Great Fucking Albums #24: Siamese Dream

Well, I said it was probably time to do this and so it looks like I’m a dude of my word.

The 1990s were a good time to listen to rock music, because the radio actually managed (on occasion) to play music that was good. In Oregon, we had Portland’s 94.7 KNRK, the station that first introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins. That introduction, crucial as it was to my transition from person who owned Hysteria on vinyl to person who owns albums of which he’s unashamed, came in the form of “Today,” the hit single (I believe the first among many) from Siamese Dream. I was all of thirteen years old and living with the first of two alcoholic step-dads that would make Hamm’s-swilling appearances in my adolescence. I still listened to my music on cassettes back then, and a friend of mine copied Siamese Dream onto a blank cassette for me (he had the CD and it can be safely inferred that he therefore had the better childhood); I promptly wore the cassette out (a disadvantage of the format. Come to think of it, portability was probably the only real advantage of cassettes). I must confess that, at first, I pretty much listened to “Cherub Rock” and “Today” over and over.

But I’m older and wiser now, and I can safely say that Siamese Dream was one of the best albums of the 1990s (yes, I know about Nevermind. I know. Settle down). For one thing, few albums of that decade announced themselves with the authority of “Cherub Rock,” a song that should be included in every video game that dares to place the word “guitar” anywhere near the word “hero.” That riff burned its way into my psyche when I was a teenager and it’s one of the few things I like to remember from that time in my life.

Like many of my favorite rock albums, Siamese Dream sounds better the louder you hear it (assuming you don’t push your speakers to the point of distorting the sound) and the one thing my sad little thirteen-year-old self managed to get right was listening to this album with the volume cranked up in my shitty Walkman headphones until I was practically swimming in Billy Corgan and Jame’s Iha’s über-distorted guitars. I didn’t know it at the time, but Siamese Dream got its dynamics from the Pixies and its guitar style from Dinosaur Jr.. That combination is as winning today as it was back then, although the modern incarnation of the Pumpkins doesn’t seem to be able to pull it off.

Was Siamese Dream pretentious? You bet your ass it was pretentious! Two songs approach seven minutes in length and one (“Silverfuck”) gets dangerously close to the nine minute mark. Length alone doesn’t make a song pretentious, but if a band is willing to linger that long in a tune, it suggests to me that said band may be overestimating the importance of their art. Billy Corgan definitely overestimated the importance of his art (to the point that he was deeply, apparently permanently offended when Pavement made a half-hearted, one-line crack about the Smashing Pumpkins in “Range Life”) and he continues to do so to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that Siamese Dream is fucking awesome.

There’s the aforementioned guitar tone; I mean, holy shit. Yeah, it’s J. Mascis-aping, but it also somehow turns Mascis’s frenetic, furious playing up to eleven while giving it a lot more focus. Even at its wildest (like, say, the guitar solo on “Cherub Rock” or the one on “Geek U.S.A.”), there is not a single note on Siamese Dream that hasn’t been fussed over, largely by Mr. Corgan, who frequently overdubbed James Iha and D’arcy’s parts with his own playing (and then overdubbed his parts with himself – between forty and one hundred times, depending on the song and who you ask). According to some sources, Corgan and producer Butch Vig could spend hours working on one 45-second section of a song.

And, though I don’t have much interest in looking up the lyrics that I can’t understand on this album (and there are many), Corgan’s vocal melodies are uniformly excellent on Siamese Dream. They’re catchy but not overly simplistic, possibly because Corgan controlled nearly every second of the recording process with an iron fist.

The result of all this fisting and fussing (sorry, couldn’t resist) was a bloated, pretentious, $250,000 over budget masterpiece. Though the 1995 follow-up, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was quite well-received, I don’t think the Smashing Pumpkins ever made an album as completely great as Siamese Dream. It swung for the fences on every single track, and the number of home runs it managed to hit in 62 minutes is astounding. In a decade that would see a steady and precipitous decline in the quality of Big Rock Records, Siamese Dream was a brilliant Big Rock Record, which was exactly what Billy Corgan wanted it to be.

