The blog is late this week. But I have a good excuse, I think. I had a real genuine nightmare of a week. My job moved me to a new role in a new location with very little notice, without asking me if I actually wanted a new role in a new location. The new role was as a valet in a parking garage. I managed to scratch the first car I drove. This was exactly what I was worried would happen, which is why I never asked to be a valet. I appealed to my boss, but when it became clear that they were not going to move me back out of this new position, I quit.
So, I have three work days left before I face unemployment again. I actually feel pretty good about it, because that job sucked a whole lot, even before they shoved me into valet out of nowhere. But I also got sick. Just a cold, but man, when it rains it pours. So last night I was supposed to finish writing this but ended up reading the last 100 pages of Sally Rooney’s “Intermezzo” instead. Boy, that thing is on “Hamlet’s” level in terms of providing catharsis for dead parent havers. Thank you, Sally Rooney!
Anyway, this week I’ve got some rambling about turn based games and why it’s cool that Baseball sort of is one, and a review of the new Dry Cleaning album. Enjoy.
Y'know what two games are ancient and still beloved? Chess and Go. Y'know what two games are turn based? Chess and Go.
I want to briefly consider this fact, and use it to defend both the combat systems of classic JRPGs and the slowness of Baseball. Consider this a soft launch of a segment of this weekly blog devoted to video games. A segment on video games has been a long time coming, since they occupy the number four spot on the hierarchy of how often I think about things (music and Baseball are two and six, respectively).
Baseball is slow. This is the number one thing non-Baseball likers tend to complain about. It's even something some people who are Baseball likers tend to complain about. Consider "Duffless," the episode of the Simpsons where Homer gives up beer for a month. While spectating a Baseball game sober he says "I never realized how boring this game is." And this is Baseball for a lot of people, I think. An excuse to socialize, get drunk, and hang out, despite the fact that the actual game is a little boring.
Classic role playing games engender similar complaints, sometimes even from the people making them. Think of all the JRPG styled games made by western developers that promise to "make the combat exciting" through the addition of mini games, rhythm components, bullet hell segments, and other such distracting tchatchkes. Even the developers of the "Final Fantasy" series have been tacitly admitting to finding JRPG combat boring through their steady infusion of action elements into the gameplay starting with "Final Fantasy XII" and culminating in the admittedly excellent combat system of "Final Fantasy VII: Remake" (mea culpa: i haven't played "Final Fantasy XVI." It very well may have culminated there).
This desire for more action, for more speed, is understandable, to a degree. Baseball and classic RPG combat are both turn based, and any turn based system necessarily involves waiting. Maybe even a lot of waiting. Maybe something like 50% of the game spent waiting.
But, well, waiting is good. Time spent waiting, in a well designed game, is time spent thinking. Chess and Go are the ur examples of this concept: you spend your opponent's turn planning your next turn. The advanced player spends their opponent's turn planning their next several turns. This sort of thinking involves a good deal of anticipation, and reaction. Thinking of what your opponent might do, then thinking about how best to respond to what they end up doing.
This is what good RPG combat is all about. In a difficult fight, when it isn't your turn you're doing complicated guess-math about damage and hit point totals, engaging in complicated risk/reward scenarios about whether you should spend a turn healing or take another swing. In easier fights, when it isn't your turn you think about how best to ration your resources through the next stretch of the game, about how you'll apply the resources gained from the fight to your character progression, or at the very least about the game's ambiance and narrative.
Baseball takes this concept and dramatizes it for an audience. The game is played in turns on both the macro and micro levels. On the macro level, the two teams take turns batting and playing defense. As a spectator, waiting for your team's turn on offense is thrilling. The other team takes swings, trying to do damage. You sit there hoping that your guys can hold out, that they can get through to their turn unscathed. Especially in a close game, this is wonderful tension.
On the micro level, the pitcher and batter are essentially engaged in turn based combat. The pitcher throws, the batter responds. Once you as the spectator tune into this dynamic, the real joy of watching Baseball is unlocked. Both the pitcher and the batter are constantly thinking, making decisions, and trying to anticipate one another. The pitcher is choosing what pitch to throw, the batter is trying to figure out what pitch to expect. This dynamic gets more and more exciting as the at-bat progresses, because the batter is getting more and more information. As you watch a tenacious hitter foul off pitch after pitch, the notion that they're eventually going to land a real hit starts to feel all but certain, because they're figuring the pitcher out.
The turn based nature of Baseball gives you time as a viewer to tease out all of these intricacies. Basketball and Hockey aren't really any less complicated to play, but they don't give the spectator time to ponder every miniscule decision in the same way the players do. Baseball does.
