By James “soselfimportant” Roach
I mentioned that the organ gets a workout on this album, and this is its apex. Ironically, it’s the one place where I think a Wurlitzer with a few more options would be a little more appropriate. The acoustics are good, but it just feels one-dimensional.
By Elliot “TheLastBanana” Colp
The beat’s pretty good, but the robotic voice samples just kill it for me. Too dense, especially in the second half of the song.
By Gabe Nezovic
Jazz-concrète. It’s an interesting experiment, but a little too abstract for my tastes.
By Andrew Huo and Michael Guy Bowman
Like Hauntjelly, the intro’s pretty cool, but the trumpet part is just a little too perfectly played, the timing absolutely precise.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
I don’t know, I think ‘capricious but also horrifying’ works a lot better than 'capricious and whimsical’. Of course, Gamzee wasn’t at all horrifying when this song was released, so there wasn’t much of a choice.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
Oh, I’m sure I’m dating myself by saying this, but I had Mario Paint when it first came out, when I was a kid. Like, on a plastic cartridge, with that ridiculous cheap, garish SNES mouse that came with it. There’s probably quite a few kids whose first creative art or music projects originated on a television, waiting seconds for their multimedia Mario Paint masterpiece to be saved to the cartridge’s RAM chip.
In case this is completely foreign to you, here’s Explore, only in Mario Paint Composer (made by someone more talented than I am, to be sure). That’ll give you a basic idea of how it worked (the tool in the video is much more powerful than the original SNES version, though).
Unfortunately, such cutting-edge hardware still resulted in a rather limited musical palette. Cat noises, Yoshi sounds, and the baby (!) can only take a track so far, I’m afraid.
By Marcy Nabors (Steamlord313/Shadolith)
It’s all of the naks. All of them. I would say that it’s impossible to successfully use crocodile naks as a significant part of a musical piece, but when we get to Genesis Frog, Mr. Rosetti is there to prove me wrong.
By Elaine Wang (electronic orange juice/orngjce223). Original “Frost” by Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri
I like the source (Frost), and I like the choice of instrumentation (mostly woodwinds and strings). But the heavy usage of long, drawn-out notes exposes the sampled nature of the instruments a little too audibly. Parts of the song falls into the uncanny valley of musical instruments: it sounds like a flute, or an oboe, but the perfect pitch and timing makes it feel… off.
By Gec (Eligecos)
So many horns. The organ intro’s pretty cool, but it descends into a whirling batshit pandemonium of screeching honk horns soon afterwards.