Retaliation

Usually when I listen to a new mind.in.a.box album, at least one song makes me immediately think, “This is awesome!” My favorites from albums and associated singles look something like this:

  • Lost Alone (2004)
    • Light & Dark
    • Change
  • Dreamweb (2005)
    • Certainty
    • Beyond the World
  • Crossroads (2007)
    • Into the Night
    • Fear
    • One Day
  • R.E.T.R.O. (2010)
    • Whatever Mattered
    • 8 Bits (8.6 Bits Mix)
  • Revelations (2012)
    • Control
  • Memories (2015)
    • Timelessness
  • Broken Legacies (2017)
    • Overwrite
    • World of Promises
  • Black and White (2023)
    • It’s So Good to See You
    • Insurrectionist
    • Just Like You Always Wanted
    • Fire and Lace

I didn’t have that experience with Retaliation though. In fact, when I got to the end of the album, I was mostly confused by what I had heard. Something about every song bothered or bemused me. I did not expect retro synthwave, which made me think of 80s music memes.

I picked out the same drumbeat underplaying multiple songs. Vocal choruses made me think of Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World.” “This song is cheesy as hell,” I thought at some times. “This song is beating me over the head with conservative talking points,” I thought at others. Sometimes I wondered if I was merely repelled by the female singer or occasional high-energy trance music, both of which I rarely listen to and sometimes find irritating. Some songs felt lyrically dense and couldn’t be enjoyed without understanding them.

Still, I knew what I had listened to was conceptually fascinating. Even after more than twenty years of making music and thirteen previous albums, this was unlike any music Stefan Poiss had produced before. He’d never had a backup singer before (aside from one line in Black and White and a couple collaborations with Ray Koefoed). He’d never sung like this before. “I’ve often wondered whether Stefan Poiss has by now tried every conceivable way to electronically distort his voice,” a review amused me. Apparently, he hadn’t because even Retaliation‘s vocal treatments were unlike any he’d done before.

Despite all the differences, Retaliation also felt like a natural progression of mind.in.a.box’s themes and explorations. I wondered at the end of Black and White what it would be like if the characters in mind.in.a.box’s cyberpunk saga had voices other than Stefan’s to speak through. I was pleased to see this idea come to fruition in Retaliation… although Stefan left it strangely open to interpretation as to whether there is in fact a vocalist besides himself. Unlike Black and White, Stefan doesn’t credit anyone, not even himself, as vocalists in the lyric book. One reviewer speculated that the female vocals are merely an extreme distortion of Stefan’s. The male vocals in “Little Miss Vicious” don’t sound like Stefan’s and yet I can’t fathom why it would be someone else. Stefan’s deep, raw voice often makes an appearance in mind.in.a.box albums, but he’s never sung raw falsetto as he does in Retaliation. Both these points add to the plausibility that Stefan has the capability to distort his voice so much that it becomes convincingly feminine. Meanwhile, Discogs claims that the female vocalist is Elizabeth Hourigan, the same who sang one line in Black and White. Stefan’s secretiveness seems by design as solving the mystery of who the vocalists are adds to the album’s intrigue. Is the male in “Little Miss Vicious” actually a distortion of Elizabeth Hourigan’s voice? O.O Regardless, I feel like I’ve gotten to experience the mind.in.a.box story told through a larger cast, even if Stefan is secretly still playing all the characters.

This answer gave me another question though. Does mind.in.a.box exist without Stefan Poiss’ voice? Were the songs that featured the female vocalist lesser because of Stefan’s loss or diminishment? Considering I spent several months studying and writing articles about everything to do with mind.in.a.box except for Stefan Poiss and the music itself — as if the story, themes, and lyrics were what was most important — I found these particularly interesting questions for me to be asking. Similar questions arose among fans when mind.in.a.box’s Revelations album was released. Stefan’s vocals and vocal treatments in Revelations differed from previous albums after he’d spent two years training his voice for live concerts. The increased presence and strength of his natural singing voice confused and irked some fans. While I enjoyed the experiment with another vocalist in Retaliation, I also admit that I had a similar experience in feeling jarred by the change. Over time, Stefan’s honed natural singing voice has become an integral part of mind.in.a.box’s sound. Similarly, while Retaliation has an extremely different approach to vocals from previous albums, it’s likely that it will also become a natural progression in the band’s sound.

