The latest moves by Western allies against Libya have shown marked similarities to “strategies” they adopted in Kosovo in the 1990s.

Catherine Ashton, EU’s foreign policy chief, opened the bloc’s office on Sunday in Benghazi,the Libyan opposition’s base camp when he visited the city on Sunday.

Earlier last Monday, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi and his brother-in-law Abdullah Al-Sanousi who is Libya’s head of intelligence.

In retrospective, NATO adopted a three-step strategy in Kosovo War back in 1999.

NATO first supported the Kosovo authority and launched 78-day bombings against former Yugoslavia, forcing the late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces.

The West then stirred up the political unrest in Serbia, leading to the downfall of Milosevic.

The last step was to send Milosevic to The Hague to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. Later on, Milosevic died in custody.

Twelve years later, the Western allies again resorted to a similar three-step strategy in Libya.

NATO is launching continuous air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces, while the Western allies are heaping political and psychological pressures on Gaddafi and openly supporting the opposition, in a bid to force Gaddafi to give up power. This was followed by ICC’s issuance of arrest warrant to bring Gaddafi to The Hague.

Yet, there are some differences between the two scenarios.

In 1999, the West unleashed the bombings without bothering to ask for UN Security Council mandate, while 12 years later, the West launched airstrikes on Libya by overstepping the authorization of UN Resolution 1973 to impose “non-fly” zone supposedly to protect the civilians in Libya.

In addition, NATO has expanded its military actions from Europe, the defense area defined by the North Atlantic Treaty, to Africa, which is far beyond NATO’s traditional legitimate defense area.

Ironically, the West has claimed to seek “political solution” while continuing its airstrikes in Libya, but what it really means by “political solution” is something quite different from what is understood by the international community.

Since March 19 when several Western nations started air raids, the West has organized so-called “Contact Group” on Libya and held several meetings to coordinate actions, claiming to “seek political solution to resolving Libya crisis.”

However, the “Contact Group” has openly urged support for the Libya opposition on several occasions.

In short, what happened in Kosovo and Libya may well serve as perfect examples of the so-call “neo-interventionism” pursued by some Western powers.

Under the pretext of “human rights above sovereignty,” they try to interfere in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, even resort to military means to split them.

The strategies of these neo-interventionists are, more often than not, deceptive.

On the Libya issue, for instance, the Western powers seemed to have complied with international procedures and norms: they first tried to push pass a UN Security Council resolutions and then seek an ICC arrest warrant to bring Libyan leader Gaddafi to justice.

These strategies, however, are merely employed on a selective basis to get rid of political figures the West dislike, including Gaddafi and Milosevic. The West would turn a blind eye to similar cases in countries which are considered its own allies.

To put it clearly, some forces in the West are using just procedures of the international laws to serve their own political purposes.

In the 21st century, some Western countries take “neo-interventionism” as their standard practice and even try to apply the so-called “Kosovo model” elsewhere in the world. This should ring an alarm bell to the international community.

A tall stele rises from a deeply cratered surface, casting a long, ominous shadow past a row of smaller towers. Straight lines connect the structures to each other, like streets on a map or the projected moves in a game of cosmic chess. The Earth floats serenely in the dark sky, next to the logo that reads Tekhnika—molodezhi, Russian for Technology for the Youth, a Soviet popular science magazine that launched in 1933. The magazine cover, from 1969, illustrated an article highlighting photographs from Luna 9, the Soviet unmanned spacecraft that was the first to survive a landing on the Moon a few years earlier.

This imagined moonscape is one of more than 250 otherworldly images from the upcoming, visually delightful book, Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR, by Alexandra Sankova, director and founder of the Moscow Design Museum, which collaborated on the book with her. Space Age artwork proliferated alongside the Soviet Union’s popular science magazines—there were up to 200 titles at their peak—during the Cold War. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, in particular, the cosmos became a battleground for world powers jockeying for global dominance. Though the Space Age began with the successful launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, it was the United States that, just three years after Luna 9, first put a man on a moonscape like the one on the magazine cover.

Soviet illustrations, even ones with whizzing UFOs and bafflingly futuristic machines, were not drawn to entertain as much as to educate and promote the Communist project. An open letter from cosmonauts to the public in a 1962 issue of Technology for the Youth read “… each of us going to the launch believes deeply that his labor (precisely labor!) makes the Soviet science and the Soviet man even more powerful, and brings closer that wonderful future—the communist future to which all humanity will arrive.” Scientists, astronauts, and aircraft engineers were treated like legends, since outer space was such an important idea in the Soviet Union, according to Sankova. “Achievements of the USSR in the field of space have become a powerful weapon of propaganda,” she says. Soviet citizens lived vicariously through such images, and even the more surreal and fantastical visuals—living in space, meeting new life forms—demonstrated that the idea of cultural revolution need not be limited to Earth.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Sankova about alien life, the inspirations of Soviet artists, and how the first man on the Moon changed everything. The book comes out April 1, 2020.

What do you think informed or inspired these artists’ distinctive takes on other worlds?

Two directions served as an inspiration for the illustrations: the intensive development of the scientific and technical sphere and the serious enthusiasm of designers and artists for new discoveries in various fields of science as a whole. Artists often had technical education. Another important factor that influenced the visuals was the upsurge of publications, books, novels, and short stories, and the production of science fiction films in the 1920s and the 1950 and 1960s.

Long before the dream of space flight came true, inventors and philosophers were convinced that travel between planets and even universes would become possible with time. In Russia, these ideas became widespread after the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were published. In them, the scientist expressed his view that intelligent life must exist not only on Earth, but throughout the whole universe. Tsiolkovsky became famous not only for his work in engineering, but also for the conviction there must exist highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations capable of influencing the organization of matter and the course of natural processes, and for the aspiration to find a road to the cosmic intelligence and establish an organic connection between man and space.

Soviet writers had expressed the most unbelievable versions of encountering extraterrestrial civilizations. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, space fantasy faded into the background, giving way to chronicles of the real space exploration program.

Where do these illustrations fit in the overall aesthetic of Soviet design?

Soviet graphic design always developed actively and responded to the situation in the country quickly. This was primarily due to the fact that posters, magazines, books, brochures, etc., were the most effective means of propaganda. They were fast and cheap to manufacture, and they presented material in a striking and vivid way, making information visual and generally understood.

Publishing houses throughout the country collaborated with individual artists and workshops that were part of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Scientific and technical magazines and design research institutes often provided sanctuary and official employment to nonconformist, underground artists. Working for magazines, they embodied unusual, fantastic concepts, reflected on the essence of things, made conceptual designs for cover pages, and drew a new reality that had nothing to do with their real environment.

The usual Soviet aesthetic was subject to standardization and unification. That was the only design appropriate in a country with a planned economy, where it was almost impossible to introduce anything new. The space and defense industries were the only areas for which new production lines were built.

Space also became the leading motif in design and architecture starting from the 1960s. The so-called “cosmic style” was taking shape in Soviet architecture. The houses and public buildings being constructed started to resemble interplanetary ships, satellites, and flying saucers. On playgrounds, wondrous planets, rockets, and improvised scientific stations appeared, and the walls of kindergartens and schools were decorated with stars and galaxies. Images of cosmonauts began to appear in the design of metro stations. The space theme was also dominant in the planning and design of the folk festivals that filled the lives of Soviet people and heralded the latest achievements of science, such as the launching of new ships. The streets were filled with slogans and posters saying, “Communists pave the way to the stars,” and “Science and Communism are inseparable.”

In addition to science, many of the illustrations feature alien worlds. What relationship did the Soviet people have with this kind of science fiction?

There might have been secret research institutes that were engaged in detecting an alien mind, but we don’t know this for sure. Soviet people showed no great interest in alien worlds. My dad, a Soviet engineer, has been reading scientific and technical magazines for all his life. When I asked him if there were aliens, he answered that probably there were, but he had never wanted to meet them. Space exploration influenced mostly the creative class of Soviet people. Meetings with alien civilizations then became a popular topic in movies and animation.

Based on the books and stories, Soviet film studios shot films and created incredible, fantastic cartoons involving scientists and cosmonauts as consultants for the production process. Many films became real hits: It was impossible to get into the showings, and gathered around television sets were found not only several generations of a family at once, but also friends and neighbors.