In a week when massive lead singer ego has been on my mind, Siamese Dream forces me to consider the possible benefits of having a self-obsessed, tyrannical asshole for a vocalist. There’s little argument that Billy Corgan’s ego was the driving force behind the album, but was it worth it? As a selfish listener, I’d rather have Siamese Dream in my record collection than have Billy Corgan be a nice person, but I don’t have to deal with him. As a musician, I’d definitely be the kind of guy to get in fist fights with someone like Corgan; I like bands that I play in to be democratic and Corgan, like Axl Rose, seems like a musical fascist. After Siamese Dream was released in 1993, Corgan, in a move that must have been deeply inspiring to a young Julian Casablancas, told Spin, “I’m surrounded by these people who I care about very much, yet they continue to keep failing me.” Fortunately, the most Siamese Dream-like band I’ve heard in 2011, The Joy Formidable, shares Corgan’s desire for an epic rock sound but not his flagrant disrespect (bordering on seething disdain) for their fellow band members. At least, I haven’t read any interviews with Ritzy Bryan where she’s shit-talking the rest of the band.

So, bands like The Joy Formidable and friends, take Siamese Dream as a cautionary tale: naked ambition (which is the name of my Madonna cover band) and a lot of ego can get you far, but if you follow Billy Corgan’s swan dive (or is it a Zwan dive?) from awesomeness since making this album, you might do well to stop and consider whether or not it’s worth it. Performer discretion is advised.

Believe the Hype: 8 Guitarists Who Are Rated Exactly Right

If I’m gonna sit here like a jerk and tell you that some of your favorite guitar players are vastly overrated (I am and they are), I think it’s only fair to share with you some guitar players that I think are worth every ounce of hype and adoration they receive, starting with…

1. Angus Young. I know the schoolboy outfit is a gimmick and I know that AC/DC has recorded the same album like twenty times at this point, but the fact remains that a lot of AC/DC’s songs are fucking fun. And Angus Young is a large part of the reason. The dude basically exists to play sizzling riffs while Brian Johnson (the almost instantaneous reincarnation of Bon Scott) chokes on snot to some sort of melody. Angus Young’s playing is somewhere between brick stupid and elegantly simple, but it’s beautiful, goddammit. You plug your guitar in and play “Thunderstruck” or “Highway to Hell” and just try not to have an erection. I dare you.

2. Slash. Slash has never been in a band I liked. But the fact remains that the dude is one helluva guitar player. There are probably people who think that Guns ‘n’ Roses owed whatever brilliance they ever had to Axl Rose’s lyrics and voice; those people are wrong. I don’t listen to “Paradise City” when I’m out at the bars because Axl Rose (who is now just a chunky white dude with cornrows) is a great singer. I listen to every fucking note that Slash plays on that song, though. Despite the fact that he has inspired countless shitty guitarists (many of whom now plague your radio), he has also inspired the likes of Tad Kubler (of the Hold Steady, a.k.a. America’s Finest Rock Band). Slash’s playing is fluid and melodic and always entertaining and he deserves the reverence he receives, even if the bands he plays in do not.

3. Jimi Hendrix. If you’re youngish like me, there may have been a time in your life when you just stopped giving a shit about Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps (and this is just hypothetical) your alcoholic stepdad and all his asshole buddies would pound can after can of shitty beer while rocking out to “Purple Haze” and you just got to a point where you were like, “Fuck those guys and everything they love.” But with the distance of time – you’re an adult now, remember? – you can reevaluate Jimi Hendrix on his own merits. And here’s the shocking thing: the magazines and all the stupid pundits (those dimwits who think “Stairway to Heaven” is the highest musical achievement in the history of humankind) got exactly one thing right. Jimi Hendrix is probably the best guitarist ever. In terms of tone and melodic capability and just sheer fiery awesomeness, no one can touch Hendrix. Listen to “Little Wing” or “Bold as Love” or “The Wind Cries Mary” or “Red House” (the opening notes of which tell you pretty much all you will ever need to know about playing the electric guitar) and see for yourself. If we had more statues of Jimi Hendrix than churches in this country, I think we’d really be getting somewhere.