Pervading many of mind.in.a.box’s themes is the concept of minds/people escaping their boxes in various ways. Retaliation defies what mind.in.a.box was known to be, allowing the band and Stefan to escape their own box.

Retaliation is unquestionably disappointing in at least one way though. The previous album Black and White opened with these words from The Friend, an ally of the protagonist Mr. Black:

Don’t you worry. As you know, only those with a free mind can use the device to enter the Dreamweb.

In the final dramatic moment ending Black and White, Black makes a shocking discovery about his nemesis Mr. White:

In the plane of the Dreamweb…
White’s face staring back at me…

After all of my endless struggles,
How can this possibly be?
How can this possibly be?

In most albums, White has appeared obsessive and miserable in his search to attain the Dreamweb as if he doesn’t merely want to control those who have escaped to this alternate reality but has a personal need to reach this place. The ending to Black and White suggests that White’s misery, and apparent death at Black’s hands, has finally led him to a revelation about his life or his actions that frees him to access the Dreamweb. It also tells Black that his black and white thinking is incorrect, and White may not be as evil as he perceived. What did White discover? Indeed, how can this possibly be? And what will happen to the Dreamweb now that White has accessed it?

Retaliation‘s supplementary lyric book story wraps up this cliff hanger quite unsatisfyingly. The Dreamweb remains unchanged. We hear nothing of what happens to White while he’s there. He spends several months transforming into a superhuman cyborg while in a coma and then awakens to spread more war and chaos than his lackies did in his absence. What made White interesting in previous albums is replaced with stereotypical bad guy flair. Additionally, war is about the most boring plot to fill in a science fiction or fantasy story. I’m more interested in character interactions and individual battles than political intrigue and masses of faceless people fighting one another. Unfortunately, Retaliation‘s lyric book story and songs tend more toward relating such faceless battles and anti-authoritarian messaging than any conflicting feelings Black, Night, White, and The Friend may have.

Granted, mind.in.a.box’s story has never been amazing. It’s a minimalistic to middling cyberpunk story elevated by the medium and method through which it’s told. The music has always been most important in mind.in.a.box’s philosophy. Still, Retaliation followed Black and White, which contained some of the strongest storytelling in mind.in.a.box’s history. As someone who loved Black and White‘s integration of story and music, I have to think part of what bothered me about Retaliation was that I expected a continuation of that story and was instead mostly serenaded with war songs. Even for its storytelling innovations, Retaliation also felt like a step backward.

Like the album, the lyric book story isn’t all bothersome though. I was expecting the story to handwave away Black’s escape from White’s office, where he left off at the end of Black and White, and begin sometime afterward. Instead, the story began with Black’s escape, which was really cool. I also enjoyed that Night, a character that has spent little time in the spotlight in any album, had a larger role to play.

Having listened to the album a few times now, I still can’t say that I have a favorite song, although “Little Miss Vicious,” “Greatest Glory,” “We’ll Jump Together,” and “Immunity” are competing. It’s the album I’ve found to be most true to Stefan’s philosophy that music is to be savored, not consumed in a hit of dopamine. Retaliation doesn’t have a hard-hitting song that grabbed me immediately, but I’ve found the more I listen to it, the more I appreciate it and the more enjoyable it becomes.

Resident Evil Requiem

Resident Evil Requiem should have been called Resident Evil Ax. You think the Requiem is the most boss weapon in the game. It isn’t. That ax can block standard attacks, giant plant attacks, etc. all while crushing skulls and beheading zombies. Leon only has to sharpen it once in a while.

The ax is featured heavily in one of the coolest fights in the game: Tyrant. Well-timed ax blocks and dodges are required to evade Tyrant’s attacks, including him throwing cars. The fight is slow and strategic rather than fast paced and spammy.

The motorcycle chase sequence is another great moment, very Final Fantasy VII-esque and CGI Resident Evil-like. It even includes Leon riding his motorcycle up the side of a building. His tendency to crash every vehicle he touches doesn’t plague him in this game.

