Cheap Alternatives to Therapy

As odd as the very idea may seem to some people, I'm a creature largely of pure logic. I pose problems to solve, research precedents, form a plan of action, and follow through with it. How I may personally feel about the initial problem doesn't really enter into the process all that much. I'm far more likely to get annoyed because someone else gets in the way or questions one of the steps of my process than I am likely to spend much time bemoaning the initial insult. Couldn't get a job in Boulder, fine, moved to Texas. I'm over it. Cooking at high altitude sucked anyway.

But, as many of us are, I'm getting older, and some of the lifestyle choices I made happily in my early 20's (like subsisting for days at a time on white rice) are no longer wholly my own to make. I have no problem working without rest or complaint for days on end if a project requires it. Certain other people who rode shotgun with me down from Colorado are not hardwired the same way. OK, I'll give it away, I'm talking about my girlfriend (and my cat). In the interest of maintaining domestic felicity, my major self-improvement concern nowadays is becoming more conscious of my moods, figuring out their root causes, and addressing them before I say something really mean to someone who didn't deserve it.

As I've been completing self-assigned homework readings like Goleman and Gardner's work on emotional intelligence and attempting to improve my self-awareness I've realized that I do a lot of things every day that subconsciously reflect my mindstate. My music listening habits are the best example. During the weeks of planning and packing in Boulder before our move, I listened to a lot of musical comfort food. Generally I try and spend most of my turntable time on expanding my knowledge, but the last month in our old apartment it was all Pavement, Beatles, Built to Spill, Stones, Guided by Voices. The first thing I put on when I got the receiver unpacked in Texas was Pet Sounds.

When I'm in a relaxed state, I put on whole LP's and I listen to both sides. When I'm mildly manic, I play 45's or one LP track at a time. Only when I'm too preoccupied to deal with handling vinyl do I go to the iTunes or the iPod. I must be embracing my new home, because since we've settled all I've been doing is hunting for new Austin bands on MySpace. I can't complain really about how much free digital music is at our fingertips in the modern era, because I wouldn't be able to develop this blog in the way I envision without that access. But I do worry about a generation that never decides what to listen to for themselves, since I gain so much insight into my own mysterious moods through what sleeves I pull off the shelves. Pandora or new music blogs or "Genius" mode or shuffle are all very well and good if you're feeling directionless. But everyone who takes their music seriously should spend a little time each day asking "What do I want to listen to?" and then pondering what internal feelings the chosen music reflects.

Another perhaps less universal method I use for taking mental inventory is playing Civilization IV. As I'm sure I've written before, I started playing the Win 3.11 build of Sid Meier's original Civilization in the fourth grade or so, and I've played that game or a sequel very close to every week of my life since. The game and Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe made me decide to be a history major, and so certainly influenced my choice of college. I've always understood that the game's remarkably open-ended design is central to its addictiveness. There are many different conditions for winning and many different combinations of strategies possible to reach each of the several ending points. It's like four-dimensional chess with an added time element; survive long enough and the pieces start behaving completely differently. (Of course chess itself does have an echo in this time element in the promotion of pawns, but bear with me.)

I've always figured that I love Civilization and its related family of games because I have the natural instincts of an historian; I memorize the release dates and attached personnel changes of rock records in the same way I do World Series matchups and the succession of English monarchs. But with my new developing emotional consciousness I also see that it's a way for me to put my sense of justice into practice in a sandbox where no actual nuclear warheads will be dropped on any actual Zulus. With the Beyond the Sword expansion, Civilization IV is the first game in the series where religion and diplomacy can be as rewarding as military conquest. I like to think of myself as a world leader of peace, and most of the time I only make war on my neighbors when provoked. But what serves as provocation changes depending on how my life in the outside world is going. Sometimes I will let the aggressive Spanish bully me, giving them technology and money to avoid war like Neville Chamberlain. Then sometimes I will crush the Carthaginians under my mighty boot like Zeus just because they dared to found a city in an unclaimed spot of land that I happened to need if I was going to draw a giant "W" on the map with my territory.