How did the Soviet vision of alternate worlds evolve over time, and did it change after the first Moon landing?

In the 1950s, illustrations in magazines became realistic: The romanticization of space and anticipation of new discoveries were replaced by pictures of the universe obtained through the latest research. After the first artificial satellite was launched it became the main protagonist of the popular science magazines, constantly appearing on their covers. The illustrators of Science and Life and Knowledge Is Power increasingly depicted the newest versions of rockets and ships and transmitted surprisingly believable (even if, in fact, they were just fantasies of artists) details about flights to the Moon. It seemed as if real color photographs taken from space were being published in the columns.

However, images of humans in open space remained extremely rare at that time. Practically all of the artists portrayed researchers and space flight pioneers inside the cosmodromes where rockets and flying saucers were launched, or in labs where the Moon or planets were shown on giant screens. In these pictures, man was not the main protagonist but part of a futuristic landscape, the mere inhabitant of far-off planets on the roads of which droplet-shaped aerodynamic machines flew. The illustrations in Technology for the Youth were an exception.

After the Soviets and Americans made their first space flights, the designs of magazines were immediately filled with images of man in space. The cosmonauts were docking, gazing through portholes upon the expanses of space, and walking through cities and command centers on other planets. The scale of the dreams became completely different. If in the 1950s people were thinking about what technical tools would allow them to start mastering the expanses of the universe, only a decade later artists were already designing star cities, greenhouses, and massive stations where people could live for years. The “Khrushchev Thaw” was reflected not only in the content of the illustrations, but also in the palette. The style became vivid and futuristic, full of bright colors, and other planets seemed like friendly, welcoming worlds. A new avant-garde cycle began.

In the 1970s, there was a shift in magazine design towards psychedelic graphics with characters and details, unusual perspectives in illustrations, and more complicated storytelling. However, most magazines with fascinating scientific and technical content were still being illustrated primarily with black-and-white drawings and diagrams—the cover and color inserts were the only colorful elements. Against this backdrop, Technology for the Youth was considered the most vibrant publication for many years.

Then idealistic images vanished and the illustrations grew gloomier. By the 1980s, not a trace of the dreams of the 1960s or the futurology of the 1970s remained. The designs of print publications became as realistic as possible, the colors less vivid, and the plots of stories centered on the everyday life of cosmonauts and scientists. By this time, the space race was already in decline. In 1972, an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States on cooperation in the research and use of outer space for peaceful purposes had been signed. The pace of space exploration slowed down, and reports about work in orbit became ordinary news.

What is your favorite alternate world illustration in the book?

I really like the covers of Knowledge Is Power No. 12, 1969, and No. 11, 1971. They are abstract and convey the feeling that there are some parallel realities, other micro- and macro-worlds. Abstract covers depicting a very intuitive, associative artistic image of the unknown distinguish this magazine from other popular science publications having more realistic images on their covers.

Does the Soviet view of space still have resonance today?

The interest in it is returning, or it’s more correct to say that the interest has never faded. The topics popular in the 1960s and 1980s are now relevant again—ecology, alternative energy, reasonable consumption, overpopulation, and waste recycling. Back then it was regarded as futurology, but for us it’s already the reality.

Today, perhaps, a certain romanticism has vanished. Space is not seen as an end in itself anymore, now it is a means of survival: a place harmful production can be transferred to or where new sources of energy can be found.

There is an announcement at the Roskosmos website (the Russian state space corporation) inviting young people to join the cosmonaut program. I found it while preparing for this interview. However, there is no hype around this, and the announcement was reposted neither in the press, nor by social media. Now everyone realizes that the job of a cosmonaut or astronaut is the same as any other.

If you’re also auDHD, I hope this video about what burnout can look like for us, and I hope my suggestions help as well!!

With many of the lists we’ve assembled over the past few years, the parameters have been clear. To be considered Britpop, for example, a record had to be guitar-based, from the UK, and released during a certain period. We can argue endlessly about what’s a mixtape and what’s an album, but in assembling the 50 Best Rap Mixtapes of the Millennium, the title said it all.

“Dream pop,” however, is a little different. The term has meant different things to different audiences at different times, because it was always more of a descriptor than a proper genre. So in assembling this list, we took the descriptive quality of the term and ran with it, assembling a list of 30 records that felt like they belonged together even as they came from different scenes, eras, and geographic locations. Despite the wide range of music here, there are certain qualities that unite these records: atmosphere, intimacy, a light coating of psychedelia, and, yes, dreaminess. In some cases, we defined what belongs here by thinking about what the music is not. We made a conscious decision to not include records that wound up on our Best Shoegaze Albums list—even though shoegaze and dream pop have, at times, been used interchangeably—and we avoided the more twee end of the indie pop spectrum.

30. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal (2007)

Scribble Mural Comic Journal is the sound of an email with the subject line “FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: dream pop.” It’s a slightly radical, distorted definition of it, one beyond chiming 4AD guitars and gossamer vocals, disassembled and rearranged in a space somewhere between a parasomnia hallucination and a club at the bottom of a lake. Four-on-the-floor beats melt into ambient spaces; the calamitous and enchanting “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” is everything but. In their humble beginnings, A Sunny Day in Glasgow were comprised of the musician Ben Daniels, his twin sisters Robin and Lauren (who would later leave the band), and Pro Tools, so some of these songs feel less structured than most on this list, like they forgot to build a fence around the album. A song like “Lists, Plans” could scatter away into the night, but it’s this formlessness, this broken-mirror sound that speaks to their rightful place in the dream pop canon. –Jeremy D. Larson

29. Mazzy Star: She Hangs Brightly (1990)

Mazzy Star may have been born out of the ashes of Opal, guitarist David Roback’s Paisley Underground band, but on She Hangs Brightly, they arrived as a fully formed musical force. Everything that Mazzy Star would later achieve is here, perfectly realized, on their debut album, from the narcotic blues of “Halah” to the Doors-y crawl of the title track and the heady acoustic shuffle of “Free.” Hope Sandoval’s hypnagogic whisper and Roback’s velvety guitar tones create a gorgeous, late-night atmosphere, tempered by songs that borrow from the vivid musical austerity of early blues: On the heartbreaking “Ride It On,” for example, every stroke of the guitar and beat of the tambourine fall with perfect precision. The band even cover Memphis Minnie’s 1941 track “I Am Sailin’,” the song’s searing clarity reflecting their own meticulous songwriting. Mazzy Star would later go on to greater commercial and critical success, but dream pop would rarely again reach such sharply honed heights. –Ben Cardew

28. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (2009)

Dream pop and indie pop are complicated cousins. Lines are drawn over technicalities like: How much jangle is allowed before celestial becomes C86? Is tremolo ever twee? When does shyness devolve into shoegaze? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled debut exists in the swirling intersection. Though easily the noisiest record on this list—you could say it never drifts off to Slumberland, pun intended—it’s determined to dream. More My Bloody Valentine circa “Sunny Sundae Smile” than Loveless, the Brooklyn band mixes a toffee and Vicodin cocktail topped off with a heavy dollop of power chords, fuzz pedals, and watercolor psychedelia. Guitarist/vocalist Kip Berman swoons with Edwyn Collins’ passion while Peggy Wang’s synths and backing vocals float through the reverb. It’s a romantic, youthful nostalgia that Berman once described as “sort of a John Hughes, magical feeling,” where the library is a hot hookup spot and every dweeb in an anorak can take on the world. –Quinn Moreland

27. Lush: Split (1994)

By their second LP, Lush were drifting into the space between shoegaze and Britpop, the moonlit zone where guitars and windchimes suddenly had wonderful pop hooks to hang onto. With Split, the guitarists/vocalists Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, bassist Philip King, and drummer Chris Acland made an album of pearly guitars and prurient lyrics, born of the kind of intraband trauma that could really flourish at a rural French studio in the middle of winter. In separate interviews, band members have described the process as “traumatic” and “agonizing,” with Berenyi adding that she was in a state of “pulverized victimhood.” No wonder the resulting album is pitch-black thematically, touching on child abuse, infidelity, voyeurism, and death. But thanks to the meticulous production of Mike Hedges, Split sounds so luxurious and so powerful, the essential sound of Lush. Berenyi and Anderson’s voices sky together in their clearest, most present harmonies. Songs last no longer than they need to, even the ones that stretch to eight minutes. Split is at once grounded and aloft—fiery, poppy, druggy, and alone. –Jeremy D. Larson

