If you’ve been dissatisfied with any of the government whales you’ve been using lately, I can recommend the Freelance Whales. When an album starts with a song like this, you know you’re in for some pretty fucking gentle glockenspiel-banjo times.

The whole album is good, I got it from here.

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on.

I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.

My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat.

Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie.

Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ’1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0′s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.”

I approve. It’d be a shame for anyone to hear a couplet so painfully double-edged as “When you touched a friend of mine / I thought I would lose my mind” and miss the grim joke.

Oh yeah, good news: I’m working on a really long post about a really esoteric subject that involves lots of strong opinions about game design ideas I have no experience working with.

Truffle fries in San Fran.

The restaurant of endless meat, with 2K’s Karl Unterholzner and Jordan Thomas.

Mr Gish unwisely shows his daughter the drawing Mr World of Goo did of him naked.

Dylan Moran, yesterday.

France’s pimary exports are textiles and macro photography.

Space Invader ice cubes.

Kim arranged I think my first ever surprise birthday party.

Halloween.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew.

Meanwhile, The Sounds have a new album. It’s nudged them back into the lead as my most-listened artist on last.fm, partly because their songs have a tight neatness to them that allows me to listen to them almost indefinitely without irritation, and partly because until this album, they were unique in never having produced a worthless song. That’s the last one on Crossing the Rubicon, but it’s their best album despite it. Two reasons, one of them is this:

Do you find that some bands just sound like two guitars and some drums? When No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake kicks in, it reminds me that The Sounds are one of the few that don’t. They produce a thick ribbon of undulating noise that your speakers seem happy to belt out, as if they’ve finally got something to sink their drivers’ teeth into.

The other reason is Home Is Where Your Heart Is, but it’s possible I’m just being a big sap about that one.

I see now why most swords extend in only one direction.

It’s tumultuous music, melodic but booming and insistent, the vocal a few shades more fierce and assured than a new artist is allowed to be. I like a lot of gentle stuff, but it takes something bold and sharp to grip me this firmly. Like Dog Days, every listen ends with my heart-rate just slightly higher than when it started, and my mood a little warmer.

Anyone else care to recommend something they’ve been getting into lately? The great joy of Spotify is that I can investigate tips when I get them, rather than forgetting about them for six years.

Fluxblog’s just totally saved my ass for slacking on Music Week by posting the exact same Alphabeat song I was going to write about tomorrow. His write-up is also better than I was planning to make mine. I was just going to phone it in.

James commenter Dave McLeod – who’s probably done other stuff in his life, but that’s the highest possible accolade here – was sat next to me in the office the other week when Alphabeat came up on a Muxtape I was listening to.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met another male Alphabeat fan.”
“At least not a straight one, I guess?”

Since I realised they were saying “Weltpolizei” and not “The bullets fly” (the next line is “Twenty-four seven”), all I can picture when I listen to it is an episode of Thunderbirds where they all have moustaches and perpetuate German stereotypes.

In other news, I’m bored of Music Week now and I’ve got lots of other stuff I want to talk about, so James will return to normal programming shortly.

Eldridge Rodriguez is a bit of a discovery for me. I half-listen to a lot of net radio when I’ve forgotten to bring my MP3 player cable to work, and every now and then something catches my ear enough for me to extract my absent mind from what I’m writing and e-mail myself the track name. This saves me looking them up, buying anything of theirs or ever thinking about them again: I’ve got them on file now, no further action is required. But during this song:

I found myself performing the whole charade three times in a row.

“Ooh, I like this. Who is it? Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Got it.”

“Man, I like this song too, who’s this? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Okay, I’ll write it down this time.”

“Oh wow, what’s this one? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, still Get What You Want. Okay, okay, I’m buying it.”

He was apparently in a band some people have heard of, called The Beatings, but what I’ve heard of theirs doesn’t grab me the same way. To me, his value is in answering the burning question: What would it sound like if Jarvis Cocker joined A Silver Mt Zion?”

Photo by Bleak!

This is an odd one for Ladytron – they’re not usually this atmospheric, and the warbling male vocal is a new one on me. But it has a curious feel to it that I can’t shake, so it’s the one I keep coming back to on the new album. Even though I have no idea what the hell it’s about. Kitten versus rain?

Ladytron are one of those bands that produce a thick, inimitable texture of sound, to the extent that they don’t really need to do anything new. It’s enough just to hear that satisfying stream of smooth booming noise again, with a few different inflections.

I mention I have no idea what Versus is about because the other track I was thinking about posting is one of the few comprehensible Ladytron tracks: Burning Up. I’ve uploaded it anyway to make up for missing yesterday.