Experienced players will know that certain races have to be beaten into submission: the Celts are just going to keep attacking your tanks with swordsmen until you put them out of their misery, and the duplicitous Babylonians simply aren't the sort of people with whom you want your subjects sharing a continent. But how you deal with dangerous, crafty Indians or Egyptians will change with every game depending on various factors both internal and external to the game world.

Well, now I just really feel like playing. I hope today I am a man of peace.

Unreasonable Vinyl Reissue Demands: Definitely Not the Last in a Series

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground

Listen, I'm not here to tell my sophisticated readers anything they don't already know about the Velvets. They're either the third most important rock band of all time (Beatles, Stones) or the fourth (Stooges). If for some reason you don't already know all four of their albums by heart and need some advice on where to start, this is a pretty good overview. (Pretty darn well-written, too.) But let's assume you already know the name of the English professor who assigned Lou Reed the short story assignment that became the lyric for "The Gift," and bought a copy of the trashy paperback that inspired their name on eBay just to have it. Are you as cranky as I am that only one mix of The Velvet Underground, the radically quiet third album, is available on LP?

If my history doesn't here fail me, Lou Reed supervised an initial stereo mix of the record that emphasized the hushed, conversational quality of the songs even more so than the more widely available version. This is usually referred to as the "closet mix," since the instruments sound very muted relative to the vocals. MGM didn't like the mix and initiated a revision, although the original version made it out for the first pressing. Subsequent reissues have all followed the more traditional MGM mix. The "closet mix" finally made it to digital on the '95 Peel Slowly and See boxed set.

The songs on which the change is most obvious, although all the tunes are affected, are "Some Kinda Love" and "After Hours." The former is all rhythm guitar and floor tom on the MGM mix and barely anything besides vocal, lead guitar, and cowbell in the "closet" version. The latter has a pulsing electric bassline on the remix that can barely be heard in the original (although it's there if you know where to listen for it). In both cases, the "closet" versions are in Reed's opinion and mine the definitive mixes. In MGM's edits, the songs have a clear evolutionary connection to the simple electric rock songs the band had been playing since the beginning, while the Reed originals push the band to a new folk-inspired place that's been wildly influential since. To get a complete picture of how the Velvets became a very frequently repeated Brian Eno quote, the serious rock historian needs to hear the records as they were originally received.

Because I'm a sucker with a bit of a martyrdom complex, I keep buying new reissues of The Velvet Underground with no indication that they'll be any different than the four or five I already have, skipping right to the last track, and saying something ungentlemanly when that damn bass line starts in at full blast. If anyone even more obsessive than I knows of a reissue that has "closet" sound, I'd be obliged for the tip.

Ditto the 90's Iggy resuscitation of Raw Power.

Buzzkill

Well, so much for my outpouring of enthusiasm for my new adopted home. Anna and I don't have jobs yet, and we spent pretty much all of our savings on the U-Haul. So we've been trying to find free shows to attend, since we simply don't have any extra money. Something Called Nothing advertised their performance this evening at Trophy's as being free. We know that bands don't always know what's up, so we called the club earlier this evening before we left. They assured us that there was "no cover until nine." So we showed up at eight, bought drinks, and dug the music of J.T. Wright & Solstice. Then, since we were enjoying ourselves so demonstratively during SCN's first song, the barmaid came over to tell us we each had to give her five dollars. We simply don't stand for these sort of bait and switch practices where I come from, so we walked out. All of my finely-honed instincts tell me that this kind of thing goes on constantly in this town, where there's way more clubs and bands than any one city can really hold comfortably. No skin off my back, I've got a finely-honed sense of justice -- and more importantly, a platform from which to wield it.

Sorry to Something Called Nothing -- we really hope to see you again soon. You're good, way better than the sloppy recordings on your MySpace page. I was all set to review this show based on those demos as an example of how attitude and instincts can go further than chops a lot of the time, but even after only one song I can tell that such a description would be selling this trio short. They're tight with great vocals, a southern edge than doesn't really come across on the Ramones-y recordings, and a wonderful melodic bass player. Absolutely not the last you or I will be hearing from them.

