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 Toby “Radiation” Fox
It’s got some great piano and synth hooks, but I have to admit that I think Black is a superior remix. Whereas this tune is driving but measured, Black throws away any pretense of control and just cuts loose.
If this tune is Diamonds Droog, carefully orchestrating and executing his psychopathic plan…
…then Black is Spades Slick (or any of the Jack Noir incarnations, for that matter) spouting one-liners and stabbing everything in front of him as fast as he can.
By Mark Hadley
Harlequin with a side of jazz. The sax and bass interludes between the main cover melody give it a little more of an edge.
By Mark Hadley
Another bass, piano, and drum trio, but this time the piano and the drumset are there for backup. This is a bass-led jam, and it’s that much cooler for it.
By Kevin Regamey
A slow-paced ensemble tune. The sax lead is natural and flows well (which is a bit of an exception for the album: more on that later), and I especially like the clarinet reply in the second half.
By Hilary “Pie” Troiano
The whole album has a serious noir vibe to it, but this song’s the noirest of them all. I can just picture Spades Slick playing that maudlin trumpet intro in the rain, underneath a single lonely streetlight. Possibly after being stabbed in the eye by a femme fatale.
By Andrew Huo and Ian Taylor
The intro sets the tone, with its hopping around in key and pitch. Vaguely unsettling, which I’m sure is the intended effect. That muffled, phased processing effect suggests that you’re sitting in the very back of a smoky dive while the band plays on.
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
Image source: Homestuck.
It’s a musical meat grinder, like something out of a Mega Man boss fight (and not just a little reminiscent of Atomyk Ebonpyre). This song’s lead synth line is so industrial, it ought to be churning out a new Volkswagen at the end of every play.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
Image source: Homestuck.
It’s interesting to think about how some of the trolls’ motifs were established: this album was most likely the root of many of them. Most of Tavros’s themes have a western vibe, and I imagine that direction was set here. Strummed guitar and soaring trumpet, along with some more eclectic stuff like accordion and xylophone.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
My favorite track on the album. It kicks off with a threatening piano introduction, and the slow harpsichord melody that follows carries an air of terrible inevitability (that bent-note oboe really helps drive the point home). Perfect for scenes of courtblock drama. Like many tracks on this album, this one is revisited on AlterniaBound, but I prefer this version and its slower, measured pacing.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
Image source: Homestuck.
A nice change of pace from the energy and aggressiveness that dominates the first half of the album. The main hook from Crustacean shows up here too. That melody is all about presentation, it seems. It sounds legitimately yearning here. Not crabby at all. Nope, not one bit.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
Where Death of the Lusii was light but maudlin, this track skews in a much more positive direction. It’s just a simple, flighty piano melody, backed by a tremulous string background. But it’s got a good vibe to it.
By Toby “Radiation” Fox
If anyone ever asks me what ‘grouchy’ music should sound like, well, this tune is officially locked into my head. Grouchy and whiny, with the orneriest synth-tuba background ever conceived.
Image source: Homestuck.
Theme (Bonus) (by Toby “Radiation” Fox) is one of three ultra-secret bonus tracks on the album. No, it’s not exactly appropriate for a planet full of sociopathic, foul-mouthed aliens, but damn is this a great melody. There’s an even better version of this song lurking on a future album (AlterniaBound): I think I’ll elaborate a little bit on it when we get there.
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 Hames. Original “Atomyk Ebonpyre” by Toby “Radiation” Fox
Atomyk Ebonpyre has come out in many flavors. This one’s faithful to the original chiptune version, just with a much more polished feel. It’s as if the original was run through the ‘modern production values’ machine, and this excellent bit of music came out.
That’s not to say there’s nothing new here, though. The off-beat, muted trumpet call gives it a really weird, interesting feeling too, like the accompaniment for an anachronistic, record-spinning deejay from the 40’s. Never heard big band horns and turntables mix so well.
By Yan “Nucleose” Rodriguez
This track has a story to tell, with its antagonistic, dominating horn melody. We wander smoothly from planning (0:00), to execution (1:00), through a moment of false victory (1:23), then on to panic (1:35) and the ensuing mad chase (2:40).
I don’t know if this song was written with ‘soundtrack’ in mind. But you can close your eyes and see how well this piece would work in a Flash animation. I hope I’m not offering a backhanded complement when I say that, because it’s a great listen as a stand-alone piece too.
By Erik “Jit” Scheele
I love this little piece. There’s a couple of versions of it floating around (I’m sure I’ll come back to it when I review AlterniaBound and One Year Older), and this one’s probably the most cheerful. It’s a little too evenly paced to be ragtime, but it has that feel.
By Brenna “Random Encounter” Curran
A noirish, jazzy number. It’s a neat combination of horns and flighty percussion. By the end, it’s like a semi truck full of saxophones rushing headlong towards you.
By Ian White (MyUsernamesMud). Original “Beatdown” by Curt Blakeslee
Drop the minor key and switch out some of the instrumentation, and Beatdown takes on a whole new feel. That solid percussion line does a lot to drive the track’s vibe, too. No longer is it a cautionary tale about fraternal abuse. This is the soundtrack for brotherly fort-building.
