Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

So, I finally got around to listening to the first of Noel Gallaghers solo albums. I have to say that whilst I was excited to see what he’d do outside of the Oasis framework, I was also a little bit scared. Scared because the man has been an idol of mine for over a decade, scared because it was his music that drew me into the world of music that I love so much today and influenced me in a lot of ways. And scared because it’d be terribly easy for him to slip into the rut of just pumping out Oasis songs without Oasis.

As it turns out, I need not have worried. I really like the album! OK, I’ll admit that it’s not exactly ground-breaking – it’s still heavily influenced by the later years of the Beatles, and let’s face it, Noel Gallagher was never going to release a grind-core album, but it’s different enough that you don’t think you’re listening to a new Oasis album.

In fact it’s interesting, listening to the last Oasis album, High Flying Birds, and the Beady Eye album (Beady Eye is the band formed by Liam Gallagher and the rest of Oasis after the split). You can tell exactly who was responsible for what songs on the last album after listening to the two independent ones. You can spot the Noel tracks because of similarities between them, and you can spot the Liam/rest of the band tracks because the Beady Eye album could have been lifted straight from a later Oasis record!

In short, if you’re a fan of Noel’s Oasis B-sides and the Noel-sung tracks on the later albums, you won’t be dissapointed here. It’s a good first effort by the Master of Britpop, and I hope he continues to diversify on the following records.

Review: EA Sports Active 2 (Xbox 360 Kinect)

Today I’d like to do something a little different from my usual rambling nonsensical blog posts. I’d like to review a computer game.

As some of you may recall, a few months back I bought the Kinect add-on for my Xbox 360. I also bought EA Sports latest fitness game Active 2. I’ve been using it four or five days a week since I got it, following the exercise routine it’s mapped out for me. It offers two routines, each with three differing levels of difficulty. First off I did the three week “Cardio Kick Start” routine, which is designed to get your body used to regularly exercising (they clearly know this game is going to be purchased by lazy gits like me!), and to begin building the muscles that will be worked and developed in the later full cardio routine.

I’m now two weeks into the full cardio routine – which focuses on building and strengthening muscle, flexibility, and cardio vascular improvement – and I have to confess, I’m impressed with the results! I’ve not only lost weight, but I feel healthier (things that usually left me panting now barely leave me breathing heavily), I have more energy, there’s been a subtle but noticeable change to certain areas of my body, and I can squeeze into clothes that a month ago I couldn’t even do up!

All this has been achieved without changing my diet (I still eat crap most of the time), without expensive gym membership, or running in the rain/snow/wind, etc. This has all been done in my living room, on my Xbox gaming console. So as far as the workouts are concerned, I’m chuffed. They’re great. When they work.

You see now we come to the not-so-great part. The programming behind Active 2’s use of the Kinect sensor is awful. We’ve got three other Kinect games at the moment (Kinect Adventures, Zumba Nation, and Dance Central), and I’ve had hands-on time with a couple of others (including competitor Ubisoft’s Your Shape), and none of them have had any problems detecting me, or anyone else in the Rooncave. At one point there were seven of us crammed into my tiny living room, playing Kinect, and it had no problems. Active 2 however has a lot of problems.

First off, sit-ups, or any of the other floor-based exercises are pretty much useless. You’ll spend two minutes spinning around on the floor to find a position in which the sensor will actually detect you properly and realise you are completing the exercises. Then when you stand up for the next exercise, it will be unable to find you, and so will ask you to re-log in. So you go through the thirty second process (for the third or fourth time) to log back in, and resume your workout. Then – usually mid-way through an exercise – it will suddenly go to the pause menu, without any commands from you to do so. During last nights workout it did this to me nine times in thirty minutes. At first, you just shrug it off, but after five weeks of it doing the same damn thing and forcing you to go scrabbling for the controller mid way through a race or a routine, it begins to become a serious irritant.

There also appears to be a minor lag in the response times with some of the activities (most noticeably on the Dodgeball, and the punch bag) which can result in some irritating failures to meet targets

Overall, it’s a good game – provided you stick to it and push yourself in the workouts, it will most likely improve your physical well being, and the heart rate monitor which wirelessly connects to your console and allows the game to track your heart rate and work out how many calories you’re burning, is very clever . However EA desperately need to release a patch to address the issues within the game – issues which none of the other Kinect games we’ve played seem to have. 7/10

TTFN

 

Rooney Loves: Atonement.