In any case, we did manage to catch the very tail end of J.T. Wright's happy hour set, and that alone made the outing well worth our bother. A mix of the organic early 70's Dead and Jeff Tweedy's stuff when he was still in Uncle Tupelo, J.T. and his trio play simple songs really well. Wright has a knack for writing songs that echo familiar progressions without falling over the ledge into plagiarism (as their MySpace description wryly acknowledges), and their cover of "Not Fade Away" mixes Holly's passion, the Stones' Bo Diddley arrangement, and Tupelo's good ol' boy roar. Refreshingly, Wright and his bassist use little teeny amplifiers instead of overpowered stacks. You can hear what they're doing, and when they jam it's impressive how clear the sound is. It holds together even when both are improvising pretty furiously, something that's way easier to conceptualize than execute. We'll see them again for sure -- since we know for certain they play every Wednesday and it's actually free.

Let's All Shimmy Like It's the Very Late Nineties

To Silently Provoke the Ghost EP

The Photo Atlas

What better way to begin a renewed commitment to music reviews in my new city than checking in with my old Denver homies, The Photo Atlas? One of the first local bands that really earned my attention when I settled in Colorado, I would be really broken up about not getting to see their Gang of Four-derived, dance-informed, energy-laden performances any longer -- only they're road warriors and they play here almost as often as they do in the 303. The Atlas got a lot of notice with their debut full-length No, Not Me Never in 2007 (the undeniable "Red Orange Yellow" remains their definitive statement), but their instant perfection of a recognizable style might have left them in a bit of a cul-de-sac creatively. This EP, which seems to have twice as many ideas in half as many songs, finds them managing to keep it fresh even as their basic sound remains essentially unchanged. Producer J. Robbins doesn't hurt any, and I like the Jawbox-like effect of Alan Andrews dueting with himself on "Jealous Teeth," with one line delivered in a melodic style and the next shouted.

Andrews has grown a ton as a vocalist after hundreds of shows, his voice sounding fuller and more assured on all of these tracks. Drummer Nick Miles, added since No, Not Me, also has a lot to do with the quality of this new one, as the Atlas sound more like a rock band and less of a producer-shaped dance act here, something that's always been reflected in their live shows. Disco beats are still in the mix, but Miles' kick and hi-hats are loud and that's as it should be. Harmonies on "It's Always About the Money" and "You Haven't Read Enough" are welcome developments, and I appreciate the way band and producer are thoughtful about putting unique details on every track, like the fuzz bass tone for "Class of 2012." The group still has yet to release anything that's a departure from their basic beat-happy template, even though a teaser EP like this one would have been an excellent opportunity to try a ballad experiment. I guess we'll have to await the next full-length.

I wasn't sure what to expect from the Photo Atlas after label problems and a lineup change sapped their initial momentum. To Silently Provoke the Ghost proves they're still full of energy, and that their chops have just gotten better. The one thing that remains is to find a method of transferring all those qualities into some tunes that shatter the mold they've built for themselves a little bit.

Records I Listened To Today

14 Greatest Hits, Hank Williams. I'm no stranger to the music of Hank Senior; I've been playing songs like "Howlin' at the Moon" in my solo sets since I was in college. But it is a little tricky finding unaltered Williams recordings on vinyl. The pioneering live fast, die hard rock star, one of the many tragedies of Williams' biography that would be repeated endlessly by later travelers on the lost highway is the way his original recordings were butchered after his death by shortsighted, profiteering record labels. 60's and 70's re-releases of the original recordings (which spanned from 1946 to Williams' death in 1953) added atrocious orchestra overdubs in a misguided effort to make Hank's timeless songs sound "contemporary." Being able to find a better selection of used classic country albums in record stores wasn't the main reason I moved to Texas, but it doesn't hurt any. This '61 MGM compilation presents a somewhat random assortment of hit singles as they originally sounded, with the lean accompaniment of drums, upright bass, fiddle, lead electric guitar, and pedal steel. The idea of making "greatest hits" albums by any criterion other than raw sales figures was decades away, so this compilation has a couple too many novelty tunes like "Kaw-Liga" and "Jambalaya" at the expense of more fully covering Williams' blues and gospel elements. But any Hank on vinyl is a thrill for me, and as is the case for all music made before the invention of true multitrack recording in the mid-sixties, there's simply no way to make this material sound halfway decent on CD. The details that come out most for me are the wonderfully sympathetic lead guitar playing of Bob McNett, the way the roles of bass and rhythm guitar are reversed from modern standards (guitar holding down the beat, bass anticipating the chord changes with rhythmic accents), and mostly Williams' remarkable command of his voice as an instrument. The way he chooses, sometimes only once in a song, to go to his falsetto just for one choice syllable continues to influence singers and songwriters all over popular music to this very day.