4. Keith Richards. This only works if you pretend the Rolling Stones died in like 1978, but just listen to “Honky Tonk Women.” Richards’ playing on that song alone is downright iconic. He’s not the greatest ever or anything, but Keith Richards has played some of the most memorable riffs in modern music.

5. Brian May built his own guitar and paired it with the impressive vocal stylings of Freddie Mercury (I don’t care if you like Queen or not, Mercury was one of the best vocalists in the history of rock. That dude had range that kids today are wise not to strive for) and proceeded to bridge the gap between glam and hair metal. From “Fat Bottomed Girls” to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Brian May has one of the most distinctive (and envy-inducing, at least in me) guitar sounds in music. Guitarists whose tone I would kill for: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Johnson, Brian May. Probably in that order.

6. Stevie Ray Vaughan died twenty years ago today, and that was too fucking soon. Though he was at times uncomfortably obsessed with Jimi Hendrix (and his cover of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” is more than worthy), SRV brought the blues to the people in the 19-fucking-80s, when everyone was all, “I’ma buy a keyboard and listen to Flock of Seagulls.” That is, he made the blues matter in an era when nothing did. Stevie Ray Vaughan is the reason I bothered to find out who Elmore James was (listen to SRV’s version of “The Sky is Crying” and you’ll understand that Stevie Ray knew how to pay his elders some respect) and he played the guitar the best way anyone can: like he was in a fight with God.

7. Pete Townshend. Like Keith Richards, you have to pretend Townshend died before he got old (I believe it was Kurt Cobain who once quipped, “I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend.” And then he shot himself), just like he and Daltrey said they wanted to (Keith Moon was the only guy in that band with any fucking follow-through, I guess). But if you do that, you can look at albums like Who’s Next and rejoice. Townshend didn’t have to bust out big solos to make his musical points (though dog knows he was capable of it) and he could compose real songs. And he did that windmill thing which absolutely does not help you play the guitar in any way, but it looked cool back in the day. As an early master of three-chord rock ‘n roll, Townshend is at least part of the reason we have guys like Angus Young right now.

8. Eric Johnson. You might think that I would lump Eric Johnson in with those annoying shred guys, but I won’t. Johnson’s compositions wander around from dull new agey hippie shit to blues to jazz and back again, showing an interest in playing a wide variety of music rather than just proving he’s technically brilliant (which he is). His range and tone set him so far ahead of the pack of solo guitarists that they can’t even see his dust to eat it. And “Cliffs of Dover” is still almost stupidly excellent. End of story.

So now you know who is overrated and who is properly rated (in my opinion). Next time, I’ll talk to you about some guitarists who are underrated and need your love right now (including, at last, one female guitarist. I’m not trying to be sexist in compiling these lists, but there are so few female guitarists out there, at least that I’ve heard. And Joni Mitchell doesn’t count because she’s boring. Perhaps I’ll make it my mission to find awesome female guitarists and tell you all about them in a later list). Until then, go listen to some of the guys on this list!

Send In the Clowns

Sigh. I read the Pitchfork review of the new Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, long before I actually got the album. There were lots of red flags. The review opened with, “Forget the cartoon characters.” I thought, “Wait a minute. I like the cartoon characters.” And then there was, most damningly, “Joke’s over, Gorillaz are real.”