A geek anthem for the summer if ever there was one. I usually only find out what bands look like when I write about them here, and scour Last.fm for something to draw attention away from this stretch of dry text, so I was amused to find that Born Ruffians look about twelve. Here’s what they sound like:

I suspect staring at this image while you listen probably won’t add to the experience the way it has with the last two posts.

If you keep up with these kinds of things – Norwegian electro-pop – you’ve probably already heard Annie’s obnoxiously infectious I Know Your Girlfriend Hates Me. While that was getting its deserved round of blog applause, I was only just discovering her four-year-old first album. It’s almost cockily smart, sharp, sugar-crusted pop, anomalous in a debut. Amusingly, I now discover she’s billed as “The Kylie it’s cool to like”.

With this track, it’s all about the speed-rhyming spellouts, and to a lesser extent the cute anachronisms of the chorus. I think I could like hip-hop more if the lyrics were about people ringing one another’s bells.

When, inevitably, I become a super-villain (I find myself buying a lot of black clothing with high collars lately), this is how it’ll end. When my swarm of Gogglesharks march on Beijing, when my jetpack drops me gently in the thick of the clash of Tian’anman Square, bullets pinging off my power-armour, the sky black with my aerial drones, my image burned in phosphor over that of Chairman Mao, China’s Segway-surfing police force shredded like crispy duck.

Someone – probably called John or Jack – will urgently command their technically minded sidekick to Google me, + “fatal weaknesses”, snapping that “There’s got to be something!” The sidekick, who will have spiky hair, a differently coloured shortsleeve outside his longsleeve and a name like ‘Skeeter’, will find this post.
“I think I’ve got it! Routing it through the local police band… now!” And he’ll hit this play button:

The Gogglesharks will stop, mid-chomp, and point their eyeball arms quizzically to me. It will rain deactivated silver drones. Everything will stop dead for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, forty hectares of carnage shakily frozen like the closing credits of a macabre sixties sitcom, the only sound the opening track from the latest Mates of State album Re-Arrange Us, the groans of the dying and the slightly squeaky wheel of a broken Segway whirring away. When it finishes, I will hang my head slightly and mutter “Okay, I’ll be good.”

So begins music week on James! I’ve got a ridiculous amount of new stuff I’m listening to at the moment, so I’m picking a track from each a day and posting it here until I get bored or you get bored or I forget or the week ends.

And just so you know, Jack and Skeeter, I foresaw this.

Hot Chip, who sound like a fifties phrase for expressing pleasure at your current situation, are kind of exciting. I’m listening to a song from their latest right now, one I’ve listened to maybe five times before, and I just caught myself flicking through my Firefox tabs to see if one was auto-playing something else underneath because it sounds so completely unhinged.

Oh wait, actually one of them was: I forgot I fired up Last.fm to see if this same track was on there in full, and it is. Every post a rollercoaster!

The best I can do for a genre is glitch pop – it’s bouncy and infectious, but frequently revolves around some catastrophic audio error that ought to grate but doesn’t. This track, Shake A Fist, just outright breaks halfway through, then explodes, then spends the next few minutes trying to pick the original melody back up out of the shrapnel. Once it does, the shakey reassembly of that simple tune layered over the aftershock of its bizarre phase shift is weirdly comforting, like an old friend returned.

This is not a musical convention I’m familiar with, so as I say, it’s kind of exciting. Even in the fairly straightfoward opening track, the key word of the chorus “weather” is chopped into progressively looping chunks, so his voice stutters the length of the word like a backfiring hatchback on a traintrack. His voice is kind of whimpy, too, so it jars compellingly with the gusty things they do with it.

I get to give you quite a lot to go on if you’re interested in Made In The Dark (which sounds to me like a polite way of saying “ugly”), because although Fluxblog no longer carries Shake A Fist (though his write-up is still great), Last.fm has it to stream, I’ve uploaded Bendable Poseable (my favourite, above), and someone on YouTube has already done precisely what I was going to do: recorded himself Audiosurfing the opening track, Out At The Pictures. “The Pictures” is olde English for cinema.

He’s playing it on a harder mode than I would dare and doing a lot better than I would, but he still screws it up twice. I don’t really like the harder modes of Audiosurf – the stress of getting overwhelmed interrupts your attunement to the song, which for me is the whole point. So I’m glad this dude beat me to it. Thank you, er, LethaLImpuLse? It seems like every time I have to address a YouTube poster by name on James these days I have to precede it with a nervous hesitation.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later – for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around: