Need For Speed Underground 2 Archives

About the Vinyl:

• LPs housed with Obi-Strips and Printed Inner sleeves
• Includes Download Card
• Pressed at Record Technology, Inc.
• Original Art Design by Ariel Pink
• The Kitchen Club Vinyl Bundle offers exclusive and limited color editions of each of the ten albums being issued in four cycles over the course of 2019 and 2020

Mexican Summer presents Ariel Archives.

Ariel Archives is a comprehensive series of reissues and retrospective collections concentrating on the treasure trove of material recorded and released by Ariel Pink as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. 

After beginning the series with Underground, Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2 andLoverboy, the archival journey continues with Worn Copy, The Doldrumsand House Arrest representing Ariel’s most classic recordings as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, the name used for his one-man recording venture between 1999 – 2004. Each new edition has been restored from the original cassette masters, which have been retransferred and remastered from single-track sources. Worn Copy, The Doldrums and House Arrest will be released on April 24 by Mexican Summer.

Oddly, albums such as The Doldrums, Worn Copy and House Arrest were not widely embraced initially, though their inventiveness and strange beauty was usually recognized by reviewers, if not begrudgingly. Critical opinion was divided: Ariel Pink was either a self-indulgent “weirdo” or a Pop music genius. Responding to the original press-release for Worn Copy, reviewers echoed its bafflement: Did he really made those drum sounds with his mouth? There was also a sense that Ariel Pink’s new cult-ish fan base would elevate him to the status of a rock star. Critics didn’t seem to like it.

Ariel Archives makes an effort to reckon with the remarkable volume of outstanding music Ariel Pink made during this time. Rapidly evolving from crude proto-Punk experiments to an adventurous home-recording aesthetic that explored a wide continuum of Pop music, Ariel Pink developed a sound and image that would prove highly inventive and hugely influential. Early recordings by Ariel Pink mined his musical obsessions. Underground, for example, fused basic elements from Krautrock, post-Punk, and Industrial / Goth music. But soon these expressions of homage and youthful imitation lead Ariel Pink into a deep creative rabbit hole that became the genesis of the Haunted Graffiti catalogue of music.

In total Ariel Archives will include six definitive reissues of key Haunted Graffiti albums: Underground, The Doldrums, Loverboy, House Arrest, Scared Famous and Worn Copy. Two new volumes of Odditties Sodomies will appear along with a new edition of Vol. 1, previously out-of-print. Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck’s co-written album as Holy Shit, the laid back and tuneful Stranded at Two Harbors, will be released for the first time on vinyl. There will also be a new standalone collection drawn from Ariel Pink’s non-album singles and CD-Rs.

Twenty years on, Ariel’s music still stupefies. The quantity of ideas and moods expressed through a modest recording enterprise seems supernatural, not human. Indeed, Hedi El Kohlti, in his superb new liner notes for Underground, compares Ariel’s explosive creative period between 1998 and 2004 to a character in Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly who has all of 20th century modern art beamed into his brain at flash cut speed. Did Ariel Pink, at the age of 20, receive a similar instantaneous “download” of all of the secrets of Pop music?

Need For Speed is a classic series of racing video games that allows players to experience the “underground” side of racing. The series has gone through many iterations and is back again with its latest offering, NFS: Heat. Here you’ll find our first impressions on the upcoming game, but we’ll have a full review ready for you this Friday, Nov. 8, when it launches. 

I’ll preface my impressions by saying that while I loved Need For Speed: Underground 2, I haven’t seriously played an NFS game since. So I was pretty excited to give this one a go. I was able to play about the first 2 hours of the game so far, with even more to come on our live streams throughout the week. 

For me, so far, the game has been kind of a slow burn. I would’ve liked to see some more actual racing in the first 20-30 minutes. There seemed to be a lot of cutscenes and menus right off the bat. Even once I got into the racing, frustratingly, the controls haven’t quite “clicked” for me yet. NFS: Heat makes heavy use of a drifting mechanic, but the controller input to make that happen effectively goes heavily against my personal racing-game play style. Like most racing games, you use the right trigger on the controller to accelerate. No issues there, of course. Where the weirdness comes in is drifting — you're intended to lift your finger off the trigger then quickly hit it again while turning to start your drift. I’ve found it to be pretty obtuse so far. Often, I “feather” the acceleration button in racing games, meaning I let off and push down on the acceleration often. I’m used to sometimes tapping the acceleration button, or sometimes holding it in a halfway depressed state rather than pushing all the way down. In my 2 hours of NFS, doing things like that caused my car to swing around in ways I didn’t want it to countless times. It would’ve been fine if it felt like I was doing something wrong, but it felt like the game was fighting me.

In the “pro” column, though, the graphics and audio are very good. I really like the visual style of the game a lot. It’s a cool city to drive around in, in both day and nighttime, and the soundtrack is fantastic. The first song you hear is A$AP Ferg’s "Redlight," which is maybe the hypest way to start a video game of all time. I’m also really enjoying the story and characters so far. Your companions Ana and Lucas are both super likable and well-acted. I’m looking forward to seeing the story progress. 

As this is just a first-impressions post, I’m left with kind of a mixed bag of feelings, but I’m definitely excited to see how my thoughts evolve as the game progresses. If you’d like to watch the review-in-progress, tune into our Twitch streams this week on Tuesday and Thursday, 2-4 p.m. ET to see how everything looks for yourselves!