Homestuck Music Reviews

What a way to sign off. By turns it’s morose, sentimental, and triumphant. The fanfare section is spectacular, starting at 4:13 (what an unremarkable coincidence). Its slow, ascending buildup in pitch and tempo peaks with a soaring final rendition of Homestuck Anthem to close out the album.

The original track's bumbly and goofy. This one maintains that same sort of feeling (you can't really generate a lot of dread and tension with a flexatone, after all), but in full-on orchestral HD.

Unlike Creata, this one does feature a live choir. The first one ever to appear on a Homestuck music track, to my knowledge. I didn’t think that the ‘Warhammer of Zillyhoo’ chant could become any more ecclesiastic, yet here we stand. Especially starting at 6:30, it's fantastic (the soprano really comes through).

Warm and memorable. I like the contrast of the long, drawn-out lead melody against the staccato, wandering background.

… until Vriska wanders in and butts her way into their business. Dammit, Vriska!

Part one of this little comic's over here.

This is my favorite track on the whole album. Just a fantastic groove, all the way through.

Jazzy and relaxing. Rose and Kanaya sit in a French cafe, sipping coffee, watching as the people pass by on the sidewalk.

A cool main riff, with hyped-up synth insanity wrapped around it in layers like a psychedelic onion.

Solid production values, too. Starting with Solar Voyage, all the way through Thanks for Playing, the tracks flow together in smooth transitions. Nothing is sacrificed in the stand-alone songs, yet it all comes together as one solid half-an-hour of music.

This song has my favorite piece of track art, too. With all of Dave’s recent revelations about his upbringing, the picture’s 50% comical, 50% disconcerting. I think my exact reaction was “heh heh…. Oh.”

Atmospheric. The liner notes mention that EidolonOrpheus was inspired by Calliope, hiding deep in the Furthest Ring. It was a place of temporary refuge, but one subject to an ever-present threat of annihilation. The instrumentation reinforces that feeling: light, yet somehow sad.

I've never seen The Neverending Story. A part of me’s especially glad I didn't see it when I was a little kid. Falcor’s face is all kinds of uncanny-valley weird. The canine snout… the strangely infantile facial features… the lifeless black marbles for eyes… yeesh. Eight-year-old-me had a hard enough time dealing with that scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Violet turns into a giant blueberry.

Cool main melody, but the background melodies are something else: rolling percussion in the first half, mournful, arpeggioed organ in the second. Really scratches that Castlevania itch. It's a shame this one was released after Homestuck wrapped up; I'd love to see what kind of remix potential this one has.

Smooth jazz fusion. What’s jazz fusion, you say? Lots of people like it! On a personal note, I played alto sax for a long time. It's the reason why I come down on badly sampled sax, yet extoll the live stuff. My ear for it’s ingrained through hundreds and hundreds of hours of play. And this is all I could hope for.

Freefall is very different from Tensei’s track. The hints of similarity are still there (compare 1:20 in Freefall to 1:32 in Cascade), but I doubt I’d recognize its inspirational source on my own. Where Cascade is a constant build-up of energy, Freefall’s mostly more mellow, more flowing.

A whole ‘Strife’-style album could be culled out of the hard-rockers on Volume 10. Like Beatdown, Skaian Ride sees a heap of attention on this album, including this punk garage-band version. The drum work here is relentless: you’d need three foot-pedals to keep the bass drum going at this kind of pace.