LogFAQs > #953775270

The First Thing
National Park
Collapsed Expressway

I think this track speaks for itself. I'll leave what I wrote originally anyway, though.

The first thing for somebody to realize they want to know what the First Thing's appeal is, is that it's about the monologue, and whether they as a listener connect to it. If they don't, then this is just some guy with a husky voice rambling over mellow electric guitar noodling and some chill pads. If they do, then this is a lot more than the sum of its parts-- it feels cozy, friendly and earnest, as if the artist is sitting in front of you, guitar in hand, explaining why it's okay to have the blues.

And even if no other human being is listening to you, if listening to this track helps open up that little pressure valve and get all that garbage out, sometimes it makes you feel better. I can't prove this, but this is how I figure.

When listening through the bracket playlist I kept mistaking Nefertiti for a Falcom track. (This despite being familiar with the track!) There are undoubtedly differences on closer inspection (and there are people much better-versed in Falcom music who could probably point them out easily) but I think there's a similar appeal. This composition and aesthetic doesn't really grab me in general, and I don't think Nefertiti does enough for me to have it stand out in my head.

National Park is a pretty small tune, but it does a decent job evoking the peaceful, nostalgic vibe it's going for. I can see this really clicking for people who spent a chunk of their earlier days catching bugs here.

I've talked about Reach for the Moon befo-- oh. This is a nifty take on the Reach for the Moon melody, a lot bouncier and more energetic in feel and vibe, though it reaches for some melodies and progressions that feel a bit corny to me, and spends a lot of time on its tonal center. It's a track that might wear on me after a while.

Let's talk about Collapsed Expressway. Well, maybe more than just Collapsed Expressway.

In earlier VGMCs it was held (by some) as sort of a platonic ideal to separate context from track evaluation-- to judge the music entirely on its own merits, in as close to a contextual vacuum as possible. I get the reasoning behind this-- it's an attempt to control for in-context experience when it can vary wildly between tracks, so that tracks, especially ones from popular games (like this one), don't get an advantage.

It's also very hard to do. Music is almost always associated to a context, whether explicitly (as in most soundtracks) or through the context of your own personal experience with it. If that context resonates with you, you will feel it when you listen to that track.

So it is with Collapsed Expressway. It's a track I would certainly have loved regardless. It feels lush, adventurous, full of wide-eyed wonder, inviting you to explore and hope. The violins dance along coyly with the other instruments until they step forward, sweeping you off your feet with a swooning melody line.

Would it be where it is right now-- my favourite entry in this contest-- without the context behind it? FF7R was a game that I played during the early months of the pandemic, providing some bright spots during what was a pretty grey time. This plays near the beginning of my favourite segment of my favourite game from last year. It was so striking, I stood around in-game just to listen to it for a while. You know that feeling when that happens in a game, right? It's the feeling you've found a special track.

(I remember messaging Tox later that day to talk excitedly about how they had really begun to unleash Hamauzu's musical prowess in the game, linking this track. Of course, I was entirely wrong about the composer in this case! But the feeling stood-- this was what I had been looking for in the game all along. I was also playing through this game in parallel with a couple of other friends and raved about this track during Zoom calls with them later.)

So this is what I think about when I hear Collapsed Expressway-- a track that can make me feel happy just by listening to it. Is that a bit unfair to Heritors of Arcadia, which is a lovely song in its own right (the progression during the instrumental break at 2:14 is exactly what I look for in a track like this)? Yeah, I can see how it is. But in the end, I can't deny the existence of that feeling.

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Looking at that first set of matches, it struck me-- Day 1, right off the bat, features a couple of tracks that are among the absolute favourites of some of the participants. I've just raved about Collapsed Expressway, of course; The First Thing rates as a 10 from rwlh.

That's a pretty narrow way to look at it, though. Aren't all of these tracks nominated by people that really love them? UF8 pushed hard to get Touhou 14.5 Reach for the Moon to get into the contest. I just expressed ambivalence about Nefertiti's composition and style, but it's right up FL81's alley, isn't it?

And so it goes for everything throughout the contest, across all the communities that participate here now, whether it's Collen's Kaze no Notam tracks or kama's Building Mode 5 or bebr's cat samurai music. (It feels silly that I needed a reminder of this, given how sharply I was reminded of it last year during Variations on a Ra Melody and Massive X's exit matches, but here we are.)

So maybe the First Thing to know about VGMC, other than the rules, is that every track here is loved by some subset of voters, that it's among somebody's favourites, at least. So good luck to them, give everything a chance, and happy voting.