First off, I need to take issue with the assertion that Gorillaz are suddenly real because of Plastic Beach, their mostly boring, stylistically static new album. How were they not real when Del the Funky Homosapien was spitting the freshest rhymes of his life over Dan the Automator’s beats? How was “Punk”* not real? How was “Slow Country” anything less than real and, I might loudly add, fucking beautiful? I’ll grant that Demon Days felt a little uninspired, but we got a couple of shit-hot singles out of it (“Feel Good, Inc.” is 100% certified ass-shaking music. You can’t not shake your ass to that song) and they certainly deserve to be called “real.” And, for as disjointed and weird as that album was, it certainly didn’t feel as overlong and excessive as Plastic Beach.

I realized, about halfway through Snoop Dogg’s trite, uber-laconic guest spot on “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach”, that the first Gorillaz album (one of the not-real ones, according to Pitchfork) is the only one that I still listen to from start to finish, largely because I love – love – the fact that it is a wildly inconsistent mishmash of pop, rock, and hip-hop that is, for whatever its faults, one helluva fun album. I don’t care if the P-forkers doubt its seriousness. Pitchfork has never done much to convince me that they can tolerate “fun” or “joy” (they’re big Morrissey fans over there, you know) so it stands to reason that they would laud Damon Albarn’s most uniformly sad-sack effort since The Good, the Bad, and the Queen (an album that I actually like because it had strong, if depressing, melodies and wasn’t fucked up by the likes of Snoop Dogg**). The first Gorillaz album is like Saint’s Row 2 – it knows what it is, it doesn’t give a fuck, and it’s here to party. By way of contrast, Plastic Beach is like Animal Crossing, a game where anthropomorphic woodland creatures strive to pay off their fucking mortgages and, presumably, not douse themselves in gasoline and strike a match. The game is exactly as much fun as it sounds, and it might still be more fun than Plastic Beach.

Plastic Beach is ostensibly a “concept” album (I hate that phrase and I’m really sorry I used it) about, I think, environmental destruction. Maybe. See, the attempt at cohesion is something that does not really fit the Gorillaz milieu. It’s better left to bands like the Decemberists or my beloved Hold Steady, whose Separation Sunday is the perfect balance of storytelling and ass-kicking rock ‘n’ roll. While Pitchfork’s Sean Fennessey may deride the “unfocused” nature of the first two Gorillaz records, I celebrate it; they sounded like they were 1) doing what they wanted and 2) not taking themselves too seriously. Plastic Beach suffers under the weight of its own weariness. Even the upbeat numbers like lead single “Stylo” do little to alleviate the boredom (good video though). Even De La Soul, who propelled “Feel Good, Inc.” right down my dopamine reward pathway, fail to save the album. In fact, their contribution, called “Superfast Jellyfish”, is actually downright retarded (don’t get mad – I’m only using that word because I know it pisses off Sarah Palin, which has become a sort of lifelong goal of mine. Anyone who thinks they’re helping so-called “special needs” kids by getting mad over language should be hit in the face with a shovel. Try supporting science. Try making sure that non-rich people can afford to hire the assistants their kids might need. Try actually caring about another human being besides yourself, you shallow, retarded cunt. Rant over. For now).

Mr. Fennessey is right that the rap numbers on Plastic Beach are the worst parts, but he overstates the beauty of the rest of it. There’s nothing on Plastic Beach that tops Blur’s “Tender” in the beauty department, although “On Melancholy Hill” is a good song – perhaps the only really good one on the album.

And there’s the real rub – the disparate nature of the previous Gorillaz albums was easy to forgive because, especially on the first one, you got the feeling that you were listening to a very adept mix tape. The songs, though they didn’t necessarily fit together, were great songs. Plastic Beach feels like an attempt to Make a Statement, whether it’s musical or political or whatever, and it falls flat to my ears because of it. Pitchfork may like their music with heaping spoonful of gravitas (I do too, depending on the artist. Johnny Cash’s later works bore the weight of his years, which is partly why his cover of “I See a Darkness” is actually superior to the already-gorgeous original. But he didn’t start out as a cartoon band either), but perhaps they’d do well to go back and listen to the Ramones –

Hold on. We’d all do well to go back and listen to the Ramones. Take two minutes and do that right now.