Additional outrageous action includes zombies with chainsaws, guns, and mortars. The flavor of zombies in this game remember elements from their lives, so they can wield weapons. Leon can also distract them by turning on lights that zombies know should not be on.

Interestingly, Resident Evil Requiem has two playable characters, and the play style differs between them. When playing as Grace, the game is more a survival horror where zombies are to be avoided, and health items and storage space are given sparingly. The number of times players can save is also rationed, and there are no auto saves. Leon’s sections operate more as an action horror where zombies are to be destroyed, and the game saves automatically. Storage space and health can be limited, but they’re more forgiving than Grace’s gameplay. I wonder if it’s a common complaint that players prefer one play style or the other?

If players see a particular ending first, they may be led to believe that the creators are finally forcing an end to Resident Evil sequels by killing Leon, but rest assured, he survives. Just make the right choice next time!

mind.in.a.box: Retaliation PSA

mind.in.a.box’s new album Retaliation was released today!

Also, if you haven’t read them yet, check out my analyses of mind.in.a.box’s music, themes, and cyberpunk storyline on my main website. These are what I was working on for the past month and half. Unlike the silly “reviews” I write here, I actually put some work into them. 😀

Why do I love mind.in.a.box?

mind.in.a.box: Crossroads is not about amnesia

mind.in.a.box: From Hadwiger to Kreger

You can also find my silly review of Retaliation here.

Harry Potter (Full-Cast Editions)

Audible had been continuously hawking the Harry Potter full-cast editions at me. I didn’t know what else to spend my credits on. Plus, I’d just listened to the AI-generated slop audiobook True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition and needed to cancel it out with some decent narration. So I decided to give them a try.

They were so good! They’re like listening to unabridged Harry Potter movies with a music score and sound effects. Lines are delivered with perfect comedic timing and dramatic flair. Usually, full-cast audiobooks are more like radio plays where there’s no narrator, only character dialogue and sound effects, which sometimes gets confusing. These audiobooks, however, have a narrator. Everything in the books is in the audiobooks.

I’m of Kiera Knightly’s opinion that I don’t care what J.K. Rowling has said. How cool is it that seven 8- to 26-hour-long, full-cast, fully narrated audiobooks exist? Such things could only exist if someone has a lot of money and a large fanbase to support it.

The only parts of these audiobooks that lost me were the fight scenes. These tended to be heavy on action music and sound effects, sometimes threatening to drown out the narrator. Even without that, I lost track of what was happening. I don’t think my getting lost is specific to these audiobooks though. It’s often a problem I have with audiobooks in general. The problem was more pronounced when it happened with these books though because the rest of these books were so good.

Additionally, sometimes it sounded like one or two of the actors in a scene got the shitty microphone. They sounded inappropriately muffled or distant in comparison to everyone else. This happened most often in the first two or three books, however, where I was listening to them with one earpiece. For most of the rest of the books, I used two earpieces and didn’t notice the same problem. Perhaps it was an issue with the audio balance or my phone failing to recognize that I was only using one earpiece.

Besides those two minor issues, these books were great! So good! Below are some thoughts I had on each specific book.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

I wonder if the opening scene from Mr. Dursley’s perspective was added to this edition. Or the moment where all the houses sung a song in the Hogwarts’ great hall.

*looks it up in a physical copy of the book* Oh, they exist! The houses singing a song was pretty awkward, so it makes sense it was in the full-cast edition because it was in the book.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I didn’t catch anything strange going on with Ginny except for in one scene. Listening to it a second time, I caught the hints better though. Maybe it was easier to read the hints in the first book because I remembered Professor Quirrell was the culprit.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Here are a couple quotes (perhaps paraphrased) that I thought were hilarious and well delivered:

“There is no Harry Potter here! Never call this number again! Stay away from my family!”

“Do something about your hair!”

I don’t remember Harry’s father being an Animagus. Then again, I also don’t remember Crookshanks.

