TOM FRANCIS
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Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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I Like That You Can Slow Down
Great new music is being released rapidly and randomly. Let me review some of it and give you some tracks.
Architecture in Helsinki – Moment Bends
Helsinki seem to reinvent themselves a little with every album these days. That Beep, the first single from this, has been out for almost three years, and is so funky and divergent that I’ve been itching to hear the rest of their latest experiments for way too long.
Surprisingly, Moment Bends is more conventional than their previous stuff: That Beep is nuts, but it’s more or less alone. The rest are polished pop, obvious but effective hooks and sometimes openly sentimental lyrics. Yr Go To is narrowly the best, for blending that with a slightly spacey feel, as if they got distracted while idly producing a great pop song.
Despite the loss of quirk, it’s a great album and easily the best of these three. The only bad track is Contact High, which they’re inexplicably using to promote it. It’s not just the worst track here, it’s the worst thing they’ve ever done. It has a last-verse key change, for Christ’s sake – why is that still legal?
The Sounds – Something To Die For
I only just got this, but Yeah Yeah Yeah is an instant favourite. The Sounds are usually pretty straightforward rock, but here they’re going a little more electronic – some tracks feel more about rhythms and samples than the conventional structure they’ve stuck to before. On Yeah Yeah Yeah it’s excitingly new, but the rest of the album isn’t standing up to Rubicon yet (see I’ve Got Confessions To Make).
Low – C’mon
A few highlights here, not least the tumbling Try To Sleep (below). Especially Me (and probably you, the chorus adds) is another – disarming and gorgeous. Nothing But Heart is the one with the gut-wrenching distortion in what I guess you’d call a trailer for the album, but in the rest of the song the endless repetition of the title grates enough to distract from the wall of guitar.
The former two would have been at home on The Great Destroyer, a freakishly perfect album, so C’mon is a step up from the bleaker Drums & Guns.