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May 6, 2010

The Greening explodes with amazing music in The Last Tibetan Midnight

Filed under: Music-Reviews — Tyler @ 7:36 pm

Will Loving:Singer/Guitarist The Greening

I’ve listened to The Greening for the past 5 years. The band is a combination of Progressive Rock, Pop, Psychedelic Rock and other innovative musical styles. One thing that I’ve come to expect from the band is musical satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if you are at one of their live shows at Grant and Green in San Francisco, or if you are listening to one of their albums. The Greening delivers. And their latest album, The Last Tibetan Midnight is available for purchase of hard copy or in digital format from Amazon.com. This album is 44 Minutes and 25 seconds of sheer audio deliciousness. I put The Last Tibetan midnight in my car’s CD Player and the song “Black Lotus” came on and within 1 minute and 30 seconds I was having a time warping psychedelic experience. I thought I had listened to several tracks of music. I was engrossed in the song so much that it felt like the song was taking me on a sonic adventure. Fortunately I wasn’t distracted from my driving so I stayed safe while dropping books off at the library. But I hadn’t felt such a pleasurable time altering experience while listening to music since I heard “Cinema” by Yes. That first song made me excited for the rest of the album and it truly sounded fresh and exciting.

The next song, “Belong With Me” sung by Karl Meischen, was quite different from “Black Lotus” it had an almost 50’s love song feel to it and it was quite beautiful. Listening to, “Belong With Me” made me realize that there was going to be a lot of variety in The Last Tibetan Midnight. The production value in “Belong With Me” is superb. It sounds very intimate and yet full at the same time. The song captures an old song feel with high fidelity sound quality. This is the kind of song you can listen to while slow dancing with a cherished love of your life. Also the drumming done by Nick Tatro is excellent and keeps the tempo sensitive yet upbeat and fun to listen to.

Buy The Last Tibetan Midnight at Amazon.com

The album takes a turn into the more Psychedelic part of town with the song, “Sleeping Grandpa Tacoma.” The song starts out with a weird intro that sounds like the guitar is trying to have a conversation with a disgruntled termite. But then at 20 seconds the song opens up into a Hi-Fi track with a rocking guitar line done by Will Loving and Karl laying down the law with his solid organ tones. The middle part of the song is chill Pop with some interesting rock in the mix. But then at 3 minutes 14 seconds the track gets Psychedelic with strange morphing tones that sound like cybernetic bubbles trying to reprogram a piano made out of aluminum foil. There are also cool sounds flowing through the speakers including harpsichords and even some horns. The song ends with an inhuman drum solo.

Since I like being happy, I really like music that puts me in a good mood. And the song, “Winter Sunshine” truly does just that. It starts out with warm ooooh’s and then kicks into a peppy drum beat. The singing on this song is great. Karl is singing about being joyful and smiling and passing moments and I love it. This would make a great song to wake up to and make a protein shake in the morning. I can just see myself scooping powder into the blender while listening to the “Ba Ba Bah Bah Ba!” parts of the song. “Winter Sunshine” has a great full sound for its ending with peaceful and beautiful polyphony.

Right now if you haven’t heard any of The Greening’s music before I recommend that you take a moment and check out The Greening on MySpace by clicking this link. Now when you go to their MySpace page scroll down to the song, “Don’t Have the Time” this song owns. It has pumped up distorted rock guitars that open the song. Then when the chorus kicks in with Karl on the mic it sounds aggressive and filled with charismatic vocal tenacity. My favorite part of the song is at 1 minute and 45 seconds. Here the song mutates into this totally Psychedelic vocal polyphony of what sound like twisted samples that remind me of “Here is the News” by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). FUN FACT: Did you know that “Here is the News” is on the album – Time by ELO? And the song I was just talking about by The Greening is called “Don’t have the Time” ! Both the song and the ELO album have the word “TIME.” Is this a coincidence? Or is this a subliminal message for only the adept listener. I for one believe it to be the latter.

The next song, “Sunday Afternoon” not only rocks musically, but it has an excellent and colorful music video by Danny Ochoa. If you scroll to the bottom of this article you can see the video for yourself. “Sunday Afternoon” has an excellent narrative behind it and you get sucked into the lyrics. There really is a story being told here.

“She’s So Electric” was from The Greening’s EP. The track is burning hot and is definitely Rock and Roll. The song is fast paced and the stops and starts are punchy and great for dancing and head banging. At 2 minutes 25 seconds Karl says “C’mon!” and it is epic. It has the same feel of the excitement the band Trace has during their songs. At 3 mintues 22 seconds the song’s instrumental part gets really freaky and the keyboards that jump in the mix are to die for. It sounds like a funky keyboard solo happening while a bunch of planets are being sucked into a technicolor black hole.

The Last Tibetan Midnight is concluded by my favorite song on the album, “Thought I Told You.” This song is an 11 minute progressive rock epic that is a joy to listen to. The vocals are distant and thought provoking. But the parts that really stand out are the instrumental interludes and the finale. The seeping guitar pulls make me reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s album Meddle. Nick’s drumming is great on this song too, he really keeps a down tempo relaxed beat that lets the amazing guitar lines transcend to the surface. Today I found myself chilling in my car with the seat down and letting “Thought I Told You” wash over me till the very end with the windows down. I felt like a huge chunk of stress had been lifted from my body and mind. It truly was the perfect ending to a very diverse album. Listening to The Last Tibetan Midnight was a good decision.

