The Cauldron

Issue date: 12/1/08 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Flobots

Elbow

Dark Knight

Braid

Fallout 3

As I sit at my desk, piles of CDs, DVDs, press releases, publicity shots, and broken headphones surrounding me, two things become immediately evident: firstly, that I need to clean my desk, and secondly, 2008 has been a busy year.

So as we at The Cauldron wave goodbye to 2008, and I attempt to find my way through this past year's releases, that, well… perhaps we ought attempt to help you, our intelligent and well-loved reader to do the same.

However, this is CSU - we're Vikings. No ordinary awards countdown would do - so rather than rank our entries in some arbitrary order, we recognize the best entries for what it was that made them stand out, and offer up our top choice for the medium. Obviously, opinions will differ, and we encourage you to send your hate-mail constructive criticism to us at cauldroneditors@hotmail.com.

Well then - tongue planted as firmly in cheek as we can muster, The Cauldron is proud to present the first ever Midgard Awards - the very best from this Viking Planet.

Music
(With input from intrepid music journalist, Alexes "Texas" Spencer)

Best Rap Album with Pizzicato Strings, trumpet, and overblown political stances: Flobots - Fight With Tools.

Although technically released in October of 2007, this record was bloody well impossible to find until the 'bots won a local radio station contest, and consequently had the single "Handlebars" find its way into national radio around April 2008, so we're counting it as eligible. From start to finish, there's a sardonic wit, splashes of light-hearted humor, and a fiery, driving passion that's been sorely needed in the genre since the dissolution of Rage Against The Machine in 2000. Additionally, the compositional chops being flexed by this band make as compelling a record as Danger Mouse, Dre, or anybody else has mustered. Flo-tastic.

Honorable mentions: DJ Green Lantern w/ Immortal Technique - 3rd World, The Roots - Rising Down.

Best totally unexpected move that somehow didn't suck: Say Hi - The Wishes and the Glitch.

Ok. Many of you have never heard of Eric Elbogen, or this band. Having said that, for an act that had built up a die-hard following of loyal hipsters, and whose last release was an electro-pop record entirely about Vampires to shorten its name (from "Say Hi To Your Mom"), let go of all the current band members, move to Seattle, and write a bunch of heartfelt songs on a self-built computer is hardly the sort of thing one's agents might recommend. But Wishes is an amazingly delicate record - earnest without whining, intricate without sounding like it, and powerful without shouting. An absolute gem.

Honorable mentions: Kanye West - 808 and Heartbreak, Jakob Dylan - Seeing Things, Norma Jean - The Anti-Mother, NIN - The Slip, REM - Accelerate.

And the 2008 Midgard award for best album goes to... Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid.

Avid readers will remember Kid from the reoccurring column, Now Hear This. For those who missed it, allow us to summarize: The Seldom Seen Kid is a breathtaking journey through a gorgeous and painstakingly crafted watercolor canvas of music. Epic, stirring, and beautiful, Kid takes the best of bands like U2 and Coldplay, and ditches all the pretension, commercialism, and ego-tripping, simply delivering a masterpiece.

Honorable mentions: TV on the Radio - Dear Science, Underoath - Lost in the sound of separation, MGMT - Oracular Spectacular, Emery - While Broken Hearts Prevail, Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend.

Film
(With input from studious Biology Major, J.A. Vincenty)

Best case for why being the good guy is no fun at all: The Dark Knight

Congratulations, Bruce Wayne - your love interest left you, died, and you bet everything on a losing horse. Oh, and every cop in the city is after you. Man, this was totally the best thing you could have done with a couple hundred billion dollars.

There's little left to be said about Nolan and Bale's somber noir-ish take on Gotham, other than that you should see it. Repeatedly.

Honorable mentions: Milk, Cloverfield.

Best case for why being the good guy might be worth it anyway: The Forbidden Kingdom

Sure, people may have been expecting something completely different when they saw that Jet Li and Jackie Chan were collaborating - certainly not a lighthearted fable that serves as a prologue for one of the great classical folk tales of Chinese literature - but if viewed for what it is, that is to say, equal parts Neverending Story and Sun Wukong's journey to the west - there's a quaint coming of age story that will warm the coldest of hearts. A fairytale with roundhouses.

Honorable mentions: Iron Man, Pineapple Express, Quantum of Solace.

And the 2008 Midgard award for best film goes to... Wall-E

Sure, this is a pretty standard underdog story dressed up with robots - but I've always been a firm believer that if it can be done in space, it will be better done in space. Or it could be the fact that the animation gurus at Pixar communicated so much through body (er, chassis) language, that viewers cannot help but fall in love with the titular hero, and his girlbot Eve. Absolutely charming.

Honorable mentions: Role Models, Burn Before Reading, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Video Games
Most pretentious game that still turned out pretty good: Braid.

A downloadable game for the Xbox 360, Braid is full of tongue-in-cheek nods to Mario, clever uses of time manipulation, and gorgeous watercolor-inspired visuals, and a heart-wrenching soundtrack. It's also buried in heavy-handed, I-am-smarter-thanyou metaphor, and incessant winking at how bloody clever designer Jonathan Blow is. But despite - or perhaps, because of all these, Braid is a wonderfully quaint experience - and anything that blends time travel, jigsaw puzzles, feral demon kittens and J. Robert Oppenheimer is worth your fifteen bucks.

Honorable mentions: Fable 2, (X360) The World Ends With You, (DS) The Pit, (X360) Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)

Best Reason to not start a real band: Rock Band 2

Let's face it: being in a real band is a ton of work. But being in a Rock Band Rock band is a ton of fun - and can even teach you how to play the drums. Get some friends together, and take air guitar to the next logical level on pretty much any console in existence.

Honorable mentions: Guitar Hero III (Various), Audiosurf (PC), Singstar 1&2 (PS3)

And the 2008 Midgard award for best game goes to... Fallout 3

The original two Fallout games are all-time classics. Their ability to blend gallows humor with an utterly bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, serious moral conundrums, and the option to proceed through the story in any number of ways set the stage for the modern age of western RPG's - games like Knights of the Old Republic, the Elder Scrolls series, Mass Effect, Fable, and so on. Fitting then, that things have come full circle with Bethseda Softworks' Fallout 3 (available on PC, X360, and PS3.) Blending the values of the original with the Oblivion-esque open world gameplay it inspired, this vision of a post-nuclear Washington D.C. is equal parts haunting, disturbing, engaging and melancholic. But it's always compelling.

Honorable mentions: LittleBigPlanet (PS3), Grand Theft Auto IV (Various), Sins of a Solar Empire (PC), Gears of War 2 (X360)

And that's going to wrap it up for this year - as always, feel free to tell us how wrong we are at cauldroneditors@ hotmail.com, or comment on the online article. Enjoy the rest of the year, and we'll be back with more snarky coverage in January.

Love,
'Killstring' and The Cauldron A&E Staff.

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