I've Got My Own Album to Do, Ron Wood. Fantastic, overlooked solo album, despite the fact that it has two otherwise unrecorded Glimmer Twins songs and even a tune cowritten with George Harrison. Keith Richards plays on every song, although this record was made before Mick Taylor left the Stones and Wood took his place. It's a very loose session, with Richards and Wood both freely stopping mid-riff to spin out groovy little licks whenever the mood strikes them. (The presence of top-drawer studio musicians on drums and bass holds the songs' center.) Although the Stones would never be this sloppy on record, you can hear how much the two guitarists enjoy playing together. Although Keith Richards is almost always described as a rhythm guitarist, it was really only during the Taylor years that he stuck strictly to that role; with Wood and Brian Jones no strict boundaries applied. I've Got My Own Album to Do has two highlights each of which have been made famous by other artists. I initially fell in love with the song "Mystifies Me," a Wood original, from the dynamite cover on Son Volt's debut album Trace. It's the excellence of that performance (which sadly overshadows nearly everything else Jay Farrar has done since Anodyne) that originally put me on the lookout for my own copy of this record. Ron Wood is absolutely no competition for Farrar as a singer, but I've come to like the original recording better since the Son Volt revival stays a little too close for comfort to Wood's arrangement, right down to the little lead guitar flourishes, and Richards' harmony vocals are priceless. Over on Side Two, "If You've Got to Make a Fool of Somebody," recorded by everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Brian Poole & The Tremeloes, gets made over in that unmistakable Keith Richards duet style where the two singers aren't really remotely in synch and yet it's perfect. Super record, it's a shame Wood never really got the material together for another solo outing of equal strength.

Magic Potion, The Black Keys. I never really gave the Black Keys much of a fair hearing when they first emerged because (unfairly) they were lumped in with the White Stripes, for whom I've never had much use. Anna loves both those bands, however, and she's brought me around on the Keys if not the other. We've been looking for Magic Potion on LP for ages and it finally turned up today. After all the buildup, I was a bit disappointed. Anna says that her attachment to the album is due to the period in college when she was listening to it all the time, apparently a very creative era in her life. I don't really listen to music in at all that way, which is interesting -- there was a time I remember being quite obsessed with Let It Bleed, but that was before I had Exile, which is patently superior, end of story. Anna continues to consider this her favorite Black Keys album even though she agrees with me that Rubber Factory, which came out before Magic Potion but she heard after, is a much more interesting and diverse listen. I simply don't think that way. Objectively, what was going on in my life the first time I heard Painful as opposed to Electr-O-Pura doesn't make a lick of difference when it comes to which in my opinion is the better Yo La Tengo album. (But then again which records I have on vinyl and which I only have in crappy digital does make a huge difference. There was a time when I was convinced Presence was better than Physical Graffiti simply because I hadn't located the 2xLP of the latter yet. Also personal, also extrinsic to the history of the music in question, but in a totally different fashion.) Back to Magic Potion. This record was the Black Keys' major-label debut, and yet it sounds more stripped-down than anything since their first indie record. The huge variance in guitar tones and vocal ambience from Rubber Factory is absent, though Dan Auerbach's songwriting is more than strong enough to carry you through the record without things getting boring. It is surprising based on their other output that they were self-conscious enough about signing to Nonesuch to break their habit of broadening their sound with every record for this one. Maybe they wanted to make one more album in Patrick Carney's garage just to make sure the new label would let them get away with it; maybe they were afraid of alienating their fans (or just as bad, winning too many undesirable new ones). In retrospect, Magic Potion fits into their catalog nicely as a bit of a breather before Attack and Release, which isn't their best album but maps out the direction they have to keep going, trying new weird ideas just enough to keep their basic formula exciting and fresh.

