Listening: Bandcamp
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I have at least three Takashi Yoshida works left on the list, and we’re not going to get through them all by the time this website (ed. note: originally posted on cohost) returns to its home planet. So instead, let’s listen to this big arrange album that just dropped for a game I’ve neither played nor heard anything from the soundtrack of. One of the participants in this album was the artist of the first thing I ever posted here about, so looping back to the beginning seems like a fitting way to close this off, especially since the video game is a shmup so you end up back at the beginning a lot, and also because there’s a bunch of Buddhist imagery on the album cover for some reason??? I really don’t know anything about this game besides “shmup” and “has more layers than it seems.”
This album was produced by Resonant Union, a group which has mostly focused on doing arrangements from Falcom games, though their album prior to this was for the Xeno series and obviously this is not a Falcom game. A bunch of musicians have participated in their previous works and a lot of them show up here too, along with some new faces and a surprising number of professional Japanese composers (like, not just a non-zero amount, but an amount over 10). This is definitely one of those “many people worked on this and it sounds like many people worked on this” arrange albums, so there’s a decent amount of different styles here. The primary style is energetic EDM ranging from four-on-the-floor dancier tunes to more DnB material (sometimes in the same track), which I suppose is appropriate for a shmup. There are some chiller and more ambient electronic tracks as well, along with rock, prog, chiptune, and some video game music-assed video game music.
Pretty decent album overall, a bit hit-and-miss as these kinds of things tend to be for me but there a bunch of enjoyable tracks here. I always feel kinda bad when I listen to a compilation like this and my top picks are the ones by the people who I already know are my favorites, and my top two picks here are indeed by the people who are my favorites, but a couple of other tracks in my top 5 were by people I’ve never heard anything by before (AIKATYPE and potatoTeto), so that’s pretty swell.
Right, so I guess that’s it, then. We’ll be finishing up the Takashi Yoshida journey on the new blog (ed. note: this blog) before moving on to other things, like how there are only three months left in this year and there’s still so much VGM from this year to listen to god this always happens. To anyone who’s stuck here with me for any length of time: thanks for wasting a small fraction of your precious life on my malformed writing??? You now have the perfect excuse to free yourself from me relentlessly posting about composers that only I care about. In case I never see you again: thanks for being here. I really do mean it, thanks. :eggbug:
Recommended tracks:
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“Boiling Brew” (ViRiX Dreamcore) has those funky determination vibes, really like the bit starting at 3:50
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“Heavy Heart ~ Air Mix ~” (AIKATYPE) is one of the weirder electronic tracks
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“phyn’ll bäcks” (RRThiel) chips some tune in a fusiony manner
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“Sour Eater ~glaze peeler~” (potatoTeto) brings in this aggressive transposing section in 11 a couple of times like at 0:56, naturally this is my favorite part
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“Hold On / Stall Out” (jaxcheese) is a progressive journey through a few different old video game sound palettes
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“Yynem ~ menyY” (Cryptovolans) I was required to post to close the cycle even if I didn’t like it, but it’s Cryptovolans so I always like it, love me a good jazz accordion solo
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“Black Onion ~ALLIUM OF HOPE~” (Promtastik) is some fun violin-led symphonic prog
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“Menacing [fifth nucleus]” (Chimeratio) takes a bunch of tracks on the album and turns them into a new track
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“The Earth Has Returned” (Yasuhisa Watanabe) is in a style of calm, uplifting EDM I wasn’t expecting from Yack., then the Chords started at 2:01 and I was like “yeah okay that’s him, that’s the guy”
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