The explanation for Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew seemed convoluted like the characters were saying the same thing in different ways repeatedly. I wonder how different the movie was from the book, specifically how many things it changed to make explaining Sirius concise.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

All the characters’ voices dropped at the same time, even Colin Creevy who isn’t even in Harry’s grade.

Hedwig looked EXTREMELY offended. A lot of people are extremely something in fact.

Harry doesn’t solve how to open the egg or how to swim underwater for an hour on his own. In fact, he has the answer spelled out for him or given to him. *continues listening* Oh, that was intentional!

Harry Potter’s voice actor can’t scream in pain to save his life.

Dumbledore mentions the room of requirement. Teasers for the Order of the Phoenix!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I remember Order of the Phoenix being my least favorite in the series to read, but for whatever reason, it’s my favorite of the full cast editions. The understandability of the ending fell apart a little, but otherwise, I loved this rendition and immediately wanted to listen to the whole thing again. Maybe it’s the level of misery Harry is subjected to. He may not be able to scream in pain, but Harry’s voice actor can play the hell out of an angsty teenager.

I wonder if there were hints in previous books that Aunt Petunia cares more about the wizarding world than she claims.

What qualifies someone to be a prefect or a best boy or best girl? Are they just Professor Dumbledor’s arbitrary favorites?

Kiera Knightly played Dolores Umbridge? I didn’t recognize her!

“Wotcher” means “What are you up to?” or “What cheer?”

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

I think Harry’s theories are wrong in every book except this one. In this one, he’s right about everything… about Snape and Malfoy at least.

Did Harry always have a relationship with Ginny in this book? *looks it up in a physical copy* He did! I always recall his marriage to Ginny coming out of left field, but reading this book again, it’s fitting. It’s probably just the movies where it doesn’t make sense.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For how much Harry likes Quidditch, he never gets to play it for a full school year. In book 1, he was hospitalized after fighting Voldemort. In book 2, Quidditch was canceled because the monster from the Chamber of Secrets had petrified so many people that the school was locked down. In book 3, Harry was harassed into unconsciousness by dementors (although I think he actually did finish the season). In book 4, Quidditch was canceled to make way for the Triwizard Tournament. In book 5, Professor Umbridge bans Harry. In book 6, he gets detention for cursing Malfoy and misses the last Quidditch game. And in book 7, he doesn’t go to school. That sucks.

I imagine Harry’s voice actor had fun impersonating other characters for The Seven Harry’s chapter. The actors probably had fun impersonating main characters throughout the book actually.

Killing Fred, Tonks, and Lupin? That’s brutal.

There’s always a scene toward the end of a Harry Potter book where everything is explained. It seems like a comfort provided to the reader that everything will always make sense in the end. I’m sure people who get pissed off by explanatory scenes would be pissed off about it though.

Harry’s parents died in 1981, which means Harry was born in 1980… 80s nostalgia strikes again!!!

Hermione, Harry, and Ron’s voices dropped again as adults. Weird. Why would the audiobook creators decide to do that?

Dark (Seasons 1-3)

Dark, a German Netflix series, was pitched to me as the antithesis of Stranger Things Season 5–well planned, dense, and thoughtful in comparison to action and nonsense said repeatedly to cater to the second-screen generation. Dark features an ensemble cast of characters who discover they are trapped in a time loop in which events repeat every 33 years. Among other past and future years, it takes place in 2019, 1986, and 1953, hitting the nostalgia and atmosphere of both the 80s and the 50s as is popular in media these days.

How did this time loop happen? In the present year 2019, one of the protagonists Jonas discovers that he is the son of his love interest Martha’s 11-year-old missing brother Mikkel. Mikkel went through a hidden portal in a cave where he found himself trapped 1986. Meanwhile, another boy Mads from 1986 goes through the portal and reappears in 2019 dead with his eyes and ears exploded, intriguing other 2019 characters who knew Mads as a boy. Mikkel would grow up to become Jonas’ father, making his sister Martha Jonas’ aunt. Distraught that he and Martha can’t be together, Jonas becomes determined to rescue Mikkel or otherwise stop the time loop from coming to be.

