No Escape AFK Blog #1: “The Artful Escape” and my desire for Maximalist Music That Doesn’t Suck

I wrote a review of the game The Artful Escape this week, and I was pretty harsh on it. Part of the reason I didn’t end up liking it was the music, which went back and forth between orchestral and arena rock-esque most of the time. The weird thing is, I’m by no means opposed to maximalism in music — I just want it to be good.

I grew up listening primarily to punk, alternative and hardcore, though before I could be said to have an ounce of taste I also listened to your standard classic hard rock fare — AC-DC, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath — quite a bit. (I like was 12 years old or so, in my defense.) I never got into psych rock, and I was never someone who dreamed of seeing Van Halen or Twisted Sister or any other glam rock/arena rock band live.

And when you’re listening to punk, “loud and fast” have to play by certain rules: the drums have to be played in a certain fashion at a certain tempo, the guitar melodies should be utilitarian and sparse and in theory easy for anyone else to play, the bass should follow the guitar, etc. Metal, by comparison, does stuff differently. I was never a metalhead.

There are other common misconceptions about punk and hardcore, like how it was primarily a Western affair —“Only bands in Europe and North America play punk” is both an easily disproven, boldface and pervasive lie. As a global phenomenon punk rock has taken on so many interesting forms, from the Brazilian metallic hardcore of Olho Seco to the angular post-punk-ish wildness of TsuShiMaMiRe and the aggressive surf rock of Otoboke Beaver in Japan to the Palestinian-Egyptian rap/punk fusion of Jaffa Phonix. To claim that punk is only for kids in the West is just wild.

Combing through punk became a massive part of my life as a teenager, to the point where I was spending large chunks of my leisure time tracking down and downloading ripped copies of classic punk and hardcore jams. At one point I had over 30,000 songs on a massive hard drive I’d carry around to friends’ houses just in case they wanted to listen to the stuff I’d compiled. Maximum Rocknroll, a long-standing punk zine (one of the best to ever do it imo) became a vital resource for me, as it just inherently had better access to more international stuff.

One album and band I became fixated on was Paintbox, and their 2009 double-LP, Trip, Trance & Travelling. Paintbox was a Japanese hardcore band active from the mid-1990s until the guitarist, Chelsea’s death in 2007. Trip, Trance & Travelling was weird for a hardcore album. The heavy distortion, fast tempo and rough, growling shouted vocals are all there, but so is a bassline that frequently walks up and down the fretboard, and so are all these metallic/arena rock-esque guitar solos, and so is this wild horn section, and why does it all sound so dreamlike?

Paintbox was my entry into the mysterious world of Burning Spirits hardcore, named after a particular tour featuring many Burning Spirits bands but now encompassing a whole bestiary of wild and innovative sounds from bands all over Japan. Its analog in the US might be Youth Crew, if Youth Crew ever went full arena rock for even like a second, or like crust punk with a penchant for theatrics. Really, Paintbox in particular reminds me the most of the Canadian band Fucked Up, who also chose to combine the sonic violence of hardcore with more explicitly psychedelic sounds and motifs, especially on an album like The Chemistry of Common Life.

Of course maximalism doesn’t need to indulge in psychedelia. Sometimes it can indulge in doom, and that’s where a lot of my favorite crust bands have excelled over the years. I think about albums like the Can We Call This Life EP from Tragedy:

Anyway, I think what I was looking for in The Artful Escape was a soundtrack that didn’t sound like a lifeless imitator of the kind of music I legitimately enjoy. While that’s entirely subjective — you might find something you like in that game, after all — it was still enough of a dealbreaker for me specifically that it colored how I wrote about the game, even two weeks later.

Music: the only place where people hold onto opinions harder than video games.