Robot Claw – Page 509 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Review: Ceromonies (Fields Of The Nephilim)

July 5, 2012

The new Fields Of The Nephilim album is entitled ‘Ceromonies‘. It’s a double live album, with the songs recorded during gigs live in London back in July 2008. The package also contains a DVD containing some of the songs, but since the format is PAL I am unable to view it (without changing the region on my Mac…)

Each of the two CDs has it’s own name, ‘Ad Motem’ and ‘Ad Vitam’. The arrangement of songs onto each of the two CDs doesn’t seem to follow any specific criteria, and the full track listing covers the entire history of the band (original album the song was from in brackets):
– Trees Come Down, Harmonica Man, Preacher Man (‘Dawnrazor‘)
– Moonchild, Celebrate (‘The Nephilim‘)
– Wail Of Sumer, And There Will Your Heart Be Also, Psychonaut (‘Elizium‘)
– Shine, Penetration, Zoon (Wakeworld) (‘Zoon‘)
– From The Fire (‘Fallen‘)
– Shroud, Straight To The Light, Xiberia, Requiem, Mourning Sun (‘Mourning Sun‘)

Live albums are tricky things. Often released solely to extract a few extra dollars from fans between studio albums, more often than not they are listened to once or twice and shelved. Some bands are exceptions to this – I personally find Rammstein‘s live albums to be magnificent and almost better than the studio work – and the difference seems to be how creatively the band interprets their own music. Furthermore, live performances have a life that is not easily captured in a recording. I can still vividly remember certain things about many of the live performances attended more than I can remember exactly how I felt about the way the band played their songs that night.

Fields Of The Nephilim is one of those bands that, for me, evokes a Pavlovian reaction when I listen to their songs. It’s impossible for me not to think about my last year of high school when I hear Psychonaut, or recollect vividly the days of Newcastle University, The Hanged Man concerts and late nights out with friends when hearing most anything from Earth Inferno. Indeed, were it not for FoTN, I may never have met KLS! This band was the soundtrack for a very important part of my life, and always will be.

So listening to any Nephilim album is, for me, a good thing (well, except perhaps for the ‘official bootleg’ that was Fallen). That said, I’m sad to say Ceromonies may count itself amongst the ‘shelfwarmers’ as far as live albums are concerned.

The performances are great (the above video is from the included DVD), the packaging is great, Carl’s voice is (mostly) great, the recording quality is great and the songs are (of course) great. But the arrangements are where things get a bit iffy, and the selection of material is for me, disappointing.

Even though three years had passed since the release of Mourning Sun, the tour from which this album was recorded was to support the album so it’s not surprising that about a third of the songs are from that album. However, since I prefer the earlier (pre ‘Nefilim’) material, I would have liked more from that era. Song choice aside, the second disappointment of the album is how similar to the studio versions the songs sound. It’s been 20 years (in some cases) since these songs were first released, but some of these performances could almost be the studio versions with a bit of crowd noise added. And where a song differs from the album, it’s the same difference as it was two decades ago. One such example is Trees Come Down, which – will powerful and effective on Ceromonies – is a pale imitation of the version recorded in 1989 and immortalized on the Forever and Ever live bootleg:

And therein lies the biggest problem with Ceromonies. During their lifetime, this band has released almost as much live material as studio albums. So one would imagine another should not be forthcoming unless it offered something new. Ceromonies does not; it’s not as good as the 1991 live album Earth Inferno and not as good as either of the two live DVDs Forever Remain (1988) and Visionary Heads (1991). Yes it has new material, but the songs are too similar to the album tracks and (for me) of lesser quality (the superb ‘Mourning Sun’ excepted) compared to older works. More importantly, Fields Of The Nephilim is a widely bootlegged band, and even their most famous concert from the Town and Country club back in 1989 was bootlegged and released (as the very, very, VERY good live album ‘Forever And Ever’). Ceromonies therefore isn’t even as good as a live bootleg!

That said, I’m glad I got this release. Not only as a collector, but since it inspired me to dig out the old albums and listen to them again for the first time in at least a year. While Ceromonies may have been ultimately disappointing, it’s only because Fields Of The Nephilim as a band is so very, very good. I’m glad this new CD inspired me to once again realize just how good 🙂

Samurai Scorpion

July 4, 2012

Remember Mega Mantis? Well he now has a friend:

Once again, this kit was a gift from my brother. I have the same high praise for the design, the instructions and the quality of the pieces. Even better: this guy was easier to assemble than the mantis!

