By Thomas Ferkol
It has an odd, surreal vibe to it, almost like you’re hearing it from afar, rather than up close and personal. It’s a sound that should be impossible to pull off on a heavy metal track, yet here it is. My favorite part starts at about 1:57, with the distorted violin riff, backed up by an even more heavily distorted electric guitar.
By Svix
Starts off in marching chiptune, then adds some extra synth around the 40 second mark. It’s got a solid driving beat, and that echoey chiptune backing keeps the track tied together throughout.
By Clark “Plazmataz” Powell, feat. belly dancing by Tavia Morra
I liked the original version of this song, but this remix takes it a few steps higher still. It eschews the more fast-paced middle section of Even in Death, aiming for a more mellow cadence throughout. The key and the bongo drums give it an Eastern sound, and the flighty, expressive violin lead is fantastic. Another one of my favorites.
By Robert J! Lake
After a few listen-throughs of the album, I kept coming back to this one. I can’t put my finger on it. The whole song’s built around that cool, whanged electric guitar that first features in the intro. It’s a little more experimental than I usually like (an awful lot of backwards instrumentation in the middle), yet in the end, it works as a dark, moody piece.
By Erik “Jit” Scheele
It’s not chiptune, but this song has ‘video game music’ tattooed all over it. It would fit right in were it part of the soundtrack for an SNES game, I suppose. Pretty catchy.
Performed by David Ko. Original ‘I’m a Member of the Midnight Crew’ by Eddie Morton
Barbershop! I hope Eddie Morton is taking notes (well, he should be, but he’s been dead for 75 years, so I guess I can’t blame him).
By Various Artists. See the Bandcamp page for details.
Original fanart (used in the comic) by Lexxy.
Four excellent songs combined into one mind-blowing medley. It’s probably the most popular single track in the Homestuck catalog.
The four individual pieces are Cascade, Flare (reviewed here), Savior of the Dreaming Dead (reviewed here), and Black Hole / Green Sun (reviewed here). I’ve reviewed most of the four parts previously, so I’ll stick to the first part. There’s a ‘beta’ version of Cascade on this album as a bonus track, but I think that the final version turned out a bit more polished.
Once again that xylophone gets a heavy-duty workout in the intro. At about 1:33, there’s a really cool phaser or flanger effect on the lead guitar, a great improvement over the 'beta’ version of Cascade featured later in the album. The 'Cascade’ portion of the track varies from fast-paced to introspective.
Of all the music in the Homestuck library, this piece is probably the one you could best describe as a soundtrack, rather than a stand-alone composition. Parts of it were modified specifically to fit the Flash animation, but that doesn’t really hurt its quality as a track. Andrew Hussie described it a little more (as well as the production and content of Cascade, the Flash animation) in a series of Tumblr posts that you can find here.
RATING: 11 / 13 - enjoy the utter fuckin domination it affords
Yeah, it’s ‘the one with Cascade.’ And that medley is ridiculously good, especially as featured in the high point of Homestuck. But there’s more to this album than just that one, marathon score. It’s not quite as consistently good as Volume 5, but man, does this album have some kick-ass tracks.
Apart from Cascade (and its individual parts), Unite Synchronization and Even in Death (T’Morra’s Belly Mix) are fantastic, for opposite reasons. With Cascade, those are the ‘singles’ for the album, the anchors.
But there’s a lot of good non-flash material featured on the album, too, and the variation is good: video-game pieces (Frog Forager), chiptune (Scourge Sisters), barbershop (I’m a Member of the Midnight Crew (Acapella)) and metal (Infinity Mechanism) all show up throughout. And as a whole, the album has a very listenable quality: it’s a little soft in the middle, but otherwise good throughout. The bonus tracks add another dimension: a different version of Cascade’s opening is featured, as well as a stand-alone version of the medley’s end.
Click here for individual song reviews for Homestuck Vol. 8.