That sounded harsh. I think I’m kind of hurt a bit. Nada Surf are one of my favourite bands. I’ve bought every album INCLUDING the Australian version of The Proximity Effect that I paid $80 for because it wasn’t available for order in Canada! In my days as a rocksmith I was lucky enough to *OPEN* for them when they played locally. Pretty much the highlight of my rock life.

So, now that you get the full context of my views on this album, I would like to re-state: MEH!

It’s sweet, it’s cute, it’s poppy rocky awesomeness…that I already have a DOZEN albums of! It even sounds like they’re going through the motions on this one. Lazy lyrics (I’m sorry, you rhyme’d “out” with “out”), lazy composition, lazy tempos. It’s like they’re just “showing up”. That would probably really piss them off to hear, as I don’t think they’re the type of band that would release something half-assed intentionally. But I have to wonder if we’ve heard the last truly new sound from this band, and all we have to enjoy is a softer, blander Nada Surf. Perhaps their next record could be more experimental, and by that not another cover record.

If you don’t have any Nada Surf records, please don’t start with this one. They have a fine catalogue of amazing delightful indie-pop-rock awesomeness. This one is also one of those (just not the standout).

Rating: 2/5

Choosing the “best” album of 2011 has been difficult for a few reasons. My traditional rules are that I must pick a studio album released during the 2011 calendar year. The past twelve months have had some pretty fantastic musical releases. But this year there’s one CD I have listened to more than all others. I’ve memorized every word, every note, along with every crass genitalia reference. I’ve decided it’s still technically a studio album – being original songs recorded in a studio environment. Yes, people. This year, my favourite musical release this year is:

The Book of Mormon.

It’s perfect. Seriously. If you are just waking up from a coma the creators of South Park and Avenue Q teamed up and had a fantastic musical baby. It has awesome songs you can sing along to, plus the most complete and honest tearing apart of a modern religion since Life of Brian. It’s won 9 Tony Awards and sold out until next Fall. So even if they do refer to female genital mutilation, it’s probably in the most hilarious way possible. Only Matt Stone and Trey Parker could make you want to dance and since about having AIDS, but I swear if I don’t want to bust a move during “Hasa Diga Ebowai” (which, **spoiler alert**, means “Fuck you God”).

The Runners Up (in no particular order) :

snailhouse – Sentimental Gentlemen (Another win for Feurstack. This album features his best lyric and music crafting to date. A total complete package, not a mediocre song in the bunch)

City & Colour – Little Hell (I’m sad to see Alexisonfire go, but I think his heart was really in C&C for too long and this album proves it. Dallas has a long career of songwriting ahead of him.)

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Sounds like it was recorded in 1966 with half of CSNY, lyrics are clearly modern youth which works entirely too well with the three-part harmonies)

The Dears – Degeneration Street (I have a serious heart-on for their brand of “orchestral pop noir romantique”)

Puscifer – Conditions of My Parole (Maynard’s description of “like Twin Peaks in the Desert” is absolutely accurate. I don’t care if Tool never releases another album, I just want Maynard to keep making music because he’s fucking good at it.)

The Get-up Kids – There are Rules (fantastic comeback album. Classic GUK with all sorts of new sounds and improved songwriting)

The Civil Wars – S/T (amazing folk/country duo – mostly just girl and boy singing over sparse guitars and piano)

—–  and…of course…  ——

The “Worst of” List

This year I want to give special shout out to my friends over at Team Radiohead and the complete pile of sonic garbage you call The King of Limbs. Hey guys, remember when you were a fucking rock band? Like with guitars? And rock? And guitar-based rock? I know…you’ve done it, it’s done, rock is dead and you want your jangly sonic experimental warbling over shitty distorted beats. If this was Thom Yorke’s second LP I’d have at least treated it with some respect. But this? A Radiohead album? Come on. Seriously, I thought after In Rainbows (a good album by all respects) you were going to maybe do some kind of rock-inspired album. Maybe next time.

What I was actually most drawn to in the movie was the flashback to when Clu first betrayed Flynn. When he explained how the Iso’s were destroyed I was like “That sounds like a great movie! Why the Hell didn’t they make a movie about that!?” Well apparently we don’t get a movie, we get a game. No, not a GOOD game, this is Disney, after all. We get a shitty Prince of Persia game with Daft Punk instead of Disturbed.

Actually it’s not THAT bad. Not like Aladdin for the SNES bad. Well, you die every 3 seconds just like all Disney movie games, but luckily there’s a million checkpoints. Motion is not smooth like Prince of Persia at all. The targeting system is a joke. Lock on hardly ever works, and for objects you have to be coming at it from almost a straight angle, which is very hard to do when tanks are pummeling you.

Combat is kind of weak. The moves seem to be limited to just a few, even with four different disc types. You can kill most enemies in 2-3 hits if you know their weakness. The game tries to make it harder by throwing six dudes at you at once, but then they give you bad-ass area of effect attacks for that! And you can replenish your health and energy by simply wall running or vaulting over just about anything. Makes battles easy to the point of there being almost no danger.