26. DIIV: Oshin (2012)

The debut album from Captured Tracks stalwarts DIIV didn’t intentionally set out to channel dream pop. Yes, they were fans of Ride, but frontman Zachary Cole Smith cited this particular album’s inspirations as krautrock and Malian music. Yet from the opening gambit of the instrumental track “(Druun)” to the distant vocals of “Past Lives”—vocals that sound like they’re being teleported from another dimension—DIIV quickly found themselves cited as revivalists of dream pop. The record plays out like an inversion of a late-’80s Sub Pop grunge record, taking the dirge and muddiness of guitars, drums, and bass and oversaturating that in blissed-out ambience. It ebbs and flows in a manner that often makes it difficult to distinguish tracks, driven largely by rhythm, echo, and a sense of wonderment. Lyrically, it’s not trying to offer much in the way of catharsis; instead, it provides a bedrock for you to come, lie down, and sink deeper into whatever emotional state you’re in. Isn’t that what dreams are made of? –Eve Barlow

25. Wild Nothing: Gemini (2010)

Gemini was released as part of the 2010 guitar-pop mini-boom, but it could just as easily have been recorded in 1989. Jack Tatum’s first album as Wild Nothing is full of songs that exist just outside the margins of your memory: Haven’t I heard this before? Isn’t this guitar part familiar? Didn’t an ex-boyfriend make me a mixtape with “Drifter” sandwiched between Cocteau Twins deep cuts?

Tatum put Gemini together while studying at Virginia Tech, and its amateurish charm separates the album from his more expansive, polished later work. When songs like opener “Live in Dreams” and the chiming “Our Composition Book” fade in slowly, it’s easy to imagine hearing them streaming from a dorm room window overlooking a verdant quad. And while there isn’t much lyrical depth to Gemini, that’s a feature, not a bug. You can listen to “Summer Holiday” or the gloomy, glamorous “Chinatown” and fill in the blanks with your own memories of being young, sad, and in love. –Jamieson Cox

24. The Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme (2010)

For many dream pop bands, drum machines and samplers help ground a sound so ethereal, it runs the risk of floating away. For the Radio Dept., these tools are precisely what set them apart on their third album, Clinging to a Scheme. With their mix of sunny guitar jangle and melancholic sentiment, the Swedish trio could easily be slotted as indie pop. But factor in their apparent fondness for Saint Etienne and darkwave, diet-Eurodance-meets-reggae beats, and jokes landed via spoken-word samples (à la the Avalanches), and the album rests at the more electronic end of the dream pop spectrum. The post-punk riffs that made them interchangeable with ’80s bands on the 2006 Marie Antoinette soundtrack remain intact, as do the lo-fi charms of their 2003 breakthrough Lesser Matters. But on Clinging to a Scheme, the Radio Dept. apply their eclectic tricks easily to their moody, understated soundscapes. –Jillian Mapes

23. Brightblack Morning Light: Brightblack Morning Light (2006)

Born in the South, transplanted to Northern California, ostentatiously fond of cannabis, and known to perform in headbands alongside a sleepy dog named Lolly, Brightblack Morning Light all but invited mockery of the get-your-patchouli-stink-outta-my-store variety. Fortunately, on their self-titled second album, the highlight of their brief career, the mid-Aughts duo of Nathan “Nabob” Shineywater and Rachael “Rabob” Hughes sounded like the best possible combination of those influences.

Out of burbling electric piano, twangy slide-guitar melodies that split the difference between Hank Williams and Mazzy Star, and their own somnolent vocals, Shineywater and Hughes crafted languid, lightly psychedelic paeans to the natural world. Brightblack Morning Light beefed up the dream pop aesthetic for heartier tastes—this was music for freak-folk stoners on a Joshua Tree camping trip, not pale, narcotized indoor kids. Even if you laughed at the trippy rainbow glasses that came packaged with the double LP, it was difficult to resist the blissful midsummer vibes they accompanied. –Judy Berman

22. Low: I Could Live in Hope (1994)

It takes courage for a band to play as quietly as Low do on I Could Live in Hope, their debut album. Mimi Parker brushes her drums as if fearful of waking a sleeping child, John Nichols’ trebly basslines are sparse to the point of abstraction, and Alan Sparhawk’s skeletal guitar suggests the gaseous atmosphere of Brian Eno’s ambient works, set off by vocal melodies of a powerful, understated economy. The effect urges leaning in, paying attention, but Low don’t want to seduce you; they want to unnerve you. I Could Live in Hope inhabits a world of disquiet, like the lingering malaise of a bad dream, where a line as seemingly innocuous as “She used to let me cut her hair” feels ridden with shame and discomfort. Dream pop records often come steeped in instrumental flourishes and pillowy effects; on I Could Live in Hope, Low prove that small gestures can be transformative, too. –Ben Cardew

21. The Clientele: Suburban Light (2000)

As its title strongly suggests, the Clientele’s 2000 debut album is all about finding the magic in the mundane. Collecting singles the band released in their late-’90s formative phase, Suburban Light showcases singer/guitarist Alasdair MacLean’s preternatural gift for crafting songs that feel both warmly familiar yet eerily distant, like a golden-oldies station beaming in from another dimension. Jangly gems such as “We Could Walk Together” and “(I Want You) More Than Ever” betray the unsubtle influence of ’60s-pop melody makers like the Byrds, the Left Banke, and the early Bee Gees, then shoot it through a gauzy Galaxie 500 filter, casting their lovelorn lyrics in a narcotic haze and letting each languid guitar line ripple out to infinity. The result isn’t so much dream pop as daydream pop: the sound of wistfully gazing out a rain-soaked window, imagining the more wondrous world that lies on the other side of the glass, and counting down the time until your escape with each drop of drizzle that rolls down the pane. –Stuart Berman

20. Atlas Sound: Logos (2009)

Listening to Atlas Sound’s second studio LP can feel a lot like drifting in and out of consciousness. Like Bradford Cox’s first album with this project, 2008’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, Logos follows the logic of a fever dream. Voices rise from a haze of guitars and synthesizers, then dissipate back into it. People drift in and out of the field of sound, as though the listener were a sick child assumed to be asleep by the adults in the house; that these vocalists are not only the Deerhunter frontman, but also Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, only compounds the effect.

If Atlas Sound’s studio debut inspired occasional bouts of claustrophobia, Logos opened up the arena of Cox’s sound experiments. The gorgeous “Quick Canal” yawns to an almost nine-minute runtime as Cox’s quick, scratchy drums egg on Sadier’s lilting soprano. There are pop gestures, too, on the twee-adjacent “Shelia” and the swinging “My Halo,” but Cox focuses more on lingering in that space between dream life and waking life, where each state of being feeds the other and neither seems quite real. –Sasha Geffen

19. Cocteau Twins: Blue Bell Knoll (1988)

The brilliance of Cocteau Twins is that they capture the lightness of dreams. Their pop sound is like they’ve dipped into your reveries and are playing them back to you. By the time Blue Bell Knoll, the Scottish band’s fifth album, came out in 1988, they had cemented this meld of glittery guitars and avian vocals, this talent for finding pure white in the black abyss of goth. This album, however, was their first significant U.S. release, introduced with their bewildering single “Carolyn’s Fingers.” On it, Elizabeth Fraser’s words are impossible to understand: Either they’re being spoken in another tongue, or you’ve temporarily developed aphasia and can’t compute them. Throughout the record, the trio strip back to their basic groundwork of bass-guitar melodies, a pattern they’d continue on Heaven or Las Vegas two years later. Blue Bell Knoll is not as dynamic a listen as that masterpiece, but its exploration of widescreen space is essential, and set down the canvas for glorious colors to come. –Eve Barlow

18. Grouper: Ruins (2014)

Grouper’s Liz Harris recorded Ruins in a small town off the coast of Portugal during an artist’s residency; the atmosphere of the place, miles away from her home in Portland, Oregon, bleeds into the album as much as any instrument. While most Grouper records cultivate dissonance and noise, Ruins focuses more on silence and all the sounds that can fill it. Frogs croak in the space she leaves between piano chords. At one point, without warning, a microwave beeps. What other artists might consider mistakes, Harris considers connection to a world of sound bigger than what she herself can create.

