My Needlejuice Mystery Box 2022, Ranked

I wanted to do something very different, a surprise article for once, something that would allow me to showcase some stuff I enjoy. This is an article about music, not gaming – and it’s an easy one to do while I work on the reviews proper.

What’s "Needlejuice" in the title? It’s an independent record label that formed in September 2017 and operates from Nashville, Tennessee. It has both a website, a Discord server and a Bandcamp page, and features a lot of (but not exclusively) artists from the LGBTQ+ community. It favors indie bands and musicians and covers a very wide variety of tones and genres, from the comedic to the serious, from pop to rock, from psychedelic to prog passing by vaporwave. The label is dedicated to production of physical media: CDs, of course, but also cassettes, vinyl records and more. This short description doesn’t do them justice; I’ll simply close on saying they deserve to be more known. Maybe your new musical obsession is waiting for you somewhere in their large catalog.

My 2022 box also included a shirt!

Since 2021, the label has been offering mystery boxes on their site at the end of the year. The boxes include albums in three formats – the Tier 1 box had one CD, one cassette and one vinyl, Tier 2 had two of each, and Tier 3 had three of each, plus a vinyl test pressing and extra goodies. The first such box I purchased was in 2022. (Why did it take me till 2024 to write this? ...Hell if I know.) When making a mystery box, the label considers the buyer's purchase history, ruling out what they already own, and will include albums both old and new. The box I ordered in 2023 had stock fresh from the year as well as albums that date all the way back to 2008.

I figured I would help with their visibility in my own way, by listing down the albums I obtained in that first box from the one I enjoyed the most to the one I enjoyed the least. This is all subjective, and that I didn’t like a band or artist doesn’t mean they’re bad – merely that their stuff didn’t click with me or fit my personal preferences. Even with the ones I didn’t like, I’ll do my best to be positive. In summer of 2023, thanks to Spotify, I did a deeper dive into all these bands’ larger discographies, so my adoration for the bands may not match the position they’ve been given here - I’m ranking the albums themselves. I’ll also include an embed to my favorite track off each album.

If anyone from Needlejuice reads this and notices some facts that are incorrect, tell me and I'll correct them!

Starting with...

Nuclear Bubble Wrap – Problem Attic

I’ve been following Nuclear Bubble Wrap (whose frontman Jace McLain is also one of the founders of Needlejuice Records; shortened "NBW") since roughly 2010, when I discovered the band through a forum dedicated to "Weird Al" Yankovic. Back then, the band did both parodies and original comedy music, but evolved in the following years to ditch parodies and focus on a psychedelic sound, albeit retaining a comedic and often geeky edge. They appear a few times on this list.

Problem Attic (geddit?) has been described by McLain as the last album of a trilogy, and whereas their previous two albums discussed anxiety and depression, this one covers the sources of both in modern society for the younger generations. The first half is more comical in tone, with tracks about murderous AI, late-stage capitalism, and conspiracy nuts. Side B is where the facade breaks, with songs about sexist legislators, climate change, police brutality and the growing dread towards the future. The title track is a brutal takedown of the older generations who allowed, if not encouraged, things to get this bad for their personal benefit, their children be damned.

It is, as far as I can tell, their most socially charged album, and will probably remain such. It’s a bleak but sobering listen with biting satire and only a few alleviating moments, like a song about how the Mars rovers are awesome or another about T. Rexes being perfect creatures because they can’t jerk it. Yes, you’ve read that right.

Jace McLain and the second singer, Kyle Thorne, offer great performances. I cannot recommend this album enough, it’s a great display of their skill. I’m so hyped for their next full-length release.

Favorite track:

Update: Odd start to the year

Alright, so a couple things about the start of 2024. It's going to be a little odd. As you may have noticed, I didn't post anything last Friday. I also likely won't post anything this coming Friday, either. The first reason for that is that, as I discussed in my Retrospective 2023, I need a break so I'm taking January a little easier.

Which isn't to say I'm not writing, I do have a couple of articles cooking, many of which are for non-Steam games. I'm trying to focus on the games on consoles for now, I'm a starting work on the Year Plans on Nintendo consoles, and looking into the other games here and there that I'm interested in.

However, a lot of my year plans involve games I'd love to play but can't. I got myself a brand new computer late last year, and I'm already having issues that need repairs. Some games I played or tried to play - namely Valheim, For Honor, and Assassin's Creed III - would crash my computer a few minutes to half an hour in, provoking a BSOD. Needless to say, that's got me worried. So I'm going to take my computer in for repairs tomorrow morning and I won't have it until... well, I hope to have it back next Monday. Hopefully at little to no cost, seeing as it's still on guarantee.

