not really keen on telling someone else how much they like games. It's entirely possible for someone to like a handful of games as much as someone else likes basically every game. I would guess that attitudes such as this are leftovers from gaming twenty plus years ago, when someone with spare change and a lot of time could basically play or at least know something about basically everything of note. These days, there are way more video games and the audiences are so varied that you can't really know everything about every game, unless all you really keep track of is whatever rises to the top.

As a result, you have small indie games that someone might have a thousand of or you might have someone who only really enjoys RPGs and factory games so they just have five hundred hours in Pathfinder and 2000 in Factorio and that's all they've played for three years. As long as you're having fun with your video games I'd say you like video games.

(Fair warning – I’m using the generic, overarching term “classical music” and not the specific term for the specific period referring to specific things.)

I have only occasionally listened to some classical music. I liked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’ve liked some other stuff here and there. More than anything else, the thing getting in the way of me listening to classical music is trying to figure out which performance of a thing to listen to. If I suggest that someone go listen to Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, something I’ve listened to a few times recently, all I have to do is say the name of that album and you know where to look. Meanwhile, there are a zillion different performances of any given classical piece and any of them might have a different flavor or might be flawed in some way or, as in the case of Bela Bartok, there's a "suite" version of The Miraculous Mandarin that is missing the last third because of controversy in the early twentieth century or whatever. And I have always found looking up classical music to be an exercise in "am I listening to the right one?" instead of just enjoying whatever performance I happened to find.

So do I have anything significant to say about this specific piece? Yes! I did enjoy it! I kind of roll my eyes when metalheads compare their favorite genre to classical music, but as a metalhead, I tend towards the proggy side of things at least in part because I really enjoy music that rises and falls and rises again in intensity and frequently changes feel. And I’m sort of in the same headspace with this. This is a piece of music that’s always doing something interesting, I feel like I could listen to it a hundred times and find something new to appreciate and enjoy and then do the same thing a hundred more times. Like everyone else, I love a good catchy rhythm and fun melody, but something like this can stick with me for years if I listen to it more than a few times.

I didn’t comment in the thread about what new music I listened to this year because, uh, I’m bad about listening to new music these days, I’ve got a rotation of stuff and that’s what I listen to and I rarely add anything new. I want to change that in 2024 and it seems like I should put some more stuff like this on my palate. I suppose I just gotta pick a classical piece and listen to whatever first performance I come across and find more if I’m really interested in that piece.

I'm somehow always still a little bit shocked by the dislike for Doom Eternal. I bought that game, played it, had a fucking blast, thought it was the best combat loop in any FPS ever (and I still think that), and then I got online and it seemed like roughly half the people who played it were incredibly disappointed.

And I get why... but, for me, that combat was incredibly satisfying. It was also incredibly demanding. It's worth noting that I don't find "crush everything with little challenge or difficulty" to be a power fantasy. If you're never on the edge of death in a game like Doom Eternal, it's kind of just boring. Somehow Doom Eternal found a way to make it feel like you're always on the edge of death and you're still making it through, and that's so much more satisfying. I don't feel a power fantasy unless whatever I'm fighting is also powerful.

One of the primary complaints was "you have to use certain weapons on certain enemies", which isn't true in the base game. You basically have infinite ammo, just chainsaw whatever meatbag is closest to you, and use whatever gun you like - anything's viable, though some guns will be more difficult than others (aside: you might not be able to stick to one single gun for the entire game but... you're not doing that are you? Certainly you're switching things up at some point!?). Except when it comes to the Marauder, which ruins all three or four scenes he's in over the course of a ten to fifteen hour game, and in the DLC, which actually forces you to use certain guns with certain attachments on certain enemies in a way that genuinely was frustrating. The Cursed Prowlers are an especially shitty enemy.