The happenstance music critic

The happenstance music critic

After perhaps more than a year of not bothering with it, I "rediscovered" Friendster. A lot has changed since the last time I logged on. This time I figured it would be cool to add my friends from work.

It's also worth the effort of going there to check up on old friends from high school. Yeah, I know I've publicly denounced my elementary and high school existence ad nauseam, but I can't deny that I made at least a handful of friends from the nouveau-riche circus that is Zobel. I just want to see how they're doing.
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On the only real shopping trip I've been on since April, I managed to buy myself a memento of my high school existence.

Monty Macalino is perhaps better known as the band Mayonnaise's front man—and Mayonnaise is the band that won the Red Horse Muziklaban contest in 2004. Back in Zobel, though, he was one of the most gregarious and popular characters of Zobel batch 2000 and an active participant of the Search-In retreats. I bought Mayonnaise's second album "Pano Nangyari Yun?" out of curiosity.

While the riffs are cool, I'm not very stimulated by the lyrics. Not many of them make sense, unfortunately, and although Monty wrote all of them, I can't feel much of his spirit in the songs. Maybe I should have bought the first album instead?

Meanwhile, I remember how surprised I was with a certain band from Cebu whose sound could pass as a foreign act's. Now Urbandub has at least three albums and I bought the one called "Embrace," which seems like the newest one.

These guys are amazing, but they're not perfect. There’s just not enough variety to "Embrace." While I like their sound as demonstrated in "Alert the Armory" and "First of Summer," they have too many heavy tracks packed into this CD. This lends the impression that they can't break away from one routine. This level of seriousness and gloss is welcome, but they should give themselves a break to fool around.

The last album I bought was an old favorite. For me, you can never go wrong with the 1980s supergroup Swing Out Sister, and I bought the local version of their 2CD "Ultimate Collection" for a pretty good price. The foreign version has 3 CDs, but never mind that.

My only real complaint about "Ultimate Collection" is the second CD. 50% of CD2 is made up of remixes and live performances of tracks that are already on CD1, which is just too much. I would have appreciated having some of their more obscure songs on hand.

While I have mixed opinions over all these albums, I desperately needed new music to listen to, so the effort wasn't all that wasted.
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I've returned to the driver’s seat with Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2. Using my black Mazda RX-8, I managed to fight my way to the end of the “Monster Machine” story arc. I do mean "fight" as the last two races in particular were very rough: my CPU opponents were constantly wanging into my car, forcing me into mistakes such as crashing into walls and traffic.

That means I've got just 10 races to go before I beat the game. And it can only get worse from here on in.

In somewhat related news, I hear Sega Rosso is beta-testing the next installment in the Initial D Arcade Stage games, Ver.4.

This time the game cards are credit-card-thick, and there will no longer be any data transfer from the old games (CRUD!). The cabinets will reportedly sport LCD monitors and the same old sequential shifter, now mounted at waist level—-I'm pretty sure these things will be expensive. Gameplay should be tuned less on "impossible" grip levels as the first 3 games and a little more toward realism, but not to the point of Battle Gear 3's realism. Four new courses have popped up for beta testing: Akina Lake, Shin-Myougi, Shin-Usui and the tough Ibaraki pass from the Fourth Stage anime.

Great. Come 2007 I'll have another way of wasting money.