One Perfect Side. Music. Queens of the Stone Age. …Like Clockwork (45RPM LP).

This is the first entry of a new series I’m working on called “One Perfect Side”. The idea is to take an LP — or, more interestingly, a double or triple-LP — and break it into its constituent sides, pitting them against one another. Eventually, the quality of one side rises above the rest, taking its place as the, yes, “One Perfect Side” of the album.

…sounds cheesy? You’re cheesy.

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There are ten songs on Queens of the Stone Age’s best album, …Like Clockwork. I’ll admit, I had no idea that I was going to be getting four sides to work with when I bought it, but here we are; someone, probably Josh Homme, decided that releasing this album for playback at the sonically-superior 45RPM speed was the way to go, and the only way to fit ten songs onto a 45RPM album is to spread them out over two slabs of vinyl. As such, here are the sides we have to work with:

Side A:

1. Keep Your Eyes Peeled
2. I Sat By the Ocean
3. The Vampyre of Time and Memory

Side B:

1. If I Had a Tail
2. My God Is the Sun
3. Kalopsia

Side C:

1. Fairweather Friends
2. Smooth Sailing

Side D:

1. I Appear Missing
2. …Like Clockwork

Let’s dive in.

The Retro Revue. Game. Kirby’s Adventure. NES.

Here’s a thing I never knew: While localizations outside of Japan give Kirby a gender (male, of course, because video games whose origins lie in the NES era could rarely conceive of otherwise), Japan refers to Kirby with a gender-neutral pronoun. I’ll do the same, since it seems that was the original intent — for the purposes of this blog, Kirby is they/them.

I never much got into the Kirby games. By the time Kirby was a thing, I’d already formed my Nintendo allegiances, and there wasn’t a whole lot of room to go beyond them. I was a faithful Mario game player. I loved the Legend of Zelda games (all two of them, to that point). Beyond the mascots, I’d gravitate toward run ‘n’ gun shooty-shoot stuff like Contra and Mega Man, with the occasional space-shooty-shoot game for flavor — I still have an entirely irrational affinity for Life Force, a game whose high point comes at the end of the first level when you shoot a giant brain with an eyeball. There wasn’t a lot of room in my life for something like Kirby’s Adventure — heck, by the time it was released in 1993, I’d owned a Sega Genesis for a couple years, my NES likely gathering dust as I ignored it into oblivion.

Even if it weren’t gathering dust, however, I’m not sure it would have gotten a fair shake from my barely-pubescent point of view. Kirby games are unabashedly cute, and — spoiler alert — beating Kirby’s Adventure does not take a lot of skill. It’s a game that is wildly forgiving to new players, offering lots of chances for extra lives, and when those run out, continues that barely penalize the player in terms of progress. It’s relatively easy, by Nintendo standards, to get from point A to point B, and that ease somewhat unfairly led to Kirby being considered a little kids’ game at the time.

Hindsight, however, offers something more forgiving. Kirby can be played from front to back, sure, but this is a game meant to be savored. Once you get through the story, going back through the many levels and finding better ways to beat them, figuring out how to get to the secret areas, exploring the many weapons Kirby has at his disposal, well, these are the true joys of Kirby’s Adventure.