Feel better? I know I do. Anyway, the Pitchfork people might wanna check out the Ramones and the first Gorillaz album and ask themselves if they would’ve enjoyed a Ramones album of long jams about the spotted owl. Chances are, no one would enjoy that because that’s not what the Ramones did well. And, judging by Plastic Beach, cohesion and weary seriousness are not what Gorillaz do well.

*My assertion that “Punk” is the best Gorillaz song will probably be met with laughter and scorn, but I can bear it. “Punk” is the best Gorillaz song.

**To be fair, Snoop Dogg is only on one song on Plastic Beach and I don’t want to give the impression that he is solely responsible for its bloated, preposterous shittiness. But it’s telling to me that Gorillaz used to have guest spots from MF Doom and Del the Funky Homosapien and now they’re kicking it with Snoop Dogg. A Ghostface or RZA cameo would’ve been much more welcome to my ears.

How to Cringe for Forty Minutes Straight

I’m going to be 30 next month. I wasn’t quite a teenager when Pearl Jam’s Ten came out and their music resonated very strongly with me. At the time, I thought, “This is my music. I will love this music forever.” And I still love a lot of Pearl Jam’s early stuff (Vs. is flawless), but I’ve approached their last few records with a mixture of trepidation and skepticism. Early reviews of Backspacer (their new album, available semi-exclusively at Target. They made a deal with the indie shops to release the album as well, which has muddied the debate over whether or not the Target deal was a 100% dick move, but I know this much is true: 1992 Eddie Vedder would never have done that, and was probably missing more meals than 2009 Eddie Vedder) seemed to suggest that Pearl Jam had begun to rock again. My hopes, because they’re stupid, soared.

I think one question can help us narrow down whether or not you’ll like Backspacer. At first, the question will seem unrelated, but I’ll tie it all together with, to borrow a phrase from my (dead) hero George Carlin, my usual flawless logic. Here’s the question: Are you going to watch the Who perform at the Super Bowl halftime show? Subquestion within a question: are you going to watch it enthusiastically? Sub-subquestion within in a question: Really? Everyone in their right mind loves Who’s Next and would love to have a time machine so they could go back and see the Who play live. But do you really want to see Roger Daltrey (whose hopes were clearly dashed – he didn’t die before he got old) and Pete Townshend stumble about on stage in front of… of who, exactly? They sure as fuck won’t be playing with Keith Moon and John Entwistle, so why should I care? Pearl Jam is not quite that advanced a case (i.e., all of Pearl Jam’s most stable lineup is still living), but here’s what I’m getting at: the great albums of our youth may be great forever, but the bands that made them might not be (might not be. Some bands/artists can age amazingly gracefully – I’ve trotted out examples all over this blog in the last year and a half, so I’ll let you fill in the blanks on your own) and we’re doing ourselves a disservice to pretend that they are.

Backspacer makes me cringe from start to finish, resulting in a roughly forty minute frowny-face. Pearl Jam still sort of recognizes the essential elements of rock ‘n’ roll, but Vedder’s lyrics have gotten at least half-stupid (“I’m gonna see my friend & make it go away”?! Also, he rhymes “everything” with “friend” by pronouncing it “every thin”) and it feels like Pearl Jam has devolved into awesome guitar solos surfacing in the middle of a sewage leak. Yes, Pearl Jam’s two guitar players, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, are still the best part of the band. It’s just not enough any more.

Over the last several albums, Eddie Vedder has relied more and more on what I call his Screamy Voice. Vedder has a pretty nice baritone but these days, he’s singing like he resents it. Even the croony tunes on Backspacer are now augmented by a reedy, nasal twang – the kinda thing coffee house dudes add to their notes to let you know that they’re being soulful (this absolutely ruins “Just Breathe” for me by belaboring its rather obvious melodic hook. It’s a shame, too, because “Just Breathe” is one of the two songs on this album that I could nearly like). Seems to me that Vedder used to have a better grasp of when to growl and when to actually sing.

