It’s funny how a soundtrack can affect a scene’s perception. The action in this part of the Flash (can I still call it a Flash?) isn’t so different from the prior part: kids bounce around in combat, while Lord English executes his classic ‘pound Trolls into the ground with your fists’ fighting technique.
Yet the music is darker, more ominous, and that casts a shadow on the whole section. Maybe the heroes will avoid destruction, but there’s no way they can truly win here. Not yet, anyways.
I’ve fawned over this song in the past, and I didn’t expect it to come up again, especially in the climactic part of one of the end-game Flashes. But all it took was those first three notes to clue me in on what was coming.
Source: Homestuck (art by xamag).
Favorite moment? Right after the Condesce finishes strangling her own heiress, she turns to the remaining kids, her glare cold with promise.
Original track by Clark Powell, with additional work by Toby Fox
Act 7 gets a bad wrap.
Does it leave a lot of loose plot threads? Oh, without a doubt. Homestuck currently has more hanging threads than that pair of cutoff jeans you should have thrown away a year ago. I think most of them will never be revisited. Apologies, but man, I don’t really care about Zillywave and Sawhoo, and I don’t care what they’re up to.
For being the ‘last’ part of Homestuck, I get the disappointment in Act 7. Some of that salt will probably be hosed off in the epilogue. That said, I really liked seeing the rise and fall of Lord English in Act 7. I thought it was a really cool, poetic way to sign off.
On to the song. If you’re wondering about the differences between the old version and the new, this track has a new Doctor / Sburban Jungle section that starts around the 6:20 mark.
If you’re going to buy some music, though, and you’ve got three more bucks to spend, then pick up Symphony Impossible to Play, which includes the majority of this song, and also three more. The version of Sarabande on that album is spectacular.
A new take on ‘Nine Lives One Love’, off of coloUrs and mayhem Universe A (also written by Dallas Ross Hicks). I try not to directly compare different variants of the same musical theme, but this is such a solid step up, I think it’s worth talking about.
'Nine Lives One Love’ has a really diffuse, layered sound to it, and it feels muddled. Bells, bells, and more bells. It drags on a bit.
MOG^3, on the other hand, flies by. It’s an even longer song, and there’s so much more to it. The song’s anchored by the same musical motif, but new instrumentation choices and new variations on that theme really hooked me in. Most of all, the song’s flow is much improved. The deep, synth-distorted bridge around 1:45 gives that same starting motif a brand new sound. New wrinkles after that (at 3:10, 3:45, 4:30, etc) keep the track interesting and well-paced, all the way to the end.
I like this song a lot. I think it demonstrates an awful lot of artistic growth.
A chill, early-rock-style guitar track. This could work great as the intro track for Sherriff Horuss’s Western TV serial (in which he beats crime itself to death with his bare hands).
Very, very Harry Potter. The instrumentation’s a dead ringer – I had to flip back and forth a couple times between John William’s theme and this song to convince myself that I wasn’t listening to the same orchestra. The first minute wins the Grammy for style-apeing. After that, it takes off into its own thing. The gothic electric guitar is a nice twist on the standard symphony background.
A live piece! The performance is a little bit wobbly, especially in a couple spots where the xylophone part gets challenging. But that doesn’t distract: it adds character (my definition of ‘character’, of course, being ‘an off-note here or there that makes me like the song even better somehow’). I especially like the high-energy ‘overture’ bit that starts around 1:20.
I like the sampled saxophone on this one; it’s tough to pull off sax artificially like that. The song’s a pre-rock 50’s croon (think Enchantment Under the Sea dance in Back to the Future).
A little overlong, but man, do I love those moddish horns in the intro. This song would make for an awesome walkthrough or overworld theme. It’s a close thing against Let Me Dance, Let Me Glisten and MOG^3, but this is my top track for the album.
A mix of sweet and sour. Wait, not sour… soul-gripping terror. Yeah. A mix of sweet and terror. The first half sets up a cool jam starting around the 1:15 mark.