While I wait for all that to be resolved, I'm at least planning ahead. I'll spend my few computer-less days watching the films I hope to cover... in February, I guess?

So, reviews proper will be the movies, then the non-Steam stuff. However, I am very tempted to have an unrelated long article to ease myself back into writing. Tempted to write about music. Yeah, you can expect an article about music soon-ish.

Retrospective 2023

Yet another year that’s been alright for me, yet one that’s been catastrophic on a larger scale. The Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing, and we have the Israel-Hamas war on top of that. Canada is on its way to a recession, the prices of everything skyrocketed this year, and I can feel the financial dread increasing. Speaking of dread, there’s a lot of it regarding next year's elections in the United States. I don’t think Americans quite realize just how influential, for better and especially for worse, their politics are to the rest of the world, and there’s potential for another disaster. On the plus side, just as I predicted last year, some people are finally getting their just desserts. Let’s hope the trend continues in 2024.

Meanwhile, X, Formerly Twitter (nobody will ever call it just X), is somehow still around, despite every attempt from Elon Musk, accidental or not, to destroy it from within. The guy even had an AI designed for the website, called Grok, and it instantly turned on Musk and his ass-backwards, teenage edgelord worldviews. Some will say I shouldn’t feast while billionaires have their crap blow up in their faces; I don’t care. Pass the popcorn.

But of course, things are always a little brighter on a personal level. Let’s see... On the negative, I think I never went to more funerals than this year, I caught Covid in August for what I assume to be the first time (In fact, I don't recall being sick as often in a single year as I was in 2023), and I’ve had a streak of intense bad luck in the very last days that were topped off by another cold. However, I can recount many positives: I finished paying my car; I got myself a Switch and a brand new computer; I again went to a convention in the U.S.; I joined Bluesky; I discovered new music bands I’m now addicted to; and I participated to two podcasts in French, which have been posted to YouTube, the two videos are this one and this one if you’re interested.

Oh, and some time ago I donated to a Kickstarter by Stray Fawn Studios, who made Niche – a genetics survival game. In my original review of that game, I said I wanted a plushie of the starting character. Well, guess what:

I originally said that as a joke! I’ll have to joke about that more often!

I remember not being too happy with how serious and downbeat many of my articles were back in 2022. This was corrected in 2023, but the tradeoff is that I feel like I didn’t review a lot of games overall. Only 34 in total. On the plus side, I love my idea of the Year Plans, even if I didn’t cover as many of them as I would have liked; I’ll do these again this year. I had a smart idea with the Gaming Memories, filling in time on weeks without a proper article. I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the blog, and I’m almost at a million views on the blog. So far so good, I guess. I also had my first article hidden by a content warning by Blogger; because I wasn’t clear enough that my article titled “Just Die Already” was about an indie game, hence why I specified the studio in the retitle. I don’t know what to expect regarding my output in 2024. In the meantime, how about I do my retrospective now?

My favorite reviews/articles of 2023

10. Rampage. Gotta acknowledge my January movie reviews in some capacity. I’ll probably do a few like this at the start of the year again.

9. Beyond Good and Evil. It was great to experience such a famous and beloved title for the first time, and I think I conveyed its story and my impressions well.

8. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This has been a year where I covered a handful of highly appreciated titles, so I’m glad I reported on this one (even if I still think it hasn’t aged super well gameplay-wise).

7. Top 12 Boss Battle Types. It was fun to figure out which types were my favorites and how they ranked, and it feels like I conveyed it well.

6. Freedom Planet. That one had been on my radar for a while, it was great to discover it at last!

5. WarioWare: Get It Together. It was a little clunky to have a paragraph detailing how every character plays, but it was much more complete than just leaving a sentence or two within a paragraph for it.

4. Streamline. Even though I couldn’t really play this one, I still played fair and gave it as best a eulogy as I could, considering the odd situation with this one.

3. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. Rarely has a review, short or long, ever been this easy to write. The only reason it doesn’t rank higher is that it’s a Quick one.

2. Sonic Forces. Didn’t get nearly enough views for the effort I put into it. I tried to cover every single aspect and analyze the story in as much depth as I could, so that makes the article stand out.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Playing through it did enlighten me to why this game is so beloved and influential.