That openness to her environment sets the perfect backdrop for what remains one of Grouper’s loveliest and softest albums. Most songs revolve around Harris’ voice and a piano. Her lyrics, uncloaked by reverb, become easier to pick out, and narratives of loss, alienation, and stunted affection emerge. Ruins is a document of loneliness, but it’s also the sound of someone opening themselves to their surroundings, softening the boundaries between the self and everything outside the self. Once you’ve learned to be permeable, being alone can prove to be a deeply fruitful state. –Sasha Geffen

17. Mojave 3: Ask Me Tomorrow (1995)

By the time Slowdive released their third album, Pygmalion, they had eroded from a swirling shoegaze band to a few shimmers in empty space. In response to how inert and ambiguous the songs on the record had grown, vocalist and guitarist Neil Halstead found himself listening to Leonard Cohen and Gram Parsons records, picking up his guitar, and trying to record actual songs instead of what sounded like their decayed echoes. He, along with Slowdive bandmates Rachel Goswell and Ian McCutcheon, ended up producing a sound faintly like country on Mojave 3’s debut album, Ask Me Tomorrow, but it still can’t help feeling drowsy and blurred; the opener, “Love Songs on the Radio,” unfolds at the rate of a bloom of smoke. It’s what makes the record so dreamy; the restless shiver of McCutcheon’s drums, the melting haze of Goswell’s voice, the cellos that swarm through the final minutes of “Tomorrow’s Taken”—these all seem to wade through the region between sleeping and waking, the coronal blurs the world melts away into when your eyes close. –Brad Nelson

16. Galaxie 500: Today (1988)

Inspired by the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Jonathan Richman, and New Zealand’s Flying Nun label, Galaxie 500 stood out in the rollicking Boston underground thanks to their introspective minimalism. The 10 tracks on their 1988 debut, Today, are sprawling washes of sound that manage to capture an ineffable sensation: a nostalgia both known and unknown, intensely familiar yet completely mystical. But any shot at shoegazing here is thwarted by a subtle restraint. No matter how high Damon Krukowski’s primal, jazz-inspired drums, Dean Wareham’s psychedelic guitar ramblings, and Naomi Yang’s robust basslines soar, their playing always returns to Earth. Their heads, however, stay in the clouds on songs like “Flowers” and “Oblivious,” in which the trio ponder the trappings of romance. And then of course there’s the fuzzy and careening “Tugboat,” in which Wareham declares his humble resolution to buoy his love through whatever choppy waters they face. –Quinn Moreland

15. The Sundays: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (1990)

“Skin & Bones,” the first track on the Sundays’ debut album, begins with a few seconds of feedback, like a spaceship landing, but the song that comes in is idyllic, as if that particular ship were the peaceful sort, with a greenhouse dome and a mission to terraform the world into a more pleasant place. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was not treated as an alien release, though; it arrived to endless comparisons. Vocalist Harriet Wheeler, like every woman with a high and/or curious voice, was stuck with Liz Fraser comparisons, and Smiths references abounded thanks to David Gavurin’s Johnny Marr jangle and the twinge of wryness and introversion in the lyrics.

But the Sundays are like sunshine by comparison. On Reading, the percussion is light as shivers, the guitars nimble; even the comparatively funky tracks like “A Certain Someone” sound buoyant enough to float away. Wheeler’s voice is both distinctive and an exemplar of countless strains of ’90s vocal, its boundless freedom and wide-eyed weirdness reflected in Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings and the late Dolores O’Riordan, its clarion tone aspired to by an entire decade of women in alt-rock and indie pop. It’s not timeless so much as ageless, lending each lyric shades of old-soul rue and youthful idealism. “Poetry is not for me,” Wheeler sings on “My Finest Hour,” but the songs are written like poems anyway: small observations on twentysomething English life, each meaning volumes. Few albums capture so well the feeling of being young, earnest, and cradling that last wisp of idealism tight, lest it vanish. –Katherine St. Asaph

14. Low: Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)

Low’s 1994 debut found them extending the hazy, ethereal guitar-pop of Galaxie 500, aided in part by the reverb-heavy production of Kramer. By the time they released Things We Lost in the Fire, they’d figured out how to craft stargazing dreaminess with the simplest of ingredients and nothing extra. Their minimalist bent had been refined to a point as fine as an acupuncture needle, where every note in their music felt like it came from great emotion. On Fire, a couple of guitar notes, a cymbal brush, and the heavenly harmonies of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker were all Low needed to transport you to another world, and the ultra-clean and dry recording by Steve Albini heightened the effect. –Mark Richardson

13. Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012)

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” sounds hopelessly unconvincing sung by Chromatics’ doomed heroine, Ruth Radelet, as if she’d settle for whatever would make her disappear more completely. Kill for Love, released five years after its predecessor, is an overachiever’s guide to dropping out of life: 90 minutes of throbbing, moonlit Zen koans about ennui and heartbreak, delivered with a glassy-eyed shrug. A graceful blend of post-punk, Italo, and melancholy ’80s pop, Kill for Love is at once dystopian and romantic, moods that are presented as perfectly complementary—after all, what’s more romantic than total disintegration? In that sense, it’s always seemed clear that by the title, they don’t mean murder but suicide; on “Back from the Grave,” Radelet sings, “Memories fade, and I wish I was gone.”

Johnny Jewel—whose Italians Do It Better label marked the band’s fairly drastic mid-’00s shift in sound, and who had just gotten his big break via the previous year’s Drive soundtrack—once had a nightmare about Satan, a normal-looking guy with a loudly ticking wristwatch that beat like a heart. And so Kill for Love’s dreamy melodies and worn-in analog fuzz are constantly serrated by a paranoid hyper-awareness that, second by second, time is running out. Hence, a 90-minute album of which every minute feels essential, even as it sighs into oblivion. –Meaghan Garvey

12. M83: Saturdays=Youth (2008)

M83 has made dreamier albums, and ones that are more pop. Saturdays = Youth sits at the intersection, the record that shares most of dream pop’s defining qualities: blushing, soft-focus co-ed harmonies, cocooning reverb, emotional polarities on a song-by-song basis. The similarities end there; whereas most other bands on this list meekly want to see movies of their dreams, Anthony Gonzalez breaks the bank to shoot them in HD. With the addition of powerhouse vocalist Morgan Kibby and co-producers Ken Thomas and Ewan Pearson, Gonzalez forgoes the distended, saturated shoegaze tones of his earlier, insular work for a different kind of maximalism; everything from symphonic post-rock droning to skyscraping pop is rendered with an overwhelming, hyperreal clarity.

The cover is a fake-out: “Kim & Jessie,” “Graveyard Girl,” and “Skin of the Night” aren’t John Hughes characters, relatable and realistic teenage archetypes tied to single decade’s pastel aesthetics. Saturdays = Youth is more attuned to the highly stylized sensuality of Sofia Coppola and Baz Luhrmann’s big-top operatics, vessels of romantic indulgence. The message with M83 here: Youth isn’t wasted on the young, Saturdays are wasted on the old. –Ian Cohen

11. Spiritualized: Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

Before he started amassing gospel choirs like troops and turning each of his records into an orchestral arms race, Jason Pierce found splendor in more intimate environs. His debut album as Spiritualized wades deeper into the meditative moments of his previous band, the drone-punk heroes Spacemen 3, furthering that group’s experiments in audio hypnosis through the twinkling psychedelia of “Sway” and the free-form ambient swirl of “Symphony Space.” But Lazer Guided Melodies also emits a warm, romantic glow that Spacemen 3 never really acquired, and that Spiritualized would relinquish on their subsequent, increasingly ostentatious records. “You Know It’s True” is the sort of nocturnal, organ-hummed ballad that Yo La Tengo would make a career out of; “Step Into the Breeze” and “Angel Sigh” ride their serene, starry-eyed verses into rapturous fuzz releases. And then there’s the absolutely divine “Shine a Light,” a heaven-sent hymn that clears the skyward path to Pierce’s future adventures in space floatation, and which remains the heart-stopping highlight of any Spiritualized show. –Stuart Berman