In the end I’m dying during the platforming sections, which is two thirds of the game. What’s that Quorra? You get to walk there and I have to go around the outer edge of the whole city? How convenient! (At least I don’t have to do it in first-person like Mirror’s Edge.) 10 minutes of platforming (20 if you suck like me), followed by 2 minutes of combat, then 30 seconds of dialogue. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Thanks Disney, you took yet another awesome idea and squandered it for a quick buck. My childhood wants to press assault charges.

The previous two releases, having the same producer, have a similar “wall of sound” approach. I do like them, but it’s a decidedly different sound than their usual fare. I really enjoy being able to have a Low album on in the background while I’m relaxing, and the LOUD sound just doesn’t work for that.

The vocal harmonies on this record are first rate. The guitar work has been evolving since the beginning, and they don’t overpower the songs, they just enhance them. There really aren’t any mediocre songs on the whole CD, and having the bonus 5-song acoustic set shows which songs work better with the extra production. “Try to Sleep” and “Nightingale” are perfect in any format.

I hope Low keeps releasing new material for many more years to come. They are one of the most interesting and lovable bands out there in this writer’s opinion. If you like slender harmonies, brilliant guitars and slow, steady rhythm, you just can’t go wrong.

Rating: 5/5

So far the choices seem limited to a serif…Perhaps something modern, but I’ll take classic if it has the flow I’m looking for. I hate huge x-heights, but tiny ones are awful for readability. I guess I’m looking for the perfect serif font…the one that isn’t Garamond, that is! The short list so far is Apollo (loved it ever since The Cheese Monkeys…well the last half anyway), Scala (because it has a huge library and a Sans cousin), Minion, Caslon, or Jenson. The list will get worse before it gets better.

I have always preferred serif fonts for body copy. Perhaps because that’s what they’re FOR. Yes that would be the only reason you need! Don’t you find it so much harder to read a long article written in Arial or even Verdana? Those tiny ‘feet’ are not just fanciful decoration – remnants of a time where form actually competed on the same level as Function. No, they actually DO something of value! They guide your eyes from letter to letter, creating larger patterns of letters that the brain can more easily digest! Yes I know modern times, gotta look contemporary blah blah blah, use a damn serif font for body copy! Damn kids get off my lawn!

So we won’t be having any of that. I have been debating on what to do with my free time this evening. I’ve put a 72-hour embargo on designing anything so I uninstalled the Adobes from my Dock and I’m going to do something fun with my computer! And not just porn!

Okay…some porn.

Here is a list of what I could be doing and why I’m not doing it.

Minecraft

I am so tempted to buy into this game. Walking around a vast land of infinite resources and monsters that explode? Sign me UP. However, given my addictive personality, I think it’s best that I never play this game.

Starcraft 2

How the hell do people play this game good? I mean seriously are you doing meth or speed or what? Every game I play with other humans I get trampled within 10 minutes. I keep beating the computer (on Hard) but I can only do that consistently as Terran. I want to get good at Zerg but I can’t get the larva production thing down. Fuck larva!

Reading a Good Book

I seriously only read while smoking outside during the Summer. During the Winter months I actually forget how to read in an effort to stay warm.

Playing Guitar

I keep threatening to do it. Maybe one of these days I’ll get my amp back from this guy’s jamspace. See, this jam space is located on the complete opposite side of town. Like if you draw a line down the middle of the city and fold the map in half, they touch. I checked with three different maps!

Left 4 Dead 2

Actually, my Xbox has not been turned on since my kid was born! It’s not that I’ve somehow lost love for the zombie killing. It is a matter of fact that my ‘man cave’ in the basement has been taken over by hostile storage items. This should have been rectified, but it’s a delicate game of Tetris down there and any shift in the eco system could disrupt the whole basement! Honestly I have a team of people working on it. Apparently if I move the chair three feet to the left I will destroy all matter in the universe. I’m paying them a lot, so they must be right about everything.

Finish Fallout NV

It…ends?

Well I guess I can at least talk about the site. I still fully intend to get rid of this crappy Wordpress abomination I’ve constructed. I thought about converting it into something I could sell, but honestly I can’t code well enough to be able to make it work out of the box. The Twitter thing is awful, the Photos above don’t change or have anything to do with WP at all…I think I’ll only salvage the bottom portion, but I think Widgets can do most of that anyway so I might as well just ditch the code and start from scratch.

I’ve just recently built my first site using HTML5 in Wordpress and so far so good. I had some problems with the Superfish menu. God damn z-index. If I say ‘999999′ I really truly want that element on fucking top of everything else. Agreed?

Here are some possible topics for upcoming posts:

• Album Reviews: Mogwai, The Dears, Iron & Wine, The Get Up Kids, Radiohead…
• iPad 2 (Why???)
• Video Game Reviews (Never touch the stuff): Fallout NV, Killzone 3(…the demo at least…)
• Web…stuff…(anyone?)

Let’s see how many of those ideas see the light of day as articles…

This  ‘Usage Based Bandwidth’ issue is exactly the kind of thing that is going to affect my bottom line. I’m just the kind of consumer Bell wants to get more revenue from, so they had to go and get the CRTC—a Government organization—to legislate me to…pay more for my Internet bandwidth? I mean, they’ve already admitted that Bell are the “subject matter experts”. What subject is this exactly?