Minor Threat, Minor Threat. Okay, vinyl is not always superior to digital in every single instance. Every single thing Minor Threat ever recorded is available on one CD, with the same iconic cover image as you get here. That CD basically made a musician out of me in 1994, as I was drumming in a band called the Flagburning Communist Homosexuals the instant I had the stamina to get all the way through "I Don't Want to Hear It" without keeling over. I've been meaning to pick this 12" EP, which in itself is is a repackaging of two 1981 seven-inches, for ages. And I'm glad I did, if only because the fold-out insert is going to look super awesome in my practice space. Vinyl sounds better than CD's, it's true, but lack of clarity for the individual instruments on these founding hardcore broadsides was a good thing, making it sound like the band was way too angry and explosive to keep the levels out of the red. I also miss the way all the songs on the Complete Discography CD abruptly cut out slightly before the end, to make room for every song -- that sense of haste, of rapid forward progress even though the songs in question are mostly a minute and thirty seconds or less, sums up the Minor Threat experience more than any one track or single. The biggest problem with the vinyl is that it reveals that the band couldn't really play: Jeff Nelson's kick drum is muffled and off the beat half the time, Lyle Preslar's overdubbed guitar solos are laughably amateurish, and Brian Baker's complete lack of chops is not mitigated by the fact that he rivals Tommy Stinson as the most adorable incompetent hardcore bassist of the 80's. Oh well. At the very least the wax edition does wonders for Ian MacKaye's precedent-setting vocals, as you can hear every spit, snarl, and snide aside as perfectly as the hundreds of tone-deaf louts who ripped off his schtick did back in the day. That reminds me, must get some Descendents and Black Flag now.

I Left My Heart at Reify Dot Org

Austin Music Blogs

On the Internet

So, I moved to a new city recently. The last three places I worked in Colorado all went out of business last year, which seemed an ill omen. Also, the "economic downturn" wholly killed a Denver/Boulder music scene that was never all that robust to begin with. All the bands I used to make a point of driving into the city to see, like CAT-A-TAC, Everything Absent or Distorted, the Hot IQ's, and many others, split up. I couldn't even find a halfway decent band to join myself, after months of trying. So I packed the records, the cat, and the girlfriend in a U-Haul and find myself now some 1,000 miles south-southeast in Central Texas. I like it. Haven't gotten a job yet, but at least there have been plenty for which to apply. And everything's cheaper here (save car insurance) -- groceries, gas, rent, movies, shows. That last thing is a big deal. Boulder's indigenous combination of engineers and upper-class college students, two groups with lowbrow entertainment tastes and way too much disposable income, had driven the prices of even indifferent concert bills up to $25, $30 a pop. And God help you if you want a beer once you get there.

Price isn't the issue here. There's five-dollar shows and free shows every night, weekends even. The surplus of bands and clubs here means there's a number of pretty decent venues (from the look of things) that charge a token cover or nothing. If you're not in the least discerning, you can park by the river downtown and just walk around waiting to hear something catchy. But I'd like to accomplish a little more than heckling bar bands for playing "Feelin' Alright" or silently counting the time it takes the average weekend-warrior blues trio to reach their fourth chord of the evening.

So how do you find local shows worth attending? Since we settled on Austin as our new homebase about six weeks ago, I've been trying in vain to find local music coverage on the web that's both reliable and well-written. Clearly I'm not the only person who has sensed a void, as a daunting number of blog projects started and abandoned litter the link tables I hit. Austin Sound is updated fairly regularly and has led to me discover more interesting local bands (Invincible Czars, Band of Heathens, Haunting Oboe Music) than any other. But the writing quality is not great, the interviewers persistently ask stupid and ignorant questions (which in turn causes the bands being interviewed to give unserious answers), and the album reviews constantly say more about the writer than the band. This reviewer, for one, hates that style. There's also a fixation on music that's more weird than good, which I suppose is all down to taste. And their show reviews are simply terrible, slavish fanboy tripe.