10. Julee Cruise: Floating Into the Night (1989)

The opening piano clunk of Julee Cruise’s “Falling” are two of television’s most famous notes: Performed by Angelo Badalamenti, they are the basis for the “Twin Peaks” theme. On TV, the song is instrumental (and inferior), a creepy call to arms for weirdos to plop on the couch and cry for Laura Palmer. But Cruise takes the song out of the darkness, as the airiness of her voice transforms the horrid into something beautiful, if still somewhat grotesque. Dream pop is synonymous with fuzz, but Floating Into the Night has more of a lacquer in its blend of Cruise’s sweet and foggy singing, raw saxophone, gentle guitar strokes, and held synthesizer notes. Of course it worked for “Twin Peaks,” a dreamy, scary alternate reality; “I Float Alone”—written, like all of the album, alongside David Lynch—epitomizes that. It’s a lounge number that, in other hands, might have never left the hotel bar. Is “floating through this darkness all alone” about a breakup or about the fallout of a murder? Is Cruise an angel sent from heaven to bless us with her pure whisper, or is she the devil in disguise? Is “both” an option? –Matthew Schnipper

9. Beach House: Bloom (2012)

If listening to Beach House’s Teen Dream felt like throwing open the shades and letting light into a dusty sunroom, Bloom revisited that same space at twilight, still opulent and opaque but with new scope. Alex Scally’s sparkling guitar leads and Victoria Legrand’s cyclone of a voice are instantly recognizable, but they’re distorted in mystery. Bloom is a seductive album that has little to do with romance or sexual gratification; its characters feel the tug of adventure, of sensations and phenomena they can’t quite describe.

And while Bloom boasts some of the most indelible melodies in Beach House’s discography—the twinkling “Lazuli,” the extended sigh of “Other People”—it’s most notable as a collection of remarkable sounds. “Myth” opens with that plonking bell, cracked like an egg after two stiff shakes; the drums on “Wild” foam and splash like the ocean around your ankles; “The Hours” clocks you with that sneering riff, a slow-motion punk moment. These little moments may not sound like much, but they end up feeling like dashes of spice added to a favorite home-cooked meal. There’s something unexpected lurking in every familiar bite. –Jamieson Cox

8. This Mortal Coil: It’ll End in Tears (1984)

The muse sang in Tim Buckley when he wrote “Song to the Siren,” a lovelorn ’60s ballad for the female monsters whose incantations tempted Homer’s Odysseus. But the track wouldn’t fulfill its mesmerizing potential until 1983, when Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser unfurled her diaphanous voice over its devotional lyrics on a cover by This Mortal Coil. Intended as a B-side, the recording became the 4AD super-collective’s first single, lingering on the UK indie charts for two years.

“Siren” looms so large in the dream pop mythos, it can overshadow not just the debut album it anchors, It’ll End in Tears, but also the entire discography of This Mortal Coil. Conceived and produced by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, the band was designed to recontextualize some of his favorite songs and encourage experimentation beyond each contributing artist’s signature sound. Cindytalk frontman Gordon Sharp’s echoing laments transform Big Star’s “Kanga Roo” from lackadaisical to crushing, while piano lends additional solemnity to the same band’s “Holocaust,” as sung by Howard Devoto of Magazine. Paired with atmospheric compositions by Fraser’s Cocteau Twins bandmates, Dead Can Dance vocalist Lisa Gerrard, and more stars, this collection of covers helped set the template for dream pop and catalyzed 4AD’s ascendance from the stilted poetics of goth rock to the kings of gauzy transcendence. –Judy Berman

7. Broadcast: Tender Buttons (2005)

Tender Buttons was new terrain for Birmingham band Broadcast. The group had been known for taking the lithe psych-pop of the ’60s and smearing it with feedback, muscular percussion, and crunchy synths on their landmark albums The Noise Made by People and Haha Sound. But in 2005, the group shaved down to a duo, comprising only of frontwoman Trish Keenan and bassist James Cargill. As a duo, Keenan and Cargill translated their signature thorniness into something captivating.

The palpable power of Neil Bullock’s drums on Haha Sound seemed like something that could have been irreplaceable, but the pared-down sound on Tender Buttons proved that Keenan and Cargill were truly the group’s central nervous system. The flavors of yé-yé sung in Keenan’s spectral voice sound even more intimate over a drum machine, as evidenced by the sticky “Black Cat” and sparse, sweet “Tears in the Typing Pool.” Staticky and serene tracks like “America’s Boy” and “Corporeal” proved that Broadcast’s pop subversion was malleable. Tender Buttons may not be as delicate as other classics of dream-pop, but its noisy, sanguine sound and the group’s maverick spirit make it essential. –Claire Lobenfeld

6. Grouper: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

Liz Harris’ early work as Grouper was dark and distorted, a black-hearted churn of ambient and noise that found her burying her voice under piles of sonic sludge. With Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, her music crawled out from under the wreckage and turned to face the sunlight. Where she once assembled free-flowing “pieces,” she was now singing proper songs, ones that connected strands of British folk, gothic lullabies, and devotional music as heard echoing through an ancient cathedral. And it’s all done with very little. Most of the tracks on Deer feature just a few elements—a gently strummed guitar and Harris’ processed and layered voice predominate—and the arrangements are thin and airy, evoking the tingle of buried memory returning to consciousness. But an intense ache sits at their center of these songs like a boulder. Every note drips with loss and the music is crushingly sad, but by sharing in Grouper’s pain, we get a feeling that art just might save us. –Mark Richardson

5. Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (2000)

Over the course of their 34-year career, Yo La Tengo have summoned squalls of feedback and tackled Stooges covers; they’ve swum with the fishes, whispered nursery rhymes, worshipped at the church of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But their range and curiosity are balanced by their interest in conjuring enveloping moods, the kind you can wrap around yourself like well-worn woolens. With 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, they embarked upon a 77-minute immersion in the deepest, sweetest sort of reverie.

In a year that was supposed to be all about cybernetic upheavals, Yo La Tengo made the quietest, coziest album of their career, one suffused in lullaby-like close harmonies and cotton-candy 1960s flashbacks, from the liquid slide guitar of the opening “Everyday” to the weightless closer “Night Falls on Hoboken,” an 18-minute excursion that plays out like a dream within a dream. Rather than a radical departure from the trio’s well-worn sound, And Then Nothing clarifies their signature into a heartbeat wrapped in a hush. Even the lone explosion of out-and-out rock—“Cherry Chapstick,” which channels shoegaze’s whammy-bar abuse through Daydream Nation’s silvery fuzz—is as sweet as it is abrasive. Sure, you can have it all, as they sing on one of the album’s highlights, but wouldn’t you rather have just this one perfect thing? –Philip Sherburne

4. Galaxie 500: On Fire (1989)

With its dislocating atmospheres and diffident vocals, all dream pop is outsider music. Galaxie 500 sounded so removed from a sense of time or place that they made this fact nonnegotiable. The droning, doleful music of their second album, On Fire, arrived with the quiet subtlety of a profound secret. Over a few chords and understated drumming, Dean Wareham mumbled clever lyrics about his Dodge Dart, the weatherman, and liminal things. Drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang made their spare neo-psychedelia burst with emotion.

