Review of Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
by aby55
I don’t listen to music as a standalone experience very often, but after finding this album and listening to the first song, I made an exception. I switched from YouTube to Bandcamp for better audio quality, and got my good headphones which I never use for anything anymore. I then decided to lie there in the dark and listen to this album while doing absolutely nothing else. I’m not going to use the name of a single “genre” to describe this, because I think it would be a disservice. I encourage you to do the same for this, and all media. Here is a list of things I permitted myself to cheat with a little bit, and did while listening, instead of doing nothing at all.
- Starting this review while the last two songs have yet to elapse, because I simply knew that I had to review it
- Writing down story ideas that I had, because this music was truly inspiring and helped me come up with some meaningful direction for a story that’s been stagnant
- Pausing during the silent west to see if it was sampled from OFF’s Silencio (I settled on “almost certainly not,” but that would’ve been awesome)
- Adding the “Boston” tag to my Neocities
Here are some things this music made me think about, even if only briefly
- The fact that I’m crying because the music has brought me to tears
My friend Miles, who did the excellent album art
- Wishing there was an RPGMaker game that had this as a soundtrack
- Making an RPGMaker game just to use this as a soundtrack
- Failing to finish making a hypothetical RPGMaker game that would use this as the soundtrack, due to executive function issues
- OFF, the RPGMaker game
- I-Ninja, the 3D beat-them-up hack-and-slash platformer for the Nintendo GameCube, as well as a few other systems
- The album Music From The Unrealized Film Script, Dusk At Cubist Castle by The Olivia Tremor Control, mostly because it also seems to be an album that is for a movie that may exist more in the mind of the listener than in any physical sense
- Dancing to this music in some sort of weird house show environment
- Wondering if anyone else wants to dance to music that sounds like this (assuredly so)
- What the dance would look like
- That’s right, this album made me consider making a TikTok for the first time
- Wanting to buy this album on CD and keep it in my car
- What sort of person and creative process could lead to making such genuinely distinct pieces of music that still hold a common theme, many common feelings, and are all just incredulously good
Some of my favorite moments
- So naturally and unconsciously moving my body to the music in a way that was peaceful and engaging
- Starting the album and deciding pretty much immediately to listen to the whole thing
- The incredibly apropos voice samples scattered throughout
- 2:00-3:00 of Storybook: Candlelight, which made me spontaneously imagine what it would have felt like to have played a SNES or perhaps PS1 era RPG as a child in the past, to have sunk many hours into it, and then, in the present, to be experiencing nostalgia for it
- The start of each track, and how truly unique it is from the previous tracks, which got me excited to see where pretty much everything would go
- The reverb/echo effect on the voices of ghost story, which created a beat of its own, and was addicting to hear in juxtaposition with the booping sounds that compose the melody introduced at 0:28 of the track, the combination of which two factors creates a luscious mix of “difficultly auditorily processed” and “easily auditorily processed,” respectively. I could probably listen to it for hours
- The incredibly peaceful and infinitely recurrable melody that opens Fantasia Mirror
- The voices in the background of the silent west, which I mentioned earlier
- The theme transition during VICTIM at 1:15 when the energy picks up and becomes more mechanical, and the theme transition at 4:55 when voice and piano enter
Overall, I would highly recommend listening to this album if you ever like listening to anything that sounds interesting and frequently dynamically changes. If you like complex compositions of sounds that you might not normally hear in music, or instruments being used in non-standard but incredibly skillful ways, then this is probably a good album for you. It seems to be priced at $7, which is one of the lowest amounts of money I've ever heard of or even considered. I will be seeking out a physical copy for myself, and using it to impress anyone who hears it in my car.