Despite how it was pitched, I spent most of Dark waiting for something to happen. Yes, yes, there’s a time loop. Then, what happened? Ultimately, the entire show is the most frustrating manifestation of pointless, space-time continuum bullshit I’ve ever seen. The first season features the 2019 cast of characters discovering and investigating the time loop and the portal. At the end of the season, Martha is murdered in front of Jonas by his future self (for reasons) just as another Martha from another dimension appears and takes 2019 Jonas to her world. The alternate 2019 is the dimension where everyone has cleft pallets and emo hair… I mean, it has an identical but slightly different cast of 2019 characters who discover and investigate the time loop and the portal… as if the creators had given up on the first dimension and were rebooting the story in another. It reminded me of that quote from Fairly Odd Parents: “It’s the show about nothing! …How do we know when it’s over?” Instead of “it’s the show about nothing” though, it’s the show where every season is the same plot and same discoveries but taking place in a slightly different world.

Several reiterations of the same explanation later, we thoroughly understand that yes, yes, Martha and Jonas are the origin of the time loop, Adam and Eve, and there is no escape. Then, what? Our 2019 protagonist Jonas is then murdered in front of alternate dimension 2019 Martha. I nearly rage quit when her future self reveals that Martha and Jonas still have an opportunity to be together. There are two timelines in their alternate dimension: one in which Jonas went to their dimension and one in which he remained in the original 2019 dimension from season one. So his death is meaningless, and we go back to the original world’s 2019 where we left off at the end of season one. The creators can reboot this show with as many timelines and dimensions as they want without consequence!

I probably should have rage quit because nothing ever did happen, although I suppose the time loop did end. It’s a clever idea somebody discovering that they are the son of a boy who has just gone missing, yes, but then what? All the show had to do was explain the dead birds and why Mads’ eyes and ears exploded.

If you do watch it, however, German with subtitles is superior to dubbed.

Black Phone 2

Black Phone 2 takes place four years after The Black Phone and features the same characters and child actors, now four years older. This I thought was really cool, both the growth of the actors and the realistic treatment of the characters in the aftermath of their experience with the serial child murderer the Grabber. Naturally, Finney is scarred, self-medicated, and angry from his kidnapping and imprisonment and having to murder his tormentor to escape. The caring and protective relationship he and his sister Gwen have, however, has also grown. When Gwen begins having the same dreams their mother had about a series of murders that took place at Alpine Lake Camp in 1957, Gwen with Finney in tow travel to the Colorado mountain camp to find the missing bodies and uncover a mystery regarding their mother’s suicide.

Watching Black Phone 2 made me want to rewatch The Black Phone. It looked like it was really good, which it was once I revisited it. The first half of Black Phone 2 is also good and has the same realism and subtle supernatural elements as its prequel. Unfortunately, the second half falls into the common trope many horror movies do where the ending gives up on living up to its expectations and devolves into ridiculousness.

Throughout the movie, Gwen is tormented in her dreams by the perpetrator of the 1957 murders, who turns out to be the Grabber. His spirit has returned from death, and he reveals that he can harm and even kill her in her dreams. Eventually, Gwen overpowers him in her sleep by lucid dreaming. Gwen’s found ability to overpower him in her sleep somehow translates to her having this ability to do so in reality where his spirit has been gaining power from the missing bodies of murdered campers. This leads to Gwen being overpowered and undefeatable by the final fight scene, which also features the Grabber on ice skates and imagery suggestive of a horse-drawn Zamboni.

Alpine Lake Camp also has an identity crisis. The camp and counselors are all constructed as if it were going to be a typical summer camp. One of the camp counselors even has a stereotypical Texas drawl. It’s the dead of winter, however, and it’s miserable outside to the point where the camp is canceled due to road conditions. It’s so miserable in fact that it’s hard to believe the camp is located in Colorado. My friends and I kept wanting to say the characters were in Alaska. It wouldn’t have been out of place for the Texan counselor to say, “I’m just a Texas girl in the wild Alaskan mountains of Colorado.”

The Black Phone

I watched The Black Phone back when it came out in 2021. Between then and now, it became buried in my memories among so many other horror movies my friends and I have watched, although I remembered it being really good. When I watched Black Phone 2 recently, my main thought through the whole movie was, “Man, The Black Phone looks like it was really good.” I’ve since revisited it.

