Back in the 2000s, my wife and I, and her sister’s boyfriend and a couple of his friends were playing a little known game called Rockband. It was made by a developer called Harmonix, which also made the first two Guitar Hero games. They broke with their publisher when they wanted to add drums and vocals; Activision wanted to keep it simple. Long story short, Harmonix went to EA and got their dream game made. Rockband itself kind of sucked, but Rockband 2 let you export all the Rockband songs for $5 and was better in every way. Like, vocals actually worked…

Anyway, one cool thing about Harmonix, the developer, is that all of their employees (or most of them? Was never clear on this) are musicians in and around Boston, where the developer is based. Some of them got the brilliant idea to, between charting popular songs for the weekly downloadable content, they’d chart their own stuff. They released a 20-pack, for free, of their own music. This song was one of them. So on top of the 84 songs on the disc, you got 20 for free, bringing you up to 104, and then you could get 50-something from Rockband for $5, bringing you to about 160 songs. There were a few more freebies, too, like Still Alive, the Portal theme song, and Headphones On from iCarly. (Oh, and try as we might to forget it, we can’t forget You All Everybody by Drive Shaft… Charlie’s band from LOST. Yeah, that happened… I don’t think anyone played that POS more than once.)

Personally, I think A Jagged Gorgeous Winter was the best of the 20, though they were all pretty good. Just, nobody you’ve heard of. We all agreed, except our drummer — A Jagged Gorgeous Winter was his hell track: he could do it, but only barely, and he was a good (Rockband) drummer. Picking this song would almost always make him pick Spoonman by Soundgarden if I was singing, or Life is Beautiful by Sixx:A.M. if I was on bass, since those were my hell tracks for those instruments.

With all the heat going around, it might be nice to hear this indie band singing about winter and things like it…