The Austin Chronicle's Earache! blog does a disservice to its community by concentrating some 60-70% of its attention on big shows by out-of-town artists, probably because the Chronicle has enough pull to get its writers into the big shows for free. You'd think Austin's alternative newspaper would have better local coverage than Denver's, but you'd think wrong. Then again Denver has a small enough scene that it's genuinely feasible for Westword to review every local CD it gets and go to see every area band that agitates for it enough; the Chronicle would have to have 40 music writers to accomplish that.

Then pickings get slim, fast: Side One Track One has a great name and a great concept if it would stick to it, but it doesn't; like a lot of blogs it's been totally destroyed by YouTube. Every post is two sentences and then a video clip. I watch too much TV on television already; I don't want to watch more TV on the Internet, particularly crappy-sounding digital music clips. Austinist is pretentious, has an ugly design that hurts my eyes, and also spends way too much time parroting the outside hype of non-local bands that don't need any more exposure. Covert Curiosity is barely even a blog, just a bunch of ads for festivals and albums. Doesn't anybody have an opinion any more? Or do these kids all just buy whatever Pitchfork tells them?

Number Nine, Number Ten, Number Nine

The Beatles: Rock Band

Video game, developed by Harmonix

Yesterday was a big day for Beatle people everywhere, as it would have been difficult not to notice. In addition to the long-delayed (though sort of pointless) release of new versions of their oddly badly-handled digital catalog, the really exciting news was the release of the inevitable Beatles music game. I spent most of yesterday, up until the point where I had to go practice with my real band, working my way through the story mode on expert level drums. The verdict? It's the best music game ever, obliterating the lazily made Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Metallica games and eschewing the mind-boggling amounts of filler tracks that the flagship Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles always possess. It's true that there's half as many songs on the disc as Rock Band 2, but they're Beatles songs. They count way more than double anything by Panic! at the Disco or Steve Miller.

I was a bit nervous about the game being too easy, as I've gotten to be a top-flight video game drummer in the past few years. That was silly. Anyone who's a music fan first and a gamer second has long since realized that what matters in these games is how fun the songs are to play, not how hard they are. I've played Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" approximately eight million times in Guitar Hero: Smash Hits even though I can practically go the whole way through with my eyes closed now. It's not tricky, it's just fun. And The Beatles: Rock Band, although it doesn't have any of the soul-crushing Slayer or Dream Theater tracks that have stalled my progress dead in other games, has a sweet difficulty curve. As the band improved as musicians and the technology and instrumentation they had available widened, their songs got more sophisticated. One of the most striking things about the game is how downright amazing it sounds; rather than working from the new digital masters engineer Giles (son of George) Martin went all the way back to the original multitrack tapes. After the very primitive early recordings, which it's a marvel they managed to massage into playable form at all, you'll be astounded at how crystal-clear and contemporary the songs from Rubber Soul onward sound. Particularly the Sgt. Pepper tunes -- I was pleased to see Geoff Emerick get a special credit after I completed the game.

As a musician, I've always appreciated the way these beat-matching games -- even ones from before the plastic-guitar era, like Rez and Amplitude -- improve players' internal meter in a useful and fun way. Of course, there's a further distinction between the drum modes, which actually teach you to play the instrument, and the toy guitars and bass. This game, appropriately to its subjects, adds the biggest advancement in real musical education since the original Rock Band. The vocal harmony function is beautifully designed, incredibly easy to jump into (even when you're playing an instrument at the same time, since these are songs everybody knows) and absorbed into the game in a way that's neither dauntingly difficult nor unsatisfyingly fudged. There's a vocal trainer, but as a lifelong Beatlemaniac I haven't touched it; I've been practicing these harmonies for as long as I've been able to sing. For those who have less refined musical ears, it's pretty amazing to plug into a video game and realize you're singing pristine three-part harmony. Of course, since I'm a baritone masochist I insist on doing Paul's high harmonies, often a seventh or even a ninth above the principal melody. I'm quite hoarse today, but it's well worth it.

