LogFAQs > #964422147

12st
Game: Murasaki Tsurugi
Title: Healthy Unicorn Girl
Composer: watson
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq9mBei8XVo

watson(gym lea_

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

I am so thankful I can finally confidently say this after ...so many years of wanting to but not being able to. KEEP IN MIND: only 5 songs in the top 12 were new discoveries, and this was one of those. So even if the number here is 12. The "real number" in terms of nom consideration priority here is...5...I like that number (it's also likely this would raise in a re-rank...which is almost petty of a difference to consider about a song that's already this high up). but the 9.9 zone starts here. everything from 12 to 1 is pretty much as good as you can get, and i favored stuff i was familiar with at the time, so if you managed to get this high up with something /new/, that's astounding. congratulations on nomming one of THREE songs that are confidently in my planned noms list for this year!

in hindsight, this song is even more my thing than i was thinking from the start. Like the fact that so early in (like at :11 and lasting for quite a while), you have an arpeggio synth going in 5/4 over the 4/4 everything else, sounds very...Wataru Ishibashi (even...axis pillar, specifically! BOTH 4/4-against-5/4 tunes and doing so in nearly exactly the same way...so cool). Overall this song sounds like ishibashi tho in a ton of ways, but i've made the ishibashi-watson comparison before, i'm just hearing it way more strongly on this song because this is THE watson song that made my ears perk up and realize i needed to listen to "watson"

i guess extended chords alternating between the major and minor version of themselves as a prominent aspect of the progression is a trope i like a lot; so what a great way to start. especially in this particular choir sound and these keyboards and all that.

then there's the axis pillar part and THAT part solidifies transposition-based chord changes, something i almost always love. that incredibly harsh synth doing like "bluesy solos" is such an odd mismatching contrast between the types oof notes being played ("oof" was a typo of "of" but i kept it because of "oofeight")

:46 transposing up a minor third with sus chords over and over is a very good prog trope (i don't know why i am calling this a "trope" because it is extremely weird and i can not even think of any other song that does it...it just seems like there would be a lot of songs that do it)

THEN there's the all out atonal bit at 1:06 which is great and very "keith emerson(mccoy tyner)" ((i have been bullied into saying mccoy tyner instead of keith emerson for stuff like this by Norio Nakagata who is subtweeting me in his song title for the album "FM Vertex II", i swear, if my premonition is right and the power of CHz brings Hideaki Kobayashi to FM Vertex III......the power will be so great, it will compel me to generate my darkest quartal chords out of my mouth))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l7KvvZTKFw

one time, my brother (who has very similar music taste to me) heard me listening to this song from a distance. walls between us, we were in different rooms in the same building, and instantly PM'd me with like "WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO" when that piano bit at 1:06 happened, saying it was "based" or something like that i think...

1:56 is some very CREEPY atonal piano; it's sorta quartaly, but a lot more dissonances added in to make it so that it makes "Thermosphere" from Einhander's intro sound "cute" by comparison

the total random cut out of the guitar and cut in of the harsh synth at 2:43-2:45 is one of the strangest moments in a song in this topic to me. i can't even think of any time I've heard a production choice like that in a song that seemed like it was intentional; there's some like...70s stuff, that has moments like that by accident-ish due to limitations. but this is like...what? Why did he do that? I dont KNOW. I dont CARE because it is VERY COOL. it's a very uncommonly seen form of "glitchy distance from reality" that's pretty simple, yet i can't really think of any places i've heard this total random out-of-nowhere cut out like that. ar tonelico production is all about these precisely timed things like that, but this is just totally slapped in at an amazingly imprecise time for a serious cut out like that...i guess overall. this song is "messy" in a norio hanzawa way which i talked about in like 40 writeups as a thing i think is cool. but it's again, a strength of this to me. The mismatch of "live feeling playing" but very plastic and mechanical heavy machine-like actual synthetic sounds is great.

this song really pulls out all the stops in terms of intensity and weirdness and it keeps unveiling newer ideas i hadn't thought of as possibilities for ways of ramping up that intensity as it goes. the drums and overstimulating bombardment of this whole section late is golden

I'm really fascinated by how late the section at 2:56 comes in, it's one of the most emotionally..conventional and like...MORE "melodic and catchy" than even a more normal-exterior watson tune?! It's a perfect climax, and maybe the inverse of what some people might approach the idea of "climax" of a song with, where you have the most chaotic bits built up to. here the chaos is pretty much everything up until then, and that's the HEROIC REPRIEVE where you know that you can never abandon your friends who you will fight for to your last breath