While there were many pieces, some of which required bending, everything went together with ease.

Doesn’t he look like a water scorpion without his tail?

He took me about an hour to assemble, using just the tool in the box and (once only) a pair of tweezers. Here he is complete:

And here’s the fated battle that everyone knew would happen one day…

Machine Brain

July 1, 2012

Remember those commander MTG decks I made before my last Australia trip? If not, they are described here. Note the last comment, where I describe how I replaced the monogreen deck with a Green/Black tokens deck. In Australia the six decks were played in 3 or 4 player games an average of 10 times each. The results (wins-losses) were as follows:

– Darien, King of Kjeldor (W soldiers): 6-3
– Mayael The Anima (RGW fatties): 6-5
– Skullbriar, The Walking Grave (GB tokens): 6-5
– Olivia Voldaren (RB vampires): 5-4
– Grand Arbiter Augustine IV (UW control): 4-5
– Wrexial, The Risen Deep (UB mill): 2-7

Yep, Wrexial bombed hard! The other decks, as you can see, were very closely matched. I believe Grand Arbiter was a bit stronger than it’s wins suggest, but tended to be a bigger target in the multiplayer games so ended up losing more than it won.

I have another trip coming up in about a month, and the decks are coming with me! I’ve made slight adjustments to five of them to include cards released since last December, and I scrapped Wrexial entirely in favour of a brand new deck. This was done not because it was the weakest, but because in 2-player games (which I will be playing in NM and CA) I reckon it would just be tedious to play against.

So the question arose, what would the new deck be?

The above card is from one of the recently released new Planechase 2012 decks. His particular deck is the strongest of the four (at least in my playtesting), and focuses on enchantments. I greatly enjoyed the deck, since I like enchantment cards and they are often underutilized. My first idea for a new deck would use this guy as commander, and include all and every enchantment boosting card I could find in white and green. It would have been a slightly defensive deck, heavy on lifegain, that relied on building up 2 or 3 creatures to shockingly powerful levels before finishing the game in as few attacks (ideally, only one!) as possible. I still think it’s a good idea, and that it may have been well balanced against the other five decks, but after some brainstorming realized I couldn’t actually build the deck without heavily changing some of the other five (specifically the Skullbriar and Augustine IV decks). So I scrapped this idea, or rather put it on the back burner for a while.

So… what next?

I wanted something I could build without cannibalizing the other decks. Furthermore, I wanted something quite different from them as well. With Wrexial gone I was left with only one blue deck, so ideally the new deck would use blue, and hopefully avoid the other colours since each were represented twice in other decks. Also – and this was a big one – I wanted to feature artifacts since they hadn’t been a large component of any of the other five decks.

A few minutes of research led to me finding this guy, and as soon as I saw him I knew I had my new commander:

He’s one of those cards that you occasionally find with an ability that just seems too good to be true. There are any number of game-winning artifact cards that could be pulled from the deck right into play, and all I needed to do this was an artifact creature already in play. Here’s an obvious combo:

Use the turbine to create Myr tokens, which can then be sacrificed using Arcum to put things like the Forge into play. This could happen very quickly given a perfect hand. For instance:

Turn 1: Seat Of The Synod, Sol Ring, Mox Opal, Palladium Myr
Turn 2: Arcum
Turn 3: Myr Turbine, sac token to put Forge into play

And that scenario even has some flexibility!

But a commander deck contains 100 cards, and this combo requires some sort of artifact creature or token generator to start. Happily, being blue there are any number of ways (Treasure Mage, Fabricate) to get specific cards into your hand (the deck contains other token generators aside from the Turbine) or to speed up card draw entirely. So what about the rest of the deck? What is the ‘gimmick’ to the remainder of the cards?

Here’s a hint:

Yep, it’s a ‘charge counter’ deck! Over the years I had coincidentally amassed almost every good charge counter card in existence, and it was finally time to collect them all into a deck. So about 20% of the entire deck is cards that utilize or manipulate charge counters, often to hilarious results:

So the deck is a control-based artifact deck (about 90% of the non land cards are artifacts) that utilize Arcum Dagsson’s ability to ‘tutor’ up broken cards to make the player invulnerable while he bases a win around fun-to-play charge counter cards. I’ve done some test deals to make sure it seems to work in principle, but it should be fun to see how it actually works against another one of the (mostly successful) other five decks 🙂