By Ralen Gainsborough. Original “Sburban Jungle” by Michael Guy Bowman
A solid, simple chiptune jam that draws from Sburban Jungle. I especially like how that crazy, rapid xylophone part in the original isn’t replicated here: instead, that basic riff (xylophone riff? sure, why not) is slowed down and drawn out until it’s almost unrecognizable, but better for the medium.
By Trent “Trogg” West
The track starts out light (with shades of Frost in the background), but by about the end of the first minute, it’s kicked it into high gear with a pretty solid synth percussion jam.
By Eston “silence” Schweickart
It’s best described as a very stylish medley. There’s versions of many familiar tunes remixed into this song, but each has a unique kick to it.
There’s a jazzy, Latin version of Crystalanthemums. That’s followed up by a symphonic, soaring cut of that Nic Cage sappy specialty, How Do I Live. An aggressive version of Ruins intercut with Liquid Negrocity fits in too. But I think it’s the bookends that are the best on this song.
There’s a song called Lotus that shows up quite often throughout the Homestuck catalog. I never really dug it, until I heard it borrowed for the intro and the coda here. It works great as a slow, simple piano dirge.
Composed and performed by Kristian “Dacen” Anderson. Mixed by Eston “silence” Schweickart
The clean, plucked electric guitar gives off a huge 80’s pop/rock vibe (I swear there’s a Van Halen or Van Halen-ish song that this reminds me of, but I cannot for the life of me remember it). Atmospheric and relaxing.
By Eston “silence” Schweickart
I want to describe it as ambient or atmospheric (there I go fighting to cram in puns again), but this song is just too damn cool for those sorts of adjectives. Great flow and a fantastic, eclectic mix of instrumentation. My favorite part? The windy static at 2:00, followed by a fade-in of the main guitar melody.
By Brad “Avinoch” Griffin
It’s a tidy mashup of Doctor and Sburban Jungle. The main piano melody meanders between the two, all backed by that frantic xylophone rhythm. The little snatch of Penumbra Phantasm at around 1:20’s a nice touch, too.
By Trent “Trogg” West
It’s taken a couple of trips through the gears of the wub machine, but that combination of low synth and high electric piano makes for a slick beat.
Arranged by tynic. Original MIDI by Beast72. Vocals by tynic and Goatmon
Alright, I knew that Aradia’s and Equius’s relationship was unconventional, if not a little twisted. But I’ve never heard the charges levied quite so eloquently as in this song. I had to go backwards and tick off each individual adjective. So, in order:
Yep, it’s all there. God damnit. The song itself is ridiculously saccharine and catchy, too. Mary Poppins wouldn’t last a day on Alternia.
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.
By Mark Hadley
Its combination of slow, quiet, otherworldly ambient effects provides a good sample of the type of music to follow on the rest of the album. I would say that it’s what the Furthest Ring sounds like, but it’s not horrifyingly terrible in any way. More likely, given the title of the next song, it simply represents ‘before Skaia.’
By Mark Hadley
My favorite track on the album (and the title track is very good, too, so it was a difficult choice). The best part about the song is the subtle transition point at around 1:09. Prior to that, it’s shaky and unsteady, with concerned strings backing little snippets of a melody to come. Afterwards, the song exudes reassurance and confidence.
By Mark Hadley
An ambitious reimagining of Skies of Skaia. The deep strings section and the plucked harp gives it a new grandiosity. The lyrics confused me until I looked it up – it’s got Latin and Lord of the Rings Sindarin going on there.
Sometimes, on other tracks, vocals can feel forced. That’s especially so when the song is something that people are already familiar with. But here it works very well. The singer’s voice fits in as cleanly as another instrument, and it creates a new, interesting layer on the base track.
By Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri
The Derse tracks tend to have good hooks, and this one’s no exception. Neat combination of violin and tech-noir synth backing in the beginning, and the energy and tension slowly builds into the second half, where the beatbox dominates.
By Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri
It came this close to being a #cage pick just because the intro reminded me of this. But that whomping synth anthem in the second half lends it some gravity, so, even though it’s not as mind-numbingly catchy as Popcorn, a #haunting refrain it remains.
By Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri
Kicks off with a flourish and a fanfare. The bookends of this track are more of a march, but my favorite part is the bridge. The melody that starts at 1:50 and carries its way through flute, clarinet, and finally a crisp, clear-ringing trumpet.
By Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri
Another rolling drumline intro, this time into a bit of freestyle piano. Once again, though, it’s the middle section that does it for me: a sparse, austere remix of Frost starts at 0:53 or so. Love that protracted horn solo.
I find myself liking these sorts of Frost remixes better than the version that was first issued on Volume 6. I think that in the original, those chiptune arpeggios diluted the power of its slow, tenor melody. I like that version but for different reasons, I guess.
By Alexander Rosetti
Xylophone, plucked strings, and harp to start with. I would say that it feels a little like a game show theme song, but that focuses too heavily on the first minute or so of the song, and there’s more to it than that. The melody comes into its own in the second half, with an expressive violin lead. In the end, it skews towards sugary again with the pipe organ, yet somehow it’s more symphonic than superficial. It’s a reverie, not a shabby carnival.
By Clark “Plazmataz” Powell
The dark side of Reverie, and even better for it. Take those same plucked strings down an octave and it sounds methodical, not celebratory. The beat box synth and the phased effects create a weird, unsettling background, right up until the bridge. There’s a great hook there, driven by a heavy, bass synth line starting at around 1:40 or so.