On Fire sounds like the Velvet Underground slowly warming up: In lieu of a Pop Art banana, Wareham sings about waiting in a line eating Twinkies; instead of heroin, he has a song about dropping acid in the woods; instead of Warhol, Galaxie 500 pair with an eccentric, no-frills producer named Kramer. As in all great dream pop, these impressionistic elements congeal into a single atomic sound, as if the instruments have eclipsed one another, moving with the crawl of a cloud. –Jenn Pelly

3. Beach House: Teen Dream (2010)

The Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally had established themselves as effortlessly sublime dream-pop adepts by the time of their third album, but they hadn’t yet embraced the production values that might convince people who weren’t reading mp3 blogs. Teen Dream, Beach House’s Sub Pop debut, was the sound of a band going for broke at that exciting moment before they know what they’re really capable of achieving. Recording in a converted church with producer/engineer Chris Coady, whose credits span Amen Dunes to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the pair demonstrated a rare balance of preaching to the choir and pulling in new converts. The spidery guitar lines, dimly lit organ tones, and sparse drum machines remain. But there’s also much more attempted: crystalline Fleetwood Mac–style harmonies, shoegaze-teetering crescendos, even kitchen-sink piano balladry. Each of the 10 songs could’ve been a single, and the physical edition’s accompanying DVD offers pleasantly warped videos for all of them. It was still dream pop, all right, right down to the “Twin Peaks”-echoing lyrical hook of the bleakly glamorous “Silver Soul.” But it was dream pop that could entice Jay-Z and Beyoncé out to a gig. Beach House have a well-earned reputation for not changing much, but on Teen Dream, they came into their own, and ushered the languid reveries of Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star, and Cocteau Twins into the current Instagram decade. –Marc Hogan

2. Mazzy Star: So Tonight That I Might See (1993)

You didn’t need to be especially cool to be up on Mazzy Star’s second album, thanks to the unexpected breakaway success of “Fade Into You.” One of the greatest slow-dance songs ever recorded, it’s easy to see why it took on a mainstream life of its own despite its uncanny bent (“I wanna hold the hand inside you”) that made it feel like a Lynchian waltz, barely swaying, eyes fixed on nothing. But really, you came to hear Hope Sandoval, husky-voiced East L.A. priestess, shaking a tambourine without passion. So Tonight That I Might See, a secret blues album obfuscated in fuzz and fog, entered the canon of the California Gothic—a vision of the place that felt like a nap you might never wake up from.

“Fade Into You” isn’t necessarily the album’s high point, though. There is “Mary of Silence,” with its strung-out organ drone and resigned cymbal clatters, Sandoval channeling Jim Morrison. Or “Five String Serenade,” a devastatingly simple acoustic Arthur Lee cover, in which her voice is joined by soft, sad violins. “Wasted” is blues at a narcoleptic crawl, as fucked-sounding as the title suggests. There’s something unknowable to all of it. And yet it’s one of those albums where it’s imperative you look up each song on YouTube and get punched in the gut by the humanity in the comments below. One, beneath “Blue Light,” goes: “In 1998, I had the best thing. A beautiful Angel that sang this to me. She’s gone.” –Meaghan Garvey

1. Cocteau Twins: Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)

Heaven or Las Vegas. You’re either in the good place or a gaudy replica designed to trick you. Sweet relief or a desert mirage. It sounds like a trap, doesn’t it? That’s kind of what the record was for Cocteau Twins, too. Six albums in, the gothy cult heroes of 4AD Records gave in completely to the pop urges they had flirted with on 1988’s Blue Bell Knoll and 1984’s Treasure. Happily, the resulting masterpiece not only defined the Scottish trio for good, it established an ethereal blueprint for dream pop. While there are countless examples of indie bands struggling to marry their deep weirdness to pop structures, the Cocteaus’ version of a slightly more commercial sound did not compromise their individual idiosyncrasies. Rather, it distilled them into something painfully gorgeous and utterly mesmerizing.

Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde were each going through heavy periods when they wrote and recorded Heaven or Las Vegas at their own September Sound Studios in London. Raymonde, the keyboard player and bassist, had just lost his father, composer Ivor Raymonde. Guthrie, the guitarist and drum programmer, was at the height of his cocaine addiction, and his partner, vocalist Fraser, was a new mother keeping things together. Fraser had been known for her impressionistic approach to melody, focusing more on the sounds of the words and effortlessly bending them into evocative gibberish with her piercing soprano. On Heaven or Las Vegas, though, you can actually tell that she is singing about her relationship and her daughter, still in an oblique and conflicted way but still with a newfound confidence she attributed to her pregnancy. At the time, dream pop was one of the few rock subgenres where overt femininity was not only tolerated, it was necessary. Fraser had already redefined how operatic vocals, glossolalia, and a vaguely new age aesthetic fit into the ’80s alternative world, but here she was being newly direct with declarations of motherly love—building hooks out of them, in fact, like on the effortlessly cool dance track “Pitch the Baby.” Arranging her peerless voice into more elaborate layers and flows, Fraser centered herself at the forefront of a band now pushing the limits of lushness.

The crucial counterpoint to Fraser’s voice can be found in Guthrie’s elaborate, effects-laden guitar loops, which sent reverb through the songs like an industrial fan whipping air around a warehouse. As a guitarist, Guthrie is to dream pop what Kevin Shields is to shoegaze. But by adopting a dazed, dreamy slide technique on songs like “Cherry-Coloured Funk,” one of the best scene-setting opening tracks ever, Guthrie cemented another aspect of his signature guitar jangle; it’s a tone you can hear traces of in everyone from Lush’s Miki Berenyi to the xx’s Romy Madley Croft to the Weeknd (quite literally). With Guthrie providing the blissful wave of noise, Raymonde adding the crucial ominous undertone, and Fraser tending to the otherworldly drama, the band reached the heights of their mood-setting abilities while still keeping most of the songs around three minutes. Not that you’d necessarily notice the song lengths: Heaven or Las Vegas is less a collection of tracks than a 37-minute journey to a surreal realm. You don’t know where you are, exactly; you just notice the warm feeling that washes over you when you arrive. Heaven, after all, is subjective. –Jillian Mapes

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-1500, marble (Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.

The Pietà was a popular subject among northern european artists. It means Pity or Compassion, and represents Mary sorrowfully contemplating the dead body of her son which she holds on her lap. This sculpture was commissioned by a French Cardinal living in Rome.

Look closely and see how Michelangelo made marble seem like flesh, and look at those complicated folds of drapery. It is important here to remember how sculpture is made. It was a messy, rather loud process (which is one of the reasons that Leonardo claimed that painting was superior to sculpture!). Just like painters often mixed their own paint, Michelangelo forged many of his own tools, and often participated in the quarrying of his marble — a dangerous job.

When we look at the extraordinary representation of the human body here we remember that Michelangelo, like Leonardo before him, had dissected cadavers to understand how the body worked.

I’m still slowly playing Persona 4 again. That’s not surprising since it’s one of my favorite video games. I’ll briefly mention that the game has many clever details. For example, on September 6, you can speak to Teddie in your classroom. This is odd because he isn’t a student at your school. He says, “I’m busier than most of you, so I can’t come every morning. I mean, I have to eat breakfast, go back to bed, eat lunch, watch some TV… And that’s not even counting time for snacks! You might not think so, but coming here is pretty tough to fit into my schedule.” Another funny dialogue occurs at school on April 12, when Mr. Morooka says, “Awright, shut your traps! I’m Kinshiro Morooka, your homeroom teacher from today forward! First things first! Just ’cause it’s spring doesn’t mean you can swoon over each other like love-struck baboons. Long as I’m around, you students are going to be pure as the driven snow! Now I hate wasting my time, but I’d better introduce this transfer student. This sad sack’s been thrown from the big city out to the middle of nowhere like yesterday’s garbage. And he’s just as much of a loser here as he was there, so you girls better not get any ideas about hitting on him! Now listen up! This town is miles away from your big city of perverts and assholes, in more ways than one. You better not even think of getting involved with the girls here, let alone abusing them! But what do I know… it’s not like the old days. Even here, kids grow up so damn fast. Every time I turn my back, you’re fooling around on those damn phones, checking your life-journals and your my-places…” In fact, there’s plenty of interesting dialogue in the game. It’s often worth it to just listen to unimportant characters at school or elsewhere in the town. The director, Katsura Hashino, even said that there’s so much dialogue in the game that some of it had to be cut in order to fit the game on a disc. Much of the dialogue can be found at https://lparchive.org/Persona-4-Golden/. In addition, you can find and speak to some characters around town that are later revealed to be of much importance to the story. One example is Taro Namatame, who can be found in the Shopping District or on Samegawa Flood Plain. Moreover, when he’s there, the weather is usually sunny, there’s no music playing, and you can hear the sound of birds and crickets.

