RATING: 5 / 13 – It is weirdly infectious.

Tomb of the Ancestors is a solo album written by Robert Blaker. It’s an unofficial Homestuck album, so it’s available completely free of charge (you can download the entire album and its bonus tracks here). Theme-wise, it’s a little like Alternia. There’s a song for each troll, only this time the subject is the trolls’ ancestors, rather than the trolls themselves.

I’ll start with the good. It’s an intense album, for the most part. There’s huge body to the brass section, and the percussion is diverse and driving. And many of the songs do well to establish a leitmotif for its subject.

But there’s places where the album falls short. The transitions between songs are jarring in a a few cases, and it makes the album feel disjointed. And some of the digital processing effects are more noisy than musical.

A lot of the songs rely on repetition of a few core segments. A little fragment of song is repeated many times, with slight variations in percussion or backing instrumentation. It’s hit or miss: on some songs on the album (and especially on one particular earlier composition of his) the hooks are great, and the flow between segments makes for a kick-ass tune. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

The songs were all written well before the audience knew much of anything about the trolls’ ancestors. Because of this, a couple of the songs don’t fit their subject all that well. That might have contributed to the album’s unofficial release (though there’s no primary-source info available on ‘the nets’ regarding it, so I won’t speculate further). But, of course, this only has a superficial effect on the music.

Click here for individual song reviews for Tomb of the Ancestors.