Slower, turn based games invite you to think about them more readily than fast games do. This is great. It's what gives Chess and Go their timeless, erudite appeal, it's what makes classic style role playing games compelling, and it's what makes Baseball so fun to watch.
Dry Cleaning is a pretty bizarre band. I mean that as a compliment, of course. These guys are a group of incredibly talented musicians who make super groovy music, with a vocalist who is clearly a poet first doing usually spoken word stuff. It’s a formula that makes for an obtuse, sort of ethereal sound that is still eminently listenable and often dance-friendly.
Their new album, “Secret Love,” is a departure in two ways: first of all, vocalist Florence Shaw sings more. Second, they brought in a new producer and worked with session musicians this time around, giving the album a much fuller sound, with a more varied musical palette. It is, to me, the best they’ve ever sounded.
I’ve been listening to this album obsessively this week, to the point where I am struggling to actually even begin thinking about how to talk about it. There’s so much to it. Each of these songs is its own little world, with a groove I want to listen to on loop for hours and lyrics that either tell concise, weird little stories, or paint strange and abstract mind-spaces in often very funny brush strokes. I could fall down a ten thousand word rabbit hole describing each song in detail and explaining why I think they’re each brilliant.
I’ll use just one song as an example. “My Soul/Half Pint” isn’t even my favourite song on the album, but it’s an easy one to dissect for these purposes. The first thing I want to point to is how the bassline and main guitar riff interact. The bassline is pretty straightforward, it walks around the chord changes, bouncing around the root notes with enough swing to make you want to move. It is locked in perfectly with the drums, which are also simple and groovy. When the guitar comes in, it spices things up. The first half of the main guitar riff moves faster than the bass, with rapid strumming slipping in and out between the steady pulse of the rest of the groove. Then in the second half it syncs up with the bass almost completely. This makes for a wonderful push and pull, the guitar sliding back and forth on top of the main groove, which is held down perfectly by the drums and bass. As the song continues the guitar gets more scattered and noodly, which works because the drums and bass are so tight.
On top of all of this, we get Florence Shaw delivering lyrics about a narrator who loves to organize her things, but hates cleaning because she finds it demeaning. It’s presented as an intense personal struggle for this narrator: her reticence to clean is fucking up her life, but she resents cleaning so much because of patriarchal gender norms. The mundanity of the narrator’s problem juxtaposed with the social critique that comes out of it is funny when delivered in Shaw’s deadpan style. She starts with “I don’t like to clean. I find cleaning demeaning” and ends up with “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like 500 years,” extrapolating what comes across as personal laziness or neuroticism out to broad social critique in a way that is both funny and sort of profound. The narrator is not wrong in her stance on domestic labour and patriarchy, even if her distaste for cleaning is first and foremost a personal thing. The way she performs it is great, too, softly sung with a flat affect. Shaw is clearly not a trained singer, but this lends her voice a casual, conversational sound that perfectly fits her writing style.
The first five songs on the album all more or less work with this formula. They all have groovy, tightly performed instrumentation, with lyrics that tell stories from the perspective of neurotic narrators that are equal parts funny, absurd, and genuinely profound. Then, in the second half of the album, things change a bit. “Blood,” “Evil Evil Idiot,” and “Rocks” get a little darker sounding. “Blood” has an anxious, pulsating groove, “Evil Evil Idiot” a lumbering, heavy one, and “Rocks” leans heavy into an alternative rock sound, sort of landing in late 80s Sonic Youth territory. The two songs that follow are sort of a cooldown, and then the closer, “Joy,” brings back the sound of the first half, though with a higher tempo and more energy. This is an album sequencing masterclass. You can feel a narrative arc to these songs based on the music alone. This is why I’ve been listening to this album over and over all week. It just flows so smoothly, and develops in such a satisfying way.
That’s pretty much the case for this album being great, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few stray details. “Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)” has one of my favourite guitar riffs maybe ever. “Evil Evil Idiot’s” lyrics are from the perspective of an online influencer who believes you should eat burnt food and avoid any and all plastic packaging; it’s a pretty apt portrayal of stupid wellness culture, and it also makes me laugh every time. The bassline to “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit” gets stuck in my head for entire days at a time. The layered, call and response vocal hooks at the end of “The Cute Things” are just wonderful. And “Joy” is an absolutely perfect closing track.
So, this is my favourite Dry Cleaning album, and I will be absolutely shocked if it doesn’t end up in my top 10 for 2026. I need to find something less good to review next week. This is the second double star in a row; if I don’t write something mean soon nobody will take me seriously.
Rating: ☆☆