As for the drums, I've been hoping since this game was announced that it would go some way towards repairing Ringo Starr's unfairly tarnished reputation. So what if he couldn't write songs? Along with Charlie Watts (rumored this week to be leaving the Rolling Stones after nearly 50 years of service), the man invented rock drumming. Expert mode in Beatles: Rock Band is a fitting tribute to a guy who reportedly broke tempo less than ten times in eight years playing with the most exacting composers who ever lived. The blitzkrieg pace of "I Wanna Be Your Man" puts the Ramones to shame, "I Feel Fine" is frantic with its asymmetrical, syncopated tom hits, and the drum solo from "The End" is way tougher to nail precisely than it sounds on record. Ringo is actually the ideal drummer for this sort of game, since he rarely uses 16th- and 32nd-note fills. Getting 100% on tunes like "I Am the Walrus" or "Good Morning Good Morning" (mind that dropped beat!) is deceptively challenging. What's more, these are just about the best songs in the history of the universe, so who cares if "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is just straight 4/4 with no fills?

I haven't played the guitar or bass tracks that much to this point, but my girlfriend assures me that the bass on expert is fiendishly difficult. Really, really nitpicky Beatles obsessives (and they don't come much more nitpicky than me) might be bothered by the fact that a lot of riffs that are hammered-on, like the main one from "Day Tripper," have to be picked out in the game, while a lot of George's early solos which were played note-by-note (in the style of his biggest early influence, Chet Atkins) only take one downstroke and then a bunch of left-hand fingering. The basslines are pretty interesting both to see and to hear. They've managed using modern technology to separate out parts from the Please Please Me era that were buried on a track along with drums and excessive rhythm guitar bleed. McCartney's unmistakable, virtuosic pulse is more audible than it's ever been in any digital format. It doesn't sound great, exactly, certainly no substitute for my mono LP's -- when playing solo bass, the game turns the recovered track way up, and it sounds pretty compressed and clippy. Checking against my scores, there are a few places where the game designers have mistakenly added a note, probably due to a stray guitar sound or kick drum not completely removed from the original tape. It keeps you on your toes! Paul doesn't need any further praise from me or anyone else, but hearing his instinctively jazzy walking lines (and his restraint when called for, "Ticket to Ride" for example) in this context is a master class in how to play the electric bass. It's a shame that so few rock bands have followed the Beatles' example by assigning their best musician to play the four-string.

It's hard to quibble with the presentation of the game, which splits right down the middle between service to fans of the band's and accessibility to gamers. There's a wealth of cool stuff to unlock, some of it new even to a Fab Four anorak like myself, but if you just want to plug in and play, the menus have been significantly rationalized from the somewhat annoying RB2 interface. They've also sped the default scrolling speed up slightly, which makes it less frustrating trying to play the drums while guitars are plugged in as well. Rock Band still needs to incorporate the option to choose different speeds for different instruments at the same time (which Guitar Hero has, but unfortunately combined with a badly designed main play screen setup that cuts the note highways off too short). The animations are light-years better than any I've seen in a music game so far, really putting the folks who worked on the earlier Guitar Hero theme games to shame. The Beatles wear historically accurate outfits and even wield the very instruments they used to record each track -- George plays his Gretsch Country Gentleman at the Cavern Club, picks up a Rickenbacker 12-string for "Hard Day's Night," strums a Martin acoustic for "Here Comes the Sun," slings a Les Paul for "My Guitar Gently Weeps," uses a Strat with a psychedelic paint job for "I Am the Walrus," and plays a Telecaster the exact right shade of maroon up on the roof of the Apple building.

