Up next for review: Tomb of the Ancestors, another unofficial album, written by Robert Blaker of the music team. It’s available for free, and you can download the full album here!
Green Sun (By Kalibration) is one of the bonus tracks on the album. Of all the songs, I think this one has the strongest melody on the playlist. The intro has a bit of that Felt vibe to it, too.
By Kalibration
Slow, dulce strings. The mood’s right on target, with those maudlin, wandering notes. More of a background ambiance than a stand-alone track.
By Kalibration
A mellow xylophone track. The mellowest, most leisurely song on the entire album, as a matter of fact. It seems this track was cut before The Concesce’s ‘SEA HITLER’ persona was revealed, so unless the Batterwitch turned over a hell of a new leaf, the song isn’t all that related to its subject. Doesn’t stop it from being a relaxing beat, though.
By Kalibration
An exotic exercise in bongo drums and finger cymbals. There’s no instrumental melody to compete with, and that talent for percussion has a little more room to shine.
By Kalibration
I like the hook. I like it a lot. It’s bouncy and cagey, and it fits Mindfang awfully well. But there’s a few parts that make it hard to listen to. The heavily distorted outro comes to mind, or the crazy chiptune bit blowout that starts around the one minute mark.
By Kalibration
This one pulls off a sort of a ‘Friday the 13th’ feel in the intro. The first half shows promise, but the second half (right after the big vocal sample) devolves into a freestyle mess of drum kit and ultra-synth.
By Kalibration
I like the introduction with those roaring horns, but after that… it just sort of wanders from musical fragment to musical fragment. It feels patched together: there’s no unifying theme.
By Robert Blaker
I like the introduction with those roaring horns, but after that… it just sort of wanders from musical fragment to musical fragment. It feels patched together: there’s no unifying theme.
I gotta disagree here that the combination of fragments makes it un-unified. A huge part of why Robert Blaker’s stuff is so cool is because it layers in so many different contrasting themes to make the song as a whole really good. This is the best example of that in my opinion, though the obvious choice for most people would be Upward Movement (or Valhalla if you’re a Homestuck music hipster). I think that in this case, it does a fantastic job of conveying Dualscar’s character through the mix of blaring badass parts and a classy waltz tune. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say wwretched wwaltz might be my favorite Homestuck piece by KalibrationLTD because of that.
Hopefully you’re prepared for the fact a good chunk of the rest of Tomb of the Ancestors is the same way. I love it, though I understand that his music, especially his Homestuck music, is a bit divisive.
You raise a good point! Upward Movement (another one of Robert Blaker’s songs) is similar to wwretched wwaltz in composition (it has a lot of smaller song segments tied together as one track), but where I think the latter is choppy, the former feels smooth, catchy, and really well done. Maybe it’s the intensity that puts me off.
By Kalibration
Well, it’s loud and busy. The percussion overwhelms the main melody, and in the second half it’s chaotic to the point of cacophony.
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.