This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb - Front Seat Solidarity


Hey, so it's summer. I kinda forgot about that because I've been busy with worrying about finding some place where I can be an intern. But let's not bother ourselves with petty trivia, here's something that I always go back to if I feel sad or down or whatever you call it. I don't know why but folk-punk always helps out, probably in part because of its beautiful simplicity.

Folk-punk, for those who might not be familiar with it, is a basically acoustic punk. No distortion, clean vocals and/or acoustic instruments makes it sound a lot like folk but much more aggressive and fun. It's the best from both worlds in short.

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb was a band that had a pretty good run but sadly they stopped doing music last year which sucks. This album is probably their best that they did. There's a duo of female and male vocalists, one bass, clean electric guitar and drums which all form one really great mold of musicians with relatively good lyrics attached to the music. All songs are uplifting in melodies (although not all in theme) and they're just long enough that they don't get boring or repetitive. It's great fun if you're in the mood for it. Check it out sometimes.

Download.

Fav. track.

Akihiro Yamada - A Collection of Paintings

Among other things that I haven't posted in a while are artbooks. Well, the sole reason for that is that I've forgotten most of my sources for that. Strangely I still have some artbooks that survived over the years on my hard drives and are unposted. So here's Akihiro Yamadas artbook that is a collection of really neat paintings and sketches.

Akihiro is probably most known for his character designs (which are plenty in this book) that he did for various animes and video games. Probably the most well known are for Twelve Kingdoms. Despite not being the cream of the top he is an excellent artist that really does have a fairly unique style when it comes to coloring. Sure the characters themselves aren't really devoid from the norm of "this is the 90s and here is how characters need to look" but the coloring really brings them a very unique and lively look. Most of the paintings that are here in color are exceptional (especially those themed in feudal Japan) but his more black and white sketches aren't really doing much for me.

Enjoy.

9 Souls


Director: Toshiaki Toyoda
Year: 2003
Runtime: 1h 59min
Format: .avi
Lagnguage/Subtitles: Japanese with soft English subtitles

It has been a while since I posted a full feature movie. Actually it has been relatively long since I posted anything but that's not the point. Two sentences in and I'm already derailing, how nice. And now I'm talking to myself by typing. What the hell brain.

9 Souls is a story about nine prisoners that somehow managed to run away from prison. At first it might be a little overwhelming to follow nine characters but as the story progresses you really get to know them and dislike/like them so it's only momentarily that you'll be lost in this endless barrage of characters. They are all convicts for different reasons but they all manage to stick together by this loose idea that there might be some money hidden somewhere and so they hijack a convenient truck and go on a adventure.

The magic of this movie is that it starts as your usual (but a bit unusual) prison break movie which is followed by a pursuit and so on, you know the cliche. Actually this setting is only the building block for the rest of the movie that has much more to offer. The center of this movie are the prisoners and their lives and what they want to do with it. At moments it's a cheery road trip sodomy and a little later it's a sad story about a doomed restaurant worker. Many stories intervened and held by the common goal of getting away from your troubles. They all try to miserably fit back into society but they ultimately can't because the society itself has written them off long ago. They're trash now, most of them anyway.


Overall this is one of the best movies that I watched this year so far therefore I can't really give it any real subjective analysis but I can direct you to a much better review that might shed some more light on this film if my description is (as usually) vague. Just follow it here.

Links:

One, two, three, four, five and six.