Rather than a single set of repeating cues for each venue, each and every song is animated independently. This provides for a level of personality, and historical accuracy, that really puts the lazy profit-mongerers at Activision to shame. They couldn't even be bothered to put Cliff Burton in the Metallica game, or do more than one character model for each member of Aerosmith. By contrast, every song in Beatles: Rock Band has its own subtle surprises, particularly after the touring period ends and the game shifts to individualized "dreamscapes" unique to each track. Some of them are based on familiar clips, like the "Walrus" sequence from Magical Mystery Tour or the 1967 promo clip for "Hello Goodbye" (pretty sure the only reason they put that particular song in the game was because they couldn't resist animating George's gigantic neon pirate hat). The band's outfits change to reflect each period: you'll see Paul in paisley and skinny ties during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, George and John in their alternating masses of hair looks ('68-'70), amazingly authentic variations in facial hair and clothing style all adapted in an effective way to a cartoony but proportional Rock Band style. For the three-way dueling guitar solo section in "The End," you get to see John, George, and Paul jamming out shoulder to shoulder, as they really did.

As wonderful as all of this is, diehards are going to be cranky about a few things. The game tries to promote an all-members-equal, everybody-doing-their-part re-revisionist whitewashing of the Beatles story, which is nonsense. Ringo doesn't need to have a lead vocal in every single stage (of four to seven songs). As much as they don't fit precisely into the guitar-bass-drums-vocals formula of Rock Band, tunes like "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yesterday" and "Blackbird" (and "Norwegian Wood" and "The Inner Light" and "Across the Universe" and "Words of Love") were and are essential elements of the Beatles' catalog, and I for one wouldn't have minded laying out (or tapping out a simple rhythm on a "bongo" or "tambourine") while watching the cool animations that might have gone to those songs. As it is, the focus is on riff-rock tunes like "Day Tripper," "Birthday," "I Feel Fine," and so forth, which is understandable but overextended -- "Dig a Pony" is one of a very handful of Beatles originals that I probably wouldn't bother getting as a download, so why it's here on the disc rather than "She Said She Said" or "Got to Get You Into My Life" or "Rain" is a mystery. The game also really misrepresents John Lennon; practically none of his quieter or more spiritual songs make the cut here. Both "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "A Day in the Life" are absent, which is just unconscionable. Instead of the original "Tomorrow Never Knows," the mashup with "Within You Without You" from the Cirque de Soleil show Love is utilized. It's a cool track, but it just makes you wish you could play the originals of both songs. The section where the rock beat drops out and you get to play along to the tabla part, sort of, suggests amazing things could be done with all of George's Indian songs if someone could just go to the trouble.

The standard that the in-game songs meet probably won't be possible for DLC; we'll see generic puppet animations as in its lesser predecessors. That's a huge bummer. If ever there was an opportunity for Harmonix to open up even more revenue streams by selling levels and costumes in additions to new tracks, this game is it. I would pay good money for several stages that would fill in the band's history more authoritatively: a Hamburg level of all R&B covers (and pre-management leather and greasy hair); a black-and-white Hard Day's Night stage with "If I Fell" and "I Should Have Known Better" and "You Can't Do That" (and Wilfrid Brambell coming out at the end of a song on a stage elevator); Help! sequences with "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," George's first run-in with a sitar, and copious clouds of, er, "incense" everywhere; an earlier studio level (the game's start in '67) covering the advances of Rubber Soul and Revolver; and then maybe a White Album section where you have to buy three different versions of the game and play John's, Paul's, and George's songs each on one of three different XBoxes.

Does it bug me out of all proportion that the game shows Ringo playing on "Dear Prudence" and "Back in the USSR," both drummed by McCartney? It really does. Also, George mimes the guitar solo to "Taxman" (Paul again) and neither Billy Preston nor Eric Clapton appears where they should. I can understand that getting Clapton's likeness rights might be opening up a whole big unprofitable can of worms, but the exclusion of Preston makes no sense at all. "Don't Let Me Down" and "Get Back," both in the game, were released under the pointed heading of "The Beatles with Billy Preston," in recognition both of Preston's fantastic electric piano playing and the energy and goodwill he injected into the darkest months of the Beatle decade. You can unlock snapshots of both guest musicians (also Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, and an unforgettable one of George Harrison contending in vain with the patch bay of a very, very new VCS3 synthesizer), but how hard would it have been to put a little digital Billy up on the roof with the other guys? He was there!