It took me a few listens to put the pin on this one. I don’t really dig the melody, or the subject matter, or the instrumentation. Then it hit me - the Kankri monologue in the middle, coupled with those droning organ notes, make for a really bizarre ASMR-inducing section. I doubt Kankri ever expected that kind of response from his ramblings.
A simple song, and with such wonderfully off-kilter vocals. Meshes really well with the light ukelele-and-piano melody. The lyrics are an interesting combination of fluffy and dark.
The wvorst troll by a nautical mile gets his own cheap 70’s sitcom theme. Happy Days, starring Cronus as your favorite leather-jacket-wearing greaser buddy. *shudders*
For what’s ostensibly a Latula track, this one charts a pretty dark course. Cool, crashing percussion, with the extraterrestrial melody carried on the off-beat.
I thought Homestuck music couldn’t surprise me anymore. Not so far as genre goes. But I was wrong. I didn’t expect to hear a ‘Rumble’-esque 50’s rock jam buried in the middle of a Homestuck fanmusic album, yet here we are.
The vocals have that husky, just-finished-a-set-in-a-smoke-choked-bar tone to 'em. Who would have thought that one of Cronus’s joke titles from Openbound 2 would prove inspiring?
I could have sworn I had heard this one before. It’s more of a consistency of style than melody, though; it shares the same vibe as MOG^3. I like the bassline that underpins the whole track.
Normally I only pipe up about a song if I’ve got something to say about it. That hasn’t changed.
But it turns out I’ve got something to say about every track on Volume 10. Hell, I’ve got something to say about tracks that got rejected from Volume 10.
This album’s the best piece of work the Homestuck music team has ever put together. Ten bucks for two hours of fantastic music. Even the commentary booklet (which you get when you buy the album) is a cut above anything I’ve seen in the past. If you dig the music from Homestuck, pick it up.
Most of the leaked playlist was vaporwave remixes of old Homestuck music (I didn’t even know vaporwave was a thing!). The first few tracks, though, were actually proposed (but bumped) from the final album. Gave it that ‘air of authenticity’ all modern pranks require. Better yet, it exposed some more solid music to the world. Ironic, I guess?
This one’s an experimental techno remix of ‘Candles and Clockwork’, off of Volume 5. That cool new beat makes it my favorite of the rejected tracks from the album, and my favorite of many ’Candles and Clockwork’ mixes over the years.
Thanks go to Makin for uploading these tracks to YouTube, and for hosting the pre-release stream (which was a riot).
A pretty piano-only take on a couple of old classics. The first half’s a new wrinkle on Homestuck, and the second half’s a ¾ interpretation of Penumbra Phantasm. I’m no student of classical music, but I can’t help thinking of Beethoven on this one.
Penumbra Phantasm isn’t on Homestuck Volume 10. But if you really, really want an idea of what it sounds like, there’s pieces of it scattered all over the place.
A few years back Toby played part of it, live, on a piano. This track, Pseudumbra Fauxtasm (alternate title: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Penumbra Phantasm), is a pretty faithful reworking of it. My favorite part’s the break right at 1:25. It’s a bit of the song that isn’t well represented in other mixes, and I love the energy of it.
The opening snippet we heard of this song during [S] Collide was just the tip of the iceberg. Even the second time I listened to the full track, chills ran up and down my spine when the choir kicked in.
That’s not a live choir, by the way. Not that I could have discerned the difference without reading firsthand that it’s a sampled effect. I’m baffled as to how technology can replicate such natural sound.
Skies of Skaia has had a link to Tolkien ever since Mark Hadley wrote Elvish lyrics for it when ‘Song of Skaia’ was released. Even more so than that song, the second half of this track gives off a huge Frodo at the Crack of Doom vibe.
For what Beatfox presumably set out to accomplish, I can think of no higher praise to give.