I’d be remiss in my disappointment with Backspacer if I didn’t devote some attention to its lead single, “The Fixer.” It’s Pearl Jam’s poppiest single to date (maybe “Last Kiss” comes close), which wouldn’t be so bad if “The Fixer” wasn’t so…well…dumb. “When something’s gone/ I wanna fight to get it back again” sings Vedder, like a guy who just wants to help you out, man. The intention is laudable but the phrasing is lazy and here’s why: you should be specific about what you’ll fight to get back when it’s gone. For instance, the Third Reich is gone. I wouldn’t fight to get it back but, within the context of “The Fixer”, Eddie Vedder will. “Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,” (that’s the chorus!) sing the dancing Nazis. Am I really suggesting that Eddie Vedder would fight to bring back Hitler? Of course I don’t think he’s a fascist, but I agree with George Carlin’s assertion that “the quality of our thoughts is only as good as the quality of our language” and the quality of Vedder’s language on “The Fixer” is somewhere between poor and embarrassing. Please see me after class, Eddie.

Vedder and company sound like they’re having fun on Backspacer and I don’t want to begrudge them that – in the past, they’ve had a tendency to sound like they weren’t enjoying the hard work of being rock stars. But the fact remains that, if Backspacer is Pearl Jam letting their hair down and having a good time, maybe some sticks need to be reinserted in some asses – I mean, Ten was nothing if not a Very Serious Album (honestly, some of it was melodramatic) but the music was kick ass. I just listened to “Alive” a minute ago (I need to take breaks from Backspacer at this point) and it still works wonders for me. But I’m not having a helluva lot of fun listening to Backspacer. Instead, I’m having doubts about why I ever liked this band in the first place. Of course, I still have their old stuff to remind me of the power they used to have. I’m not sure where Pearl Jam lost it, but it’s definitely gone now. (Will you fight to get it back again, Eddie Vedder? I sincerely hope so.)

So what now? There are plenty of people out there who will watch the Who on Super Bowl Sunday and tell everyone how amazing their performance was (probably some of the same misguided souls who dug the epic fail parade that was the Cream reunion concert). But there are people like me who will listen to their recordings of “Baba O’Reilly” and recognize that the guys performing on the TV are merely a joke about a formerly amazing band. And there are people out there who can still defend Pearl Jam no matter how bad they get (these people are enablers of Pearl Jam’s worst tendencies and I wish they’d stop) and those people will find some way, dog knows how, to love Backspacer and call it a triumph. This Rolling Stone review (and the comments below it) will give you a picture of what I’m talking about. Not that Rolling Stone can be considered credible these days. Any publication that will list fucking Stadium Arcadium as one of the best albums of the decade is not to be trusted.

Do You Hate Excitement? Listen to Doves!

As you might’ve guessed, that’s not the cover of Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album. I’m listening to it right now, so if I nod off a bit here and there, then

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Sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah. Kingdom of Rust. I fell asleep during the first track. Then I woke up. “Jetstream” just ended. “Kingdom of Rust” is starting. Nodding off again. 11 minutes of my life on the first two tracks of Kingdom of Rust. I feel like I’m at the DMV. Seriously, this album should come with a warning label: “High grade musical narcotic – do not operate heavy machinery while listening.”

Lest I be accused of cranking out overwrought prose (which seems to happen around here – the accusation, not the prose itself. You’ve never seen me in full overwrought mode, for I can assure you that if you did, it would put Byron Orpheus to shame. And if you don’t know who he is, stop reading this and go watch some Venture Brothers right now), the new Doves album isn’t terrible. It’s kinda like a Coldplay album – their singers even sound alike – so maybe your girlfriend will like it. I’m thinking of doing a Folgers Crystals-style switch on my fiance where I tell her I’m putting on a Coldplay album and I play Kingdom of Rust instead.