I recently finished reading the April 2008 issue of Play magazine, which existed from 2002 to 2010. This U.S.-based magazine focused on video games, manga, anime, and other media such as film and television, comics, and music. The two cover stories in this issue are about the ports of Death Jr. II: Root of Evil (2006) and Okami (2006) for the Nintendo Wii. The inclusion of the article about Okami is probably why I downloaded this issue from https://archive.org/ several years ago. At the beginning, there’s a paragraph about the announcement of Gears of War 2, which was released at the end of 2008. I had a mild desire to play Gears of War (2006) and its sequels for a long time, since it’s an “over-the-shoulder” third-person action game, like Resident Evil 4 (2005). I had a fantastic time playing Resident Evil 4 on my Slim PlayStation 2 and the Dead Space trilogy on my PlayStation 3 Super Slim. Now I can claim that I’ve completed two of the Gears of War games, on my Xbox 360. It’s too bad that these games aren’t available for PC, but I’m not clamoring for a release of these games for PC because when a game is ported to another platform, it’s usually as some kind of remaster nowadays, and I just hate remasters. Are the Gears of War games as good as the other great “over-the-shoulder” shooter games? No, they’re not. But I still had a very good time playing them, and they deserve to be listed among the greatest video games of all time. The gameplay is very simple. Because of this, it can be played and enjoyed by any meathead. And the story is about human meatheads that shoot at alien meatheads. Resident Evil 4, the video game that revolutionized shooters and had a massive impact on the video game industry, was directed by Shinji Mikami. I think that Mikami, like many other great video game designers, is autistic. Gears of War didn’t really revolutionize anything, but it does have its own style of gameplay, which separates it from other shooters in a minor way. This gameplay involves a cover system. That is, you don’t just stand and fire your guns in Gears of War. You, playing as Marcus Fenix, have to frequently take cover in order to recover health and to avoid enemy fire. This style of gameplay is actually quite entertaining once you get used to it. The graphics and the designs are generally excellent. I must admit that, like in the Dead Space games, I spent a lot of time simply standing and looking around at the scenery in the Gears of War games, though there are fewer good-looking and interesting things to look at than in the Dead Space games. The surroundings in the Gears of War games are usually ruined buildings, but they still have a certain charm because of the detailed designs and use of light. Perhaps the only real downside in the Gears of War games is that the story and the characters aren’t very interesting. The story is definitely not the main draw in these games. It is interesting from time to time. But, hey, in Gears of War 2, you get to kill a “giant worm” from the inside. That’s kind of cliche, but still “cool”. Anyway, the first cover story in the magazine is on page 10, and it’s about Death Jr. II: Root of Evil, which is a game that I haven’t played. Ten pages are dedicated to this game. I can’t really comment on this game since I haven’t played it, but it got a high recommendation from Play magazine, with the statement “If you have a Wii you need this game.” I did, however, play Death Jr. (2005) for the PlayStation Portable, which turned out to be an average shooter with an almost non-existent story, though I suppose that this game still has a certain charm. The article about Death Jr. II: Root of Evil is then followed by several articles about upcoming video games. The games mentioned are Iron Man, Lego Batman: The Videogame, Ninja Gaiden II, Fable II, Damnation, Disgaea 3, Castle Crashers, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Grand Theft Auto IV, Hail to the Chimp, and The Incredible Hulk. Then comes a review of Okami for the Wii, the first real review in the issue. This article was easily the biggest draw of the issue for me, and I must say that almost nothing else in the issue interested me or grabbed me, though I generally agreed with what the editors had to say. I included a short review of Okami in an earlier post of mine, after I completed the game for the first time. This is easily one of the best games for the PS2, and it’s one of my favorite video games. I haven’t played Okami for the Wii. Therefore, I can’t comment on how it compares to the original game for the PS2. Play magazine gave it a rating of 9.5 out of 10, stating the following. “Okami, to me, is one of the most important games of the past 15 years. Not because it features an elegant mythological story told through a tree spirit and a bug (sorry Issun), nor because it features a mute four-legged wolf god as a savior – although both points are worthy of a moment of silence for Clover Studios. What makes Okami so timeless is an art style that transcends technology. It looks as new today as it did in 2006. And it will look as new in 2010 as it does in 2008. In rare circumstances art can actually triumph over technology. Never has that rung so true as with Okami. But that’s only the beginning of this game’s towering achievement. It also set new standards in interaction via the celestial brush used in both the real-time battles and the practical world where the player wields the brush like a god, bearing sunlight, fruit and safe passage. How is it then that Okami became the final nail in Clover Studios’ coffin? After reinventing side-scrolling action with Viewtiful Joe and adventure with Okami, they were thanked with dismal sales. The face of the matter is that high-concept avant-garde games appeal to a relatively small (yet oh-so-appreciative) audience. It isn’t until later that the rest of the world catches up. It’s the Blade Runner effect all over again. The greatest science fiction movie ever created tanked out of the gate, but over time became a legend in filmmaking.” The review of Okami is followed by reviews of Universe at War: Earth Assault (8.5 out of 10), Condemned 2: Bloodshot (9.5 out of 10), Army of Two (8 out of 10), Viking: Battle for Asgard (9.5 out of 10), SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 (9 out of 10), Super Smash Bros. Brawl (10 out of 10), Castle of Shikigami III (7 out of 10), WWII Aces (2 out of 10), FIFA Street 3 (6.5 out of 10), Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis (7 out of 10), The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return (7 out of 10), Obscure: The Aftermath (7.5 out of 10), Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (5 out of 10), PixelJunk Monsters (9 out of 10), Sega Superstars Tennis (8.5 out of 10), Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (9 out of 10), God of War: Chains of Olympus (9 out of 10), Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (9.5 out of 10), Rondo of Swords (8 out of 10), and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates (8 out of 10). I suppose that the editors of Play can be commended for reviewing a number of games for every console every month. The only game out of the ones mentioned that I’ve played and completed is God of War: Chains of Olympus. This happened recently, and I found the game to be enjoyable. Play wrote, “Had God of War: Chains of Olympus not begun to lose focus at the end and rely too much on recycled ideas, this unrivaled PSP game would be a contender to one-up last year’s awesome God of War 2. Confidently passed on to Daxter-developer Ready at Dawn while original series creator Sony Santa Monica stick to console, the God of War template is firmly intact, but it’s the subtle sensibilities of these fresh creators that make Chains of Olympus an even more rounded success. It’s not like that much has really changed fundamentally – a few added magic attacks are nifty but insubstantial – but there are enough stylistic flourishes and design choices that mark the game as something uniquely transformative for a Kratos adventure. God of War has gracefully pushed the PS2 to its limit in the past, so anything less on PSP is asking for trouble in the most obnoxious of gaming circles. No trouble here. There is not a moment in the presentation of Chains of Olympus that disappoints, there is maybe no better tech on the PSP. Add to the benchmark coding job an impressive level of artistry behind the Greek-mythology inspirations and you get a landscape both gorgeous and highly spirited. Credit a sweeping musical score for further layering on the thick mood.” When it comes to Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Play wrote, “Last month, Nick Des Barres gave Play a thrilling preview of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. Calling this game “console-quality gaming in the palm of your hand,” he promised that it would be the best part yet of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Well kids, I come here today to confirm what Mr. Des Barres has set forth. Crisis Core is a full, complete, dignified game. It’s one of the few times in my life that I have played a portable title and lost touch with its material presence in my hands. Wrapped up in the presentation, engaged by the story, and startled by the music, I found myself playing a big game that just happened to be on a tiny screen. It’s so good that I wanted to get a PSP Slim just to be able to plug the bugger into my television at home – to anchor myself on my couch for a more robust experience. Crisis Core has been a system-seller in Japan. I hope it works the same way here.” The next article is about The World Ends with You (2007) for the Nintendo DS. It seems that this article was included only to praise the game and not to review it because the game was released almost a year before the issue came out and because no rating is given to the game in the issue. This isn’t a problem for me because The World Ends with You is one of the games that I’d like to play and because it’s a highly regarded NDS game. Play wrote, “If I was asked to cite one game that defines the NDS experience it would be The World Ends with You. No way this game gets made on console, and what a shame it would be if the spirit of true innovation was quelled during this vital turning point in gaming culture. Developed by the Kingdom Hearts team and Jupiter with character designs by Tetsuya Nomura and Gen Kobayashi (applause sign flashes), inspired by the aesthetics of Shibuya youth culture, it doesn’t get any more avant-garde, J-pop-vogue than this.” The next article includes thoughts and hopes about the upcoming Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS. Then there’s a long article about a revival of fighting games in 2008 and about the video games that were featured at the AOU 2008 trade show. The games mentioned and commented on are Street Fighter IV, Akatsuki Blitzkampf, Arcana Heart 2, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Fate/unlimited codes, Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam Next, The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match, The King of Fighters XII, Melty Blood Actress Again, Monster Ancient Cline, Samurai Shodown Sen, Sengoku Basara X, Tekken 6, and Virtua Fighter 5 R. After the article about Okami, this is my favorite article in the issue because it’s about a somewhat interesting event in the video game industry and because it features information that I didn’t know about before. Play wrote, “I’ve had a few months now to process the fact that we’re getting a Street Fighter IV. Initial media had me cautiously optimistic, and as much as I would have appreciated a high-definition, hand-drawn 2-D revival, my adult self knows that such a thing would not be appropriate for the Street Fighter brand in 2008. All that really matters is how it plays, and after having spent a combined four hours in line to play a total of two matches of SFIV, I can tell you that it is perfectly and quintessentially Street Fighter.” Then there are short articles about Tales of Destiny Director’s Cut, Warrior Epic, Blood Bowl, and Sacred 2: Fallen Angel. Then there’s an article about computer hardware and software. The issue came out when Windows Vista was still being used and when solid-state drives had yet to replace hard disk drives. I remember those days with some fondness now because at that time companies still tried to make electronic devices and laptops that looked distinct. Nowadays, almost all laptops, phones, and television sets look pretty much the same. And many great video games were still being released. Although I didn’t play video games at that time, let’s not forget that 2008 was the year of Braid, Burnout Paradise, Dead Space, Fable II, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Left 4 Dead, LittleBigPlanet, Persona 4, Rock Band 2, Spelunky, Street Fighter IV, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Valkyria Chronicles. Moreover, the economic crisis that began in 2008 had yet to reveal itself in full. Therefore, things weren’t yet as bad or as depressing as they are now. It was a time when Vancouver wasn’t being called a sh*thole by many people. At that time, if I had known that my favorite cinemas and stores would disappear in only a few years, I would have gone to those places more often. People don’t really miss something until it’s gone or until it becomes a rarity. Finally, at the end of the issue, there are several reviews of new films and television shows. The only reviews that interested me are of Appleseed Ex Machina and No Country for Old Men. It took a long time for me to finish reading this issue of Play magazine because I read it slowly. Although 2008 was a great year for video games, so far I’ve played only a few of the games that are mentioned in the issue, and almost nothing else interested me in the issue. Therefore, the issue can get only a mild recommendation from me, even if reading the issue was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me.