It sucks being fleeced by a corporation. It sucks more being fleeced by a corporation via some outdated half-century old institution that doesn’t understand how the internet works. I seriously doubt von Finckenstein could check his email without assistance, let alone decide how much the value of data is.

News Flash: There is no shortage of bandwidth in this country. It’s remarkably cheap because consumer and industry demands low competitive prices and more access to faster speeds. Myself as an example, well I eat 25gb of bandwidth for breakfast (I imagine 25gb looks a lot like bacon). I guess realistically I would think on an average day I use anywhere from 2–5 gigs of bandwidth, so you can imagine how a 25gb limit is going to make me feel. It’s going to make me feel sad when I see the bill. Then angry at people that have no idea what they’re talking about taking advice from people paid to bring in revenue for a private corporation. Then I usually get hungry. It’s a vicious circle here, people!

I’m tracking my Internets for February. So far I have used over half the theoretical cap. I am in no way going out of my way to avoid Internet use, so it’s a simple test of what I’m going to be using.  I will update. Possibly with charts.

No promises.

Typekit

Typekit offers you a diverse library of type families—fully licensed—in exchange for an annual fee. Once you decide what typeface you want to use you add it to your “kit” and it makes it available on whatever domain you have in your account. Add two lines of Javascript to any header and you are good to go! It claims to work on just about every common browser (like 95% of current traffic) including iOS 4+. I like that you are actually legally using the type, but I don’t like that you need to be able to connect to Typekit to use them. If your subscription lapses or something breaks on their end, you’re back to the usual web fonts. This could cause serious distress if something were to happen to a bunch of live sites.

I also wonder about this “kit” size. I only get two font families with a ‘Trial’ account, but puts both in one kit—thereby doubling the size—and then proceeds to tell me that my kit was too big and would load slowly. Oh joy. So it’s true I probably wouldn’t need every single weight and variation, but just the fact that I was limited to a dozen fonts kind of irked me. How could I sell this to clients as a service if I can only get about five or six websites done? Man, thinking about the phone calls the morning my account lapses or I put oooonnnnneee too many fonts into the kit… I see what they’re doing, I just don’t like my clients’ public image relying on a third-party service…server…server service.

@font-face

Originally conceived as part of the CSS3 specification, the idea was that you pay for a licensed font file that is uploaded to your server much the same way as you would load any external CSS or JS file. The problem is there is some division over what format the font files should be in (mostly due to arguments over licensing methods/requirements). As a result, there are currently several different formats being used by several different browsers. Try to think Browser Wars circa 1996 except with fonts. The code to use @font-face is kind of complex, possible too complex for the average Web Designer. You have to “declare” each font, kind of like declaring a variable in Javascript. Once you declare it using the @font-face CSS code, you can reference it just like any other web font! Even better, some people (people, not me) have figured out some nifty script hacks to make whatever format work on the browser that supports it! Huzzah for the Code Monkeys of the World!

You can make your own @font-face kit at Font Squirrel, and you will get every format you need plus the handy code to use it! It all comes in a nice ZIP format. It’s not certain how long this kind of service will stay open though, as it currently uses a checkbox “honour system” to make sure you’re using a font you own. I paid for the entire Museo family just last year, so I have permission to Museo my website up? Font Squirrel seems to think it’s okay, and that was enough reassurance for me!

Picking a Method

Typekit:

• Paid subscription service
• Fully licensed/legal
• Loads quickly **
• **except when your “kit” is too big, which could be easy to do!

@font-face:

• “Free” (not guilt-free, but no money is required)
• Complicated to code it (but there is lots of help)
• Loads immediately (no limits thus far)

I think for now I’m going to go @font-face and not sell it. I can’t comfortably manage the font kit sizes and resell it as a service to my clients. I can just imagine the conversation trying to explain why a client has to pay to use “his” font on his website! If I don’t charge for it at least it’ll get used. When you’re able to just license the web fonts like you’d buy OTF fonts, I can just add my markup like normal and walk away when the project is uploaded. Easy is always preferred, license fee or not!

I’m trying to improve my web skills while I’m still “off work”. Hopefully this will lead to some real nice contracts as people start looking for the “next generation” websites. I think that in the next couple of years there’s going to be a shift to HTML5/CSS3-compliant websites that use jQuery and shun flash. There’s so much you can do with HTML5 it’s absolutely scary! I’m over 30 years old! I can’t learn new things!

Can’t give up that easily. Evolve or die, right? I’m experimenting with Typekit, and that’s going reasonably well. You may have noticed that the font is now Garamond throughout. I’ll be probably changing the odd appearance or type size here and there, just to react to the fact that Georgia (sweet Georgia) and Lucida (GRANDE) are gone.

I have got to get a portfolio site done. There’s so much other stuff that has to happen before that. It’s gotta be “branded”, so you have to do a branding exercise. Might as well do the business cards, letterhead, and envelope while you’re at it! Then and maybe then you can sit down and try a website. Shit god damn!