By Malcolm Brown

To dust off a terribly stale, overused cliché, this song is a tour de force. It’s one of my top five favorites throughout the entire catalog.

The quality of the music is superb. Piano and xylophone kick it off, and if you turn it up loud, you can hear the dull, thudding, secondary impact of the piano key (or possibly the hammer against the piano string). It’s akin to hearing the valves opening and closing on a clarinet or a saxophone during a particularly quiet solo. If that’s sampled, there’s no way to tell: it is perfection.

This is the first song in the Homestuck library that I went and sought out. I blasted through the first several acts in two weeks or less when I first read the comic. I watched the Flashes in order, but the sound attached to them didn’t really stick until this song popped up. This is the track that forced me to take pause, to recognize that there’s something special about the soundtrack for this web comic.

I looked it up on YouTube to listen to it, to replay parts of it. I found myself asking questions about it. What was that familiar melody in the middle, when Lord English was rainbow-fricasseeing all of the ghosts? (it was Revelawesome). Haven’t I heard that haunting piano tune at the end of the Flash before? (Penumbra Phantasm strikes again). 

It led me to look backwards at earlier music: there was more value here than I initially gave it credit. I listened to music, bought albums, and now here I am, writer of a snarky blog all about the music. All catalyzed by this one track.