C'Mon Get Happy

I watched the first episode of Happy Town.  It's too early to really say much, this episode really was just an introduction of characters, basic premise and setting, but it did a decent job.  MC Gainey is great as Sherriff Conroy, but he's really the only one whose individual performance stands out.  The group of catty widows and their landlady were interesting, emphasizing the oddball characters bit.  At some points, it feels like it's trying too hard for the Twin Peaks by way of Stephen-King-made-for-TV-mini-series tone, but we'll see how it turns out.

No Matter How...

The new Coheed and Cambria album, Year of the Black Rainbow has grown on me considerably over the past couple weeks, particularly the song "Far". Below is an acoustic version that I think is even better than the album track -- albeit the video and audio is kind of poor, cell phone recording likely.

We've got armadillos in our trousers. It's really quite frightening.

A little while ago I picked up Avantasia's two new discs, The Wicked Symphony and Angel of Babylon. I'm an uabashed fan of what you could call over-the-top, pretentious metal, and have a certain fondness for projects like Tobias Sammet's Avantasia and Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Ayreon. Due to the cheese and power metal aspect of Avantasia, I've not been able to get past track five, "Blizzard on a Broken Mirror", from the first disc, but I'll probably eventually put the two discs on as background noise while I'm cleaning or something and let it diffuse.

I do, however, quite like the first single, "Dying for an Angel", which has to feature the biggest, catchiest butt rock chorus this side of 1980's Bon Jovi. Check out the video above. Turn it up to eleven.

You Won't Know

After finally catching the latest episode of Stargate Universe, "Divided", I must say I'm really enjoying this show. I was never a fan of SG1 or Atlantis, both shows just seemed to focus more on the humour and seemed to lose the plot half the time, that I just tended to leave them alone. This placement in that universe, however, has enthralled me since the beginning. It's still early in the series development, but the characters seem more engaging, the writers are actually contributing to regularised serial story, and although the overaching plot seems borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager and -- along with its shooting style -- Battlestar Galactica, it seems like something different.

I think it could partially just be the outstanding performances from all of the actors, specifically Robert Carlyle, Louis Ferreira and David Blue, maybe it's just because Blue's character of Eli Wallace just lands so close to home, maybe it's Elyse Levesque spending most of the season in yoga pants, or maybe it's because the rest of the rabid Stargate fans seem to hate it, but I'm quite enjoying this.

Birds flying high...

The Muse concert last night at the Pacific Coliseum was quite good. I've been impressed with their albums for quite some time, but they are indeed better live. I was slightly disappointed that they didn't play "MK Ultra", but it was more or less made up by playing "Map of the Problematique" and causing me to realise just how good is Dom Howard a drummer.