LogFAQs > #937792992

The Filthy Mind (Theme of the Hive Mind)
Jazzy NNYC
Douwa Kairou

The Filthy Mind (Theme of the Hive Mind) is my 36th favorite in the contest! i think anyone who has an ounce of an understanding of my taste in music should not be surprised that i like this song. I like prog metal. i like glitchy things. i like odd time. i like "edgy" and "dark". I don't want to talk in too much detail about this, because again, i will go in plenty of detail when it's time for this one to show up in my topic, but yeah. It is not really too much a spoiler that I like this song

Sand Canyon 3 is my 62nd favorite in the contest! this is a good example of Kirby music being strangely intricate even when it's a simple short cute fun happy exterior like this. This is EXACTLY the type of chord progression I always explode about, pretty much every single chord change is a modulation, you can't just jam any given notes within some unchanging lame pentatonic scale on a shamisen over this, you have to hop all over the place and change scales basically every chord to do this justice. If judging purely on "what song do i think has the most attractive chord progression in the contest" this would be ranked near the top of my ranking, even though I ranked it down at 62. Only reason this is low as it is is because there's not as much to it as other things basically. Instrumentation is super fun, fake flute and fake tuned metallic percussion, it's BEAUTIFUl. I love all the snes delay echoes mmmmm~!

closer match than you'd think, despite the numbers (is that a ranking topic spoiler? who cares). I'd be more likely to go sand canyon if it were not so small but it is hard to compare something that is really small to something that is really big like filthy mind

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-[Disco Necropolis is my 182nd favorite in the contest! : ( I genuinely can not stand listening to this but I notice a lot of people with music taste similar to me love this track. i guess it isn't that surprising though, it has the kinds of timbres i'm attracted to (FM synth and FM synth mallet perc as a primary instrument at that!), and is intricate jazz-fusion-adjacent composition at parts. but i'm way more turned off by fast oom-pah loompa goofy carnival (especially "goofy carnival halloween"...please make halloween more edgy...) song than most people who like the stuff I like I guess. No other Skeleton Boomerang song would be ranked this low to me of what I know, I like the soundtrack's general style (I find +tek slightly more engaging than the yasui he imitates usually), but this just has too big of a portion of it that's banjo kazooie-y that no matter how cool everything else is i can't get into it. These harmonies are great, sound design is cool, it sounds like a more polished undertale track in some ways, i hope +tek keeps making cool music that sounds like this soundtrack but not this song!]-

-(Jazzy NNYC is my 18th favorite in the contest! I can't believe i said disco necnckjnrgeokr was "jazz fusion adjacent" when it's in a match against this of all things lol. This is probably the most "accurately" any piece of vgm I know of has imitated the sound of like, this exact very specific tonally weird odd time synthy jazz fusion i guess haha. I tried to get this in last year but FAILED due to a technical error (it would've gotten in had it been listed properly and not accidentally split into two separate entries in the spreadsheet), so I guess i'm glad it's in NOW. i don't even know where to begin with this thing. like a big chunk of my fondness for it is because "it sounds like" it sounds like ALEX ARGENTO it sounds like VIRGIL DONATI it sounds like TRIBAL TECH (that one might be pushing it) like ok yeah it sounds like "jazz fusion" subgenre, but this is like the exact subsubgenre of jazz fusion I like most!!!!
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These warpy rubbery synth sounds are so fun! Chord chunks parallel harmonized transposing around like a VIDEO GAME SONG INSPIRED BY JAZZ FUSION. I love the FUSE out of the Devil Engine OST and this track's without a doubt my favorite from it. It's a rare gem to find something that sounds this tight to this style in VGM. It's kinda the opposite of what I said with Einhander lol, "this genre only exists in vgm", this is the opposite, there's very little VGM that is like this exact zone (despite how commonly "jazz fusion" is an inspiration to vgm composers), but there's entire nonvgm bands where every song sounds like this (though if this was on an album with most of that stuff, it'd still be among my favorites from them). Someone get allan holdsworth to do a game ost oh wait : ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( (
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Maybe it's underselling something as unique as this to compare it to so many existing artists. The stuff this does is astounding and distinct, I value it just as much as anything else in it's sub-sub-sub-genre and it blows much adjacent stuff out of the water, thrilled this piece of music is in a video game.
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One thing I like about this is how it's not very upfront about the fact that it's in 7, I actually didn't notice it was in odd time at all the first time I listened, it's such an unusual (but somehow natural/smooth feeling) grouping(s) that it's easy for it to slip by in observation. It doesn't call attention to its unevenness with any patronizing guidance to express its rhythmic groupings, though it doesn't hide the fact that it's weird either. It's not uniformly accented in any one place and I love that about it. even though so much of my 'identity' is 'likes odd time signatures' a lot of the time odd time music pisses me off because it feels like it's trying so hard to help you keep count alongside it moreso than any actual 4/4 music ever does. "ONE-2-3-4-FIVE-6-7" spoken with really heavy rigid annunciation to make sure you don't get lost is how so much odd time stuff feels, but this isn't at all victim to that. It lets itself be what it is and leaves you to figure it out if you want. but you don't have to if you don't want to you can just listen to all the cool sounds in the song if you want!
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Also it's actually not entirely just straight 7, there's one single 4/4 bar at :32 and a 15/16 right before the loop but it's so fucking subtle it's insane. the ambiguity of the transition to :38 is really appealing to me, the way the first sax hit doesn't land at all on beat one so it feels like the start of the bar is elsewhere. I could endlessly just list moments from this i love. haven't even begun to talk about the tonality beyond the vague stuff i said already but i don't feel like it so i won't sorry to the 3 people who'd care about that
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The really crystalline part at 1:24 is beautiful and a nice welcome breeze of fresh air when it comes in. It's also the most rhythmically