By Robert J! Lake
It’s a pretty little synth tune. Bouncy, cheerful, and deceptively simple, at least for the first minute or so.
By Malcolm Brown
The dropped-pitch tubular bell intro (the same motif as Stellarum Salve) falls away in a hurry, in exchange for a heavy metal guitar jam. It meanders on from there, from high shrieking electro-thrash (1:20) to a calm, echoey bridge (2:00), to a gothic synth march, complete with chanting (2:30 on). The whole track foreshadows Eternity Served Cold a bit in tone.
Again, pedantic, but the pipes at the end of Reverie sound like a calliope
You’re quite right. You piqued my curiosity on the subject, so I did a little looking around. A pipe organ drives pressurized air through pipes to generate sound, while a calliope drives steam through oversized whistles to produce music. It’s a product of its time (late 19th to early 20th century), when steam power was abundant. Here’s a video of a calliope in action.
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.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
I thought long and hard about how I would describe this song in brief: carnival thrash. That cool eastern-inspired hook just about makes the song, and it’s worth dealing with cackling fancy santas in all their glory. So goddamned catchy.
By Michael Guy Bowman
It’s a journey into an unbalanced yet determined mind, with wobbly melody driven forward by one of the more complex and interesting percussion lines on the album. Guess that Constant Confinement might have shaken a few marbles loose. Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage (from one of the greatest albums of all time) give off a similar unhinged vibe.
By Thomas “EidolonOrpheus” Ferkol
Where The Lordling is a crazy ball of energy (complete with sound effects contributed by Caliborn’s Casio, no doubt), this one’s more introspective. Graceful and flowing.
By Robert J! Lake
It’s got the same feeling of discovery and awe as Homestuck, only with a silo full of Pioneer sugar dumped onto it.
RATING: 10 / 13 – uuuuuuNGH. OH *MERRRCY*. THAT IS JuST. SOO. GRODY.
Cherubim is the most recent theme album (the most recent album of all, as a matter of fact) released officially. It’s built in pairs: the odd numbered songs (except for the last) are cheery, while the even numbered ones are dark and aggressive. Each pair is built from the same basic musical idea: each with its own take.
The album flirts with a saccharine, syrupy motif, but never really commits to it. The pizzicato strings, the cackling fancy santa… that’s just window dressing, just establishing the setting. No, the underlying theme is relentless, naive optimism against an unstoppable lust for power.
The production and editing is fantastic. Coming off of Alternia and Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead in my last few reviews, my appreciation for the intrinsic quality of this album is only greater than before. Everything’s been polished to a mirror sheen. All of the instrumentation is natural and, to my ear, may as well have been played by a live musician (except, of course, for the dedicated synth instruments).
Parts of the album nudge a little towards the experimental side, and it’s a tad soft in the middle, but overall this is a great themed compilation.
Click here for individual song reviews for Cherubim.