when Ritsuko times out

Yeah, I sure took my time.

Hellion Sounds: Crimson Nightmare (C71)
Since I couldn’t for the life of me find Hellion Sounds’ Sentence of Death, I took it upon myself to get the next best thing and downloaded this, which seems to be just another goddamn Touhou arrnage album. Why are there so many Touhou arrange albums? Sure, the music’s not bad, but just remix Pink Floyd then, huh?
Hellion Sounds – [Crimson Nightmare CD1/1 #4/11] 風神少女
Really, I cannot bring myself to like any song except this one in this album, and that’s a barely like there. Barely. I’ve only played Touhou Fuujinroku, so I don’t know any of these tunes. I have no intention of finding out either… I’d like to spend my time on more productive things, such as typing up this post or doing homework or re-encoding that lovely DVDISO rip of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro.

Unionest.NET: りあるかでんつぁ (Real Cadenza)
This one seems to be a Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ver.B arrange album. Yay! I loved MBAC’s music… I even have it on my hard drive in TTA format. Yup, and I don’t think I’ll be converting it anytime soon.
Sadly, this album lacks originality. The first song, “Catch The Dream Satchin ARM” is a repetitive piece of shit which sounds like garden variety rock. Worst of all, I don’t remember hearing this in MBAC. Hmm… NEET is nice and has tagged it for me, and it says that the original song was “Help Me!” uh…, no, not in the MBAC BGM Collection either.
M’s Yuraimbato! starts out nice. It’s a remix of Encount (Shion’s stage, my tags show), which is a pretty good song by default. Unfortunately, this is a prime example of this album lacking originality. The instruments sound good, but the goddamn chorus is where it’s at, and while it sounds good, it totally lacks the original character, and is slower to boot, and he could have at least put in a new development somewhere, instead of copying the original runs. (I don’t know how to describe that part, but in the original it’s where some incredibly fast runs, done on a synth, assault your ears and leave you going ‘whoa, how come I haven’t heard of this raito before?’) Basically Yuraimbato brings nothing new to the table, except for new instrumentation. And every monkey can do that.
I-Chu’s ‘The midday moon’ (a remix of Wonderful Boy), brings nothing to the table except a guitar which sounds badass but actually spoils the song. It deserves no further mention.
oiko’s ‘Elegant Blaze’ is a song with rather nice solo takes on the melody (Elegant summer). Unfortunately, these solo takes aren’t really as much solos as they are the baby steps of somebody who’s improvising for the first time. He’s got great technique, though. Unless he sped it up. Nothing new here either…
The next one, ‘Invisible aerial attack!’ by 鯛の小骨, I haven’t heard before but I like. It can be rather generic at times, but when the synth comes in…. yeah… I can’t say much about this because I can’t compare it to the original melody.
‘The Crimson Air’ starts off with a sound sample from a battle. It sounds like Warachia and Chaos creaming Akiha (if only I was playing Akiha!). I think you call this acid or something. Anyway it sounds good. The melody finally kicks in at 3:23… and hooray! it’s not a complete ripoff of the original song! Congrats ZTS! you may well have composed the best song in this album! Oh…. and I hear Akiha fighting back! Go Akiha! Extra points for you ZTS!
Taishi’s Unknown G Drug is also another techno style song, and it also has a nice chorus that… wait a minute, I don’t know the song! But I sure like the chorus. So it’s a good song, even if I don’t know the original.
Then I’ll skip along because there aren’t any good songs here. Really! Skip skip skip.
痛点: 猫の王国 is a great song. Why? Because it takes the end of a 1000 years and makes it into a major keyed, upbeat carnival song. Props for originality! This doesn’t make up for the rest of the album though.
岸田: MELTY BLOOD is a rock song that manages to not be obnoxious for some reason, and thus deserves this single sentence.
So yeah, most of this album is going off to la-la-land. ZTS and 痛点 (what a weird name) receive props, though. Oh, and Taishi too. A bit less.

Jikai: It seems I have an album in the works that doesn’t suck! Finally… so stay tuned!