Every song on Kingdom of Rust seems like it’s an hour long, and it seems like they want me to feel like there are epic runs up to even more epic climaxes, but if Kingdom of Rust were a state, it’d be Kansas. Not only ’cause it’s flat, but because it doesn’t seem to believe in evolution. The guitars are out of Coldplay (whose guitars are out of U2) and the vocals that aren’t Chris Martiny (and they are few) sound like the guy from Muse who sounds like Thom Yorke. The Doves’ guy (Jimi Goodwin? Jez Williams? I don’t care) doesn’t do that annoying falsetto thing that Martin does, but neither does he write melodies that are as strong as Coldplay’s. Take note, readers – I’ll never say something this nice about Coldplay again. And it could only take something as frightfully dull as Kingdom of Rust to get me to say it.

But here’s the thing: Coldplay, for all their faults (and they are many) can at least cough up a melodic hook – they’re usually obvious and about as trite as music can get this side of Andrew Lloyd Weber, but they’re there. And I’ll even cop to liking “The Scientist.” Chris Martin is a bad lyricist who writes obvious melodies that your girlfriend will love. If you’re musically inclined, you probably won’t love them. But with Doves, there’s nothing to grab onto. This is not to say that bands should only write obvious melodies – I love Tom Waits and Sonic Youth, so obvious melody is clearly not a must for me – but some melody, something to pull you into the song would be good. It’s as if Doves have forgotten that other people will listen to their music and …

Hang on. A knock at the door.

Later, 9:15 a.m., Thursday, April 30th, 2009: You will not fucking believe what just happened. I started writing this review at about 8:30 this morning and around 8:45, I got a knock on the door. From ninjas. Or zombies. Or Pirates. Or some combination of the three. There were hundreds of them, stumbling around the courtyard of my apartment complex, lamely hurling throwing stars, growling “arrrrrr” and eating my neighbors’ brains.

Fortunately, I’ve been playing a lot of Dead Rising lately and was fully prepared. I grabbed up my baseball bat and went to town, obliterating head after head, enjoying the splatty, rotten-pumpkiny squish of their skulls caving in at the hard smack of my Louisville Slugger. Some of the more ninja-ish zombies attempted to engage me in hand to hand combat, but were easily dispatched with a kitchen knife (no plot hole here, readers – I tucked the knife into my belt when I grabbed my baseball bat. You can’t be too careful when pirate-ninja-zombies invade your tiny apartment complex). Lucky for me, even ninja zombies are kinda slow moving, and definitely not as stealthy as real ninjas. The pirate zombies lunged forward, clumsily brandishing their swords. My faithful dog, Asha, came to my aid here, biting the legs of the poor zombie bastards. As they toppled upon each other, my trusty bat and I made mush of their heads. And now I had swords. Seeing that more zombies remained, I picked up two swords, letting my bat rest. I struck a heroic pose indeed, in jeans, sandals, and a Hold Steady t-shirt. I held the swords at the ready, looked a zombie square in its dead-ass eyes, and finally had an excuse to say, “Come get some.”

The rest is really a blur. I remember putrefied flesh advancing upon me and the flash of blades cutting through dead skin and hollow bone. When it was all over, I waded through the pile of zombie parts and zombie guts, back into my apartment to complete my duty to you, my readers, and finish reviewing and – shudder – listening to Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album.

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Sorry. Nodded off there again. I think “Compulsion” is playing. Can’t tell. Too bored. I know what you’re thinking, too: you’re thinking there is no way that pirate-ninja zombie thing happened. You can think what you want; I report, you decide. But you gotta admit that reading about pirate-ninja-zombies is a helluva lot more exciting than reading about the new Doves album or, dog forbid, listening to the fucking thing.