Well here we go, my first crack at anything even vaguely resembling a book review. Be gentle with me, it’s my first time… 😉

Atonement paperback cover art

Anywho, I realise that I’m a little behind the times with this, since everyone else in the world finished talking about Atonement about six months ago, after the hubbub from the film release died out (starring the simply gorgeous Keira Knightley), but I didn’t see the film as I couldn’t convince anyone to go and see it with me, and I couldn’t/can’t afford the DVD. However, this didn’t turn out to be the annoyance I had assumed, as my darling girlfriend got her hands on a couple of free copies of the book, and very graciously gave one to me, since she knows what a bookworm I am. After hearing from some of my more literary friends that the book was better than the film, I was eager to start on this unassuming paperback. However, I had to finish at least one of the books I had already started, so my dive into this much vaunted novel was delayed.

But at last, about a month ago, I settled down to start reading it. To say I was disappointed would perhaps be an understatement. I think that after reading Robert Jordan and Dan Abnett, Ian MckEwan’s work seemed somewhat dull and lacklustre. I was – to be brutally honest – bored, for the first third of the book. There were brief highlights – Robbie’s sections were interesting, as were Cecilias – but the majority of it bored me. A couple of hundred pages more-or-less dedicated to the musings and emotions of a self-important child did little to enamour me to this supposedly outstanding novel. But I persevered. And I was rewarded.

From the moment of the twins dissapearence, things brighten up. Gone are the mundane, pointless musings of the child. Things begin to happen; tensions are mounting, misunderstandings are collossal, and a sinister menace builds behind it all, only glimpsed in veiled hints, suffusing the events on the page with a dark potentiality. From then on, the book is amazing.

The depiction of France during the retreat to Dunkirk is staggering in it’s depth of detail and realism, and it’s emotional exploration of those involved – the resignation of many of the French civilians, to the anger felt towards the RAF by the fleeing British troops. The narratove, from Robbie’s POV gives you some sense of what it must ave been like in those dark days, when a German victory seemed unstoppable and our shattered armies dragged themselves back to the sea to return home and lick their wounds. Again there is a mounting sense of menace behind it all – not the sinister tension that builds before the accusation and Robbie’s arrest, but a more general, more oppressive feel behind the words; the army is broken, the enemy is coming, and we can’t stop them. This time there is no release for this menace written down. Before Robbie can be rescued, the, the narrative of his section ends.

Then once again we find ourselves behind the eyes of Briony Tallis, the child that dominated the opening of the book. But this time there is a change. No longer is she the child whiling away the readers attention with idle speculation and insubstantialities. Now we see her adapting to her chosen atonement, and again the detail given to her new life as a trainee Nurse is quite staggering. You find yourself empathising with her, sharing her sense of monotonous duty and routine. And you feel yourself grow as you watch her grow after the retreat from Dunkirk begins to arrive on our shores, and through her visit to the wedding or Lola and Paul Marshall, and her arrival at Cecilia’s accomodation.

Her final confrontation with Robbie seems almost anticlimactic, until you realise that the way it is written is almost almost certainly the way things would have resolved themselves in that particular situation, at that time, with those people, those unique characters, involved. The result seems somehow weak, because it cannot compare to the moments of sureality experienced on the road to Dunkirk, or in the throes of lust, or on the wards of a hospital hit with the first wave of war-wounded. But its normality, it’s humble example of human beings coming face to face in the flesh after confronting one another so often in their heads is what gives the scene its power. There’s no background menace here. No looming threat. All those things are in the past. There, in that small room, in that one scene, all that has happened, all that has been endured, all the threats, the anger, the pain… it all comes down to three human beings talking in a room. The way it usually does in reality. To me, that scene in the bedsit is masterful, and the highlight of the novel.

The final section of the book… well, to be honest I can’t decide whether I love or hate it. The twist that is so casually slipped into the closing paragraphs of the novel is both shatteringly powerful, and yet somehow necessary. And it leaves the reader with an almost hollow sensation, as the assurance that the three met again and almost resolved their differences, that Robbie and Cecilia saw one another and fulfilled their love once before the end is torn away, so casually. And once again, it is reality. The almost fairytale ending is revealed as Briony’s creation, a falsified ending for her novel to give the readers of her own book a sense of completion, of assurance in the good balance of the universe as they close the book. An assurance that we are lft without, as the realisation dawns that they both died, casualties of the war, months and hundreds of miles apart, having never seen one another again, and never being able to confront Briony.

I’m not sure how much of what I just wrote made sense, and I know that there’s a few spoilers in there (though I tried to keep it all vague enough that only those who’ve read the book would understand), but that’s my take on it! A bloody good book, once it gets going.

Now, I’m going to publish this before my laptop crashes again and deletes everything i just wrote!

TTFN