As promised here is the music video directed and animated by Danny Ochoa. The song is “Sunday Afternoon” from The Greening. You can find this song on the album, The Last Tibetan Midnight.

-Tyler

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It is time to dismember some stormtroopers in Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Filed under: Gaming — Tyler @ 12:35 am

In Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast you get to mess up a bar

Sometimes you need games to put you in situations that you would generally not imagine or experience on your own. As someone who loves Science Fiction and has seen all the Star Wars movies, I thought that I would have had my fill of the Star Wars universe. But playing Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (Jedi Knight 2) and having the chance to whip out my lightsaber in the middle of a bar and battle tons of mercenary thugs and goons was an unexpected and totally enjoyable experience. Jedi Knight 2 lets you fight against hordes of stormtroopers and if you enable the proper cheat code, then you will be able to actually and realistically dismember them. I mean really dismember them, it shows the cauterization marks on the limbs where your lightsaber burnt the flesh. It is totally awesome. I am pretty sure that the game uses the GHOUL 2 animation system that makes the dismemberment realistic looking and very satisfying when you perform a good lightsaber slash.

So now I am going to tell you how to enable dismemberment for Jedi Knight 2. I have only been able to enable dismemberment in single player mode. I’m not quite sure how to get it to work for multiplayer at this time, but if you know please leave a comment on how to do it! OK, first thing first you need to do is to go into the game options screen where there is an option tab called, “More Options” (that may not be the tab name exactly so look around). Then when you find the tab look for the option called, “Dismemberment” and make sure that the option is enabled. Next, be playing a single player game where you have the lightsaber equipped for this to work. Then when you are in the game and no cut scenes are playing press the “~” (tilde) button on the keyboard. This is best achieved by holding “Shift” and pressing the “`” button which is usually above the “tab” key. Doing this will bring up the console and you will see a screen come down and there will be a lot of text. The next thing you will need to do is enter this exactly without quotes, “helpusobi 1” there is a space between the one and the word. Again make sure to type it WITHOUT quotes. Then press enter and it will seem like nothing happened but you will be able to enter new text on a new line. So then type this exactly in the console without quotes, “g_saberrealisticcombat 2” then press enter. Next exit the console by pressing “~” (tilde) again. Now to test to make sure that dismemberment is working walk up to an enemy with your lightsaber out and try slashing the enemy to bits. If dismemberment is working properly then when you kill an enemy with your lightsaber either one of their limbs, or their head, or their torso will fall off. Let it be known that you won’t be able to use your lightsaber until you get to stage 3. But the game is still fun for the first two stages. This is because you get to use lots of cool guns and lay trip-mines and use grenades. And once you get the lightsaber you will really feel like you earned it. So there is payoff for playing the non-lightsaber levels.

Now that you have your lightsaber and you’ve enabled dismemberment it time to lop off some stormtrooper limbs! In Jedi Knight 2 you will encounter entire groups of stormtroopers that want to kill you. But sometimes they don’t see you coming and they might be having conversations with each other. So whenever you walk into a new area and you hear someone talking stay still and crouch to stay hidden and listen to what they have to say. Sometimes the conversations you overhear are very entertaining and well acted. One time I listened to a stormtrooper talking to his commanding officer about how he never used his blaster against a human target before. And you can hear the commander saying how blown away he is by how green and raw the new recruits are. It’s pretty funny! But when you fight with enemies that are shooting at you try to not attack with your lightsaber until you know you are going to hit your target. That way you can deflect blaster bolts while approaching for the kill. Also if you see someone throw a grenade at you use your force push skill and push the grenade back at the enemy. This technique also works against rockets and other large projectiles. One cool thing about the game is that your lightsaber hurts enemies when you just hold it at them, not necessarily having to click attack. So if you are blocking a blaster bolt attack you can run up to the enemy using force speed and then you will probably be able to slice the head off of a stormtrooper without having to let your guard down. It takes a little practice but if you custom keymap your force powers in the options screen to your keyboard instead of having to scroll through them all the time you will be able to be more effective in combat.

Lightsaber Fighting in Jedi Knight 2

There are also special moves in the game for your lightsaber that are pretty awesome. In the orange (medium) stance if you walk up to an enemy and attack and jump at the same time and keep looking at your enemy, you will do this jumping flourish attack where you swirl your sword around in the air. It is really cool to watch your character do this attack and it does tons of damage. In the blue (fast) stance there are two special moves. The first one is a backstab which you see happen when a Jedi in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace stabs one shape shifter girl with his lightsaber when he comes at him from behind. You can do that backstab in the game by having your back turned to an enemy and pressing attack. The other special move in blue stance is a upward slash. You do it by crouching on the ground then hold forward and attack at the same time while slowly releasing the crouch button. You will do a powerful ground to middle body slash that is very fast. The last special move is in red (strong) stance. It is a jumping death attack that does tremendous damage but leaves you very vulnerable for a couple seconds if you miss. To perform the move you need to perform a standing regular attack and then before the attack is complete you hold forward and then jump and attack again. This move does uber damage and can kill a wounded enemy in one hit.

The graphics, sound, and gameplay in this game really are amazing. You will feel at times that you are really inside a Remnant Ship (that’s what’s left of the Empire after Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi). The levels are big and the music is the same amazing music you are accustomed to hearing from the movies. And the voice acting is really top notch. If you played Heretic II and enjoyed it you will probably love this game as I did.

If you want to buy this game from Amazon.com then here’s a link.