Soundtrack to a Zombie Massacre

Pirate, ninja, and especially zombie humor has been done to death on this wild world we call the internets, but I share the same appreciation for the living dead that the rest of my generation does. Too many good films, and too many good video games. Who doesn't get a kick out of fighting the zombie horde in Left 4 Dead, and who didn't totally love the idea of a bonus zombie game at the end of Call of Duty: World at War? These titles arrived years after the Super Nintendo classic, Zombies ate My Neighbors, so today's zombie obsession is merely a continuation of that long-standing desire to use brutal force in defending house and home without having to actually kill any living person.

A few years back, someone put together a great little flash game called The Last Stand, and it was a blast. The premise was wonderfully simple: survive the night as the zombies tear at your barricade, then spend the day searching for weapons, making repairs and finding survivors. After twenty days of survival, the military picked you up.

A couple years back, Tony and I were into the sequel, Last Stand 2, which added a few elements to gameplay, such as intercity travel, traps, and the ability to arm your survivors with better weapons. Your goal: to make it to the city before the final helicopters leave and the place is completely nuked. It's not the most challenging game, but the randomized element of searching and the occasional difficulty in protecting your fellow survivors from being killed made each play interesting.

In the weeks before Halloween, Tony and I logged in quite a bit of playing time, and I used it as an excuse to listen to new music. The following are five heavy songs that will always remind me of playing this charming Flash game.

Download the playlist HERE.

Pentagram - Madman

Easily the catchiest track from Day of Reckoning, "Madman" was stuck in my head for the entire autumn of '08. The overdriven guitar melody following the chorus, with the machine gun double bass drumming, is great stuff.

Weedeater - Monkey Junction

The laziest, murkiest, reddest-eyed blues-rock song ever recorded, "Monkey Junction" is a haze of bass distortion, and marked the beginning of the first Weedeater album, which I grabbed from eMusic in preparation for a local show. Tony thought it was funny that I referred to it as "southern metal."

Pentagram - When the Screams Come

A fantastic crawling riff opens this classic doom song from the band's vintage (and best) era. Total Sabbath worship in the best way possible. "You have entered hell, I guess you weren't so cool!"

Kenny Rogers - Lady

I ain't jokin'. Well, I am, sort of. One of the survivors in Last Stand looks exactly like Kenny Rogers (note the above image, second survivor from the bottom), and he became the most valued member of the team. It was pure melodramatic tragedy for Tony and I when poor Kenny would get too close to the sharp end of a zombie-wielded meat cleaver, and I just had to crank up Kenny's 80's ballad "Lady" as a tribute.

I first heard the song as a kid: we had this VHS taping of a Disney TV show called "DTV" (Disney TV as opposed to Music TV...get it?) that featured a bunch of 80's music set to montages of Disney music. The one for "Lady" was a really sappy compilation of clips from Lady and the Tramp.

Just listen to Kenny lay his heart on the line. Sing it, Gambler. And keep those zombies at bay, man. Your voice won't get you nowhere in this apocalypse.

Vaste Burai - Cath Maige Tuired

This one is from a band I've only recently discovered. Texas natives from Longview, it's just a guitarist and drummer sludgin' their lovin' brains out. Makes for good zombie annihilation tuneage when the final stop of The Last Stand 2, an abandoned military fort, finds you armed to the teeth with landmines, a machine gun and an RPG. The last stop was a good place to camp out and rack up that high-score. Tony and I would compete to see who could put more zombies down. My kill count this game was 1,425. Ya got better?!

I'll leave you with an image of The Last Stand pièce de résistance: a .50 caliber headshot to zombie clown, while two Kenny Rogerses fight side-by-side.

It's a thing of beauty.

That little blue light.

Most dudes probably jog while listening to Metallica. I myself find great physical motivation while listening to the band in their heyday, tearing through the speedfreak lunacy of "Motorbreath" or the raging "Disposable Heroes." It's the anger, or the aggressive musicianship, or those dang fine hooks, perhaps.

But a couple times this past year I've been pushing up the final uphill stretch of my run only to find, piping through the sweat-drenched foam of my headphones, the light orchestral touches that characterize the work of one Arcade Fire.

Specifically the final track from Funeral, the vulnerable "In the Backseat." It's about as far in the opposite direction of "Motorbreath" you can go, but it still manages to spur me up that hill. Arcade Fire wrote a wonderful melody to send this album off, with the tiny voice of Régine Chassagne vividly reminiscing on the serenity of being a child passenger in the family car.

The little piano arpeggio marks the rhythmic passing of things outside (I always watched telephone poles zip by my window) as she watches and takes solace in her current safety, despite knowing the mortality of her loved ones, as the "family tree [loses] all its leaves."

It is difficult to describe the mood of this song without hearing the melody and slow emotional build to the climax, but it's damn near a tear-jerker for those who aren't slaves to cynicism, and it just has a reassuring sound to it as I'm tiring out on that hill, in the overbearing heat of a summer afternoon in Texas.

It reminds me of the sharp, bright little cerulean light that I would watch from the backseat, the one I'd ask my parents to turn on even if the moment didn't call for high beams.

Kerry Livgren Was a Sharp Dude

Kansas. No one's really been to the state, and no one's really heard any Kansas song other than "Dust in the Wind." And they've only heard it as ol' Blue's In Memoriam, as performed by Will Ferrell.

But, despite a few sterile synth-drenched passages in the key of schmaltz, and the sincere but ponderous lyrics, Kansas were a pretty cool band. I'm serious kids, they rocked. And it's a good place to kick off this blog.

They're one of the first 70's bands my father introduced to me. I was lost in a sea of jangly music with empty hooks, folks. And believe it or not, Kansas, before Zep, before Sab, only slightly before Deep Purple, taught me the beauty of rock 'n' roll. I remember waiting, in the dawn of P2P file sharing, for Fath's downloads to finish on our dial-up connection. And as I searched for his long-lost favorites, I'd blast "Icarus--Borne on Wings of Steel" from the KaZaA downloads folder. It was so epic, so grandiose, but with a bit of grit from those electric guitars.

Thirty years before you kids were even old enough to take blurry, low-light cellphone camera pictures of the Attack Attack! show, Fath was rocking out to "Carry On" in its infancy, taping the performance on cassette to hear later. I don't purport to put down today's rock and roll music (except for Attack Attack). Just not a big fan of cell phones at concerts.

But I digress: great musicians, and some killer songs. Here's a link to "Mysteries and Mayhem," from Kansas' '75 album, Masque. It kicks off with a pre-New Wave of British Heavy Metal sort of speed riff, with a wicked backbeat courtesy of drummer Mr. Phil Ehart (who?).

Be sure to check the dark riff of madness at 2:40. Wish Livgren would've played it a few dozen times to let it soak in.

Under Serious Construction

I'm about to come into a tiny bit of free time as the spring semester ends, so there should be something on this page by the end of May. Hope you don't mind waiting, whomever it may concern!

Blah blah blah, I'll update now and then.

Welcome to my world, people.

I'm going to ramble on and on. Witness.

Witness.