The town at night is empty, but its darkened streets aren’t completely free of activity. The shadowy dead stalk any who cross their paths, making going outside a task for only the bravest or most desperate people. When a young girl first loses her dog and then her sister disappears while looking for it, she has just the right combination of those two emotions to head out into the darkness after them. The ghosts are pure Japanese in origin, making them infinitely weirder than the “glowing translucent people” of western mythology, and when the sun sets they turn the town into a freakshow of shadows, specters, multi-legged demons, possessed items and other surprises waiting to jump out at a young girl who just wants her sister back.

Yomawari: Night Alone is a strange stealthy nighttime horror-adventure. It’s a mix of wonderful ideas, janky execution, emotional moments, and plenty of jump scares, set in a desolate open-world town and its surrounding areas. All the horror staples make an appearance- creepy schoolgrounds, haunted downtown area, shadowy shrines, abandoned factory, windswept rice fields, and plenty more all crawling with an assortment of the hostile undead. It’s dangerous out there, but the occasional Jizo statue acts as a temporary checkpoint (not, and this is very important, a save point, despite the text saying “quick save”) on the many, many times you get the poor girl killed off.

The nameless girl isn’t entirely defenseless, but it’s close. She mostly runs away from the ghosts, but hiding in bushes and signs works too. When running her stamina bar shrinks down at a pace that’s determined by how frightened she is, and when her heart is pounding with fear it dissipates almost instantly. For most ghosts this isn’t too big a deal, seeing as walking speed is just barely quick enough to keep her out of their grip, but there are a few encounters where this mechanic is maddening. The third chapter of the game see the girl running from the persistent ghost of a young woman who died after falling off a cliff, and it’s here that the game shows its controls are better suited to doing anything but action. The ghost’s attacks are quick enough that it’s easy to accidentally waste the tiny moment of Run that’s available before fear eradicates the stamina bar, making for a section that’s wildly aggravating. Thankfully it ends on a touching story note, but Yomawari is at its best when not putting its controls to the test.

Most of the time, thankfully, the girl is exploring the town, picking up keys and collectibles to help her on the way, all while using the flashlight to scout the ghosts ahead and plan the least confrontational way around. Some ghosts are always visible but most only show up in the beam of her flashlight. Their invisibility doesn’t make them any less dangerous, and that’s particularly tricky when they hang around more visible supernatural creatures who are triggered by light. Other creatures are more attuned to sound, requiring tiptoeing past, while still more ghosts just tool around minding their own business but utterly indifferent to mowing down whoever gets in their way. It’s a menagerie of the paranormal and if they aren’t overtly hostile then the best you can hope for is indifference.

Yomawari’s strongest point, in fact, is it’s personality, which shines through in every scene. The 2D art is gorgeous, easily overriding the stiff animations, and while the story is very light on the words it packs a strong emotional punch. I’m being purposefully quiet about a specific spoiler, in fact, but it shades the entire game with a sense of sadness for the girl who isn’t yet equipped to deal with her situation. She’s not out to save the world but rather find her dog and sister, and that’s a goal that’s easy to relate to despite knowing something the girl doesn’t.

Yomawari: Night Alone is a game that will be remembered more for its tone and story than gameplay, but that’s enough to recommend it. The PC port is clearly unoptimized from the Vita build, with issues like having to shoo the cursor off the screen every time you fire up the game, but the adventure of a little girl wearing a big red bow and a bunny backpack going out again and again into a haunted town is instantly engaging, hooking the player completely within the first couple of minutes. The variety of weird Japanese ghosts makes for a fantastically unique cast of threats and there are even plenty of harmless jump-scares just to keep you on your toes. While a bit rough and unpolished, Yomawari: Night Alone is a wonderfully spooky adventure that succeeds on pure heart.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is LAME and Everyone Will LOVE It. Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest character action games of all time. Despite being branded as survival horror, or even a 3rd person shooter, the classic Resident Evil 4 we all know and love actually has much more in common with Shinji Mikami’s other beat em’ up classic, Godhand, than it does the other entries in the Resident Evil Franchise. When Resident Evil 4 Remake was announced two years ago, I was sure that the original gameplay of the game (the reason why the game has endured and been so compelling) will “updated” for modern gamers. I was right. After playing the Chainsaw demo for Resident Evil 4 Remake I cannot say I am surprised or even dissapointed, because I saw this train coming for years now.

In this video, I do recognize that I am in a minority when it comes to Resident Evil Fans and that my views on the game probably will only apply to a small sliver of the audience, but I think it’s imporant to discuss in depth, as I do, the combat and design changes that have taken place in this “update” because Resident Evil 4 Remake is another symptom in this trend of crushing unique combat and level design in favor of the bland and endlessly repeated standard action game model that we see today. Before even posting this video, I am sure I will read a pile of comments that will state that this game should be taken “on it’s own terms” and that holding it against the high standard of the original release is unfair or closed minded. To that I do want to say that if Resident Evil 4 Remake’s gameplay and design should be held on it’s own terms, why doesn’t it use it’s own design, it’s own marketing, and it’s own fanbase rather than plugging into an existing fanbase and then releasing a watered down fanfiction of the original? It’s a comprimise to begin with anyway as the Remake is trying to throw all these design ideas and mechanics into a blender and then hoping the final result turns out somehow better than the tightly designed original. Sure Capcom own the IP and copyright, but artistic merit is not bought and held in a legal department.

All that being said, I do understand that this Remake world is the universe we exist in, so I can understand why people will be interested in the game and will play it. I personally will play the full version of the game at some point, I’m sure it has a lot of fun moments the same way a cover song can be enjoyable to listen to. But the point I’m trying to get across in this video is that we currently exist in a very stale, lame, predictable gaming enviroment where even all time classics like Resi 4 are now being chewed up and spit out into digestible retreds. This video is not intended as a negative review outright, but since everyone else will talk about how perfect the remake is (I’m predicting) this vid will probably come across that way in comparison ha.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is going to come out on Steam (PC), PS4/PS5, and Xbox Series X. Apparently, the Xbox 1X owners, such as myself, are being left out in the cold because that console is cursed.