It’s a shame that I forgot about it because it is indeed really good. The protagonist, 13-year-old Finney is kidnapped and held in a basement by a psycho, serial child killer known as the Grabber. Finney has subtle psychic abilities that allow him to communicate with the spirits of the Grabber’s previous victims, all of whom give Finney suggestions on how escape the basement. Finney’s younger sister Gwen also has subtle psychic abilities, which she uses to lead the police to Finney’s location.

The film is plausibly supernatural and realistic in a satisfying way. Finney and Gwen’s abilities have limitations and never make them superhuman. The film’s ghosts are subtly horrifying, not screaming, throwing people or objects across the room, or jump-scaring the audience. The Grabber has the sense that his house is haunted, but the spirits never rise up in a ridiculous show of revenge. I appreciate a film that treats ghosts more realistically. Ultimately, Finney escapes the basement and even kills his tormentor by his own cleverness and physical strength in a plausible way. The film’s supernatural elements, while they are key to Finney’s escape, don’t overshadow the story, the characters, or the ending.

Spoilers! Its plot twists are great as well. The Grabber’s brother, who is obsessed with finding the Grabber and even lives in the same house, is briefly entertained as Finney’s savior until his idiocy gets him killed. As another example, Gwen and the police discover a house with a dirt basement unlike the one most of the movie takes place in. This basement contains the Grabber’s buried victims. The audience is briefly led to believe that Finney is dead and buried among these bodies, and the scene of him overpowering the Grabber was a dream too good to be true. This makes it all the more satisfying when Finney walks out of the house across the street, the house with the basement where the Grabber tortured his victims.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Considering the only Nintendo console my family has or I have owned was a Game Boy Color, I have very rarely played Mario Party or Mario Kart games. Having acquired a Nintendo Switch 2, however, one of my friends gave me their Nintendo Switch. This was so that I could play Mario Kart 8 with six of my friends to celebrate another friend’s birthday.

That’s how I learned how many of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth‘s minigames are rip offs of Mario Kart games. That just makes them seem even more pointless to put in a Final Fantasy game. If I wanted to play Mario Kart, I would have just played Mario Kart!

Eldest

Despite killing a major character and disappearing another within the first ten pages, Eldest by Christopher Paolini is much slower than its predecessor Eragon. No more do paragraphs summarize weeks worth of events. The book occasionally, however, forces odd topics into character conversations. I can almost hear Paolini saying, “I need these characters to talk about this thing now.”

Another enhancement is that Eldest has multiple narrators. Eragon and his adopted brother Roran are the primary narrators. Nasuada, the leader of the Varden resistance, also narrates a couple chapters, but it feels random, like she’s a narrator only because Paolini found no other way to introduce important characters and concepts. I also had the feeling that Roran was a narrator to slow the book down and prevent Eragon from plowing through the plot as he had in the first book, but overall, the pair of them swapping chapters as narrators feels fitting and intentional.

I believe Paolini also reveals himself as a fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF when a side character exclaims, “Barges? Barges? We don’t want no stinking barges!” It sounds so out of place and suspiciously similar to a quote from UHF, that it has to be an allusion to, “Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!”

As my final random thought… I’ve read Eldest at least three times now. I’ve always accepted that it made sense for the elves to reject eating meat. It was an admirable lifestyle even. I’ve since been spoiled, however, with keto and lion diet ideology, fitness nutrition, and conservative talking points. How can the elves possibly get enough protein from plants to maintain their inhuman strength? They would need to have industrial-level production of soy and beans. Even Mark Boyle, who recounted his experience living off the land and rejecting modern technology in his autobiographical account The Way Home, conceded that he had to give up his vegetarian diet and eat meat to survive. He would no longer have access to all those canned beans and soy products from distant lands to supplement his vegetables. I suppose the elves have magical abilities that include speeding up and manipulating the growth of plants, but it’s still ridiculous. I’ll save most of my complaints about this point for the next book in the series Brisingr though, where Eragon’s choice to also abstain from eating meat makes even less sense.