About the review

Title: 8-bit Kids with Dreams
Listen online: 
 
 download add to playlist
Artist: skyline
Genre: Soundtrack/Game: Bitpop/Chiptune
Reviewed by: Spectra on October 04, 2007 (All reviews by Spectra)

Review Feedback: 
skyline gave Spectra positive feedback for this review.

Agree		 
Disagree

Review

 Agree with this review?  
Have an opinion and want to be known for it? Share your opinion directly with the musican and start earning your Reviewer Reputation by reviewing this song.


1Overall Description
After hearing his amazingly heartfelt track "Looking Forward" I was expecting more of the same. While it's still musically/technically very solid, emotionally this one fell short, having 2 main themes that seem very close (more like 1.5 main themes), with the first one sounding profoundly like the "happy birthday song".
 
2Creativity Description
The part at :55 uses very standard descending arpeggios. The saxophone-ish part at 1:13 however adds some much needed deep tone to the piece giving parts of the piece a progressive tone much like Cyclone's old mods. Though this deep tone and progressiveness melodically is great, the lack of progression of mood (rather that it simply seems to keep the same mood in different keys) really holds these cool solos back.
 
3Artistic License Description
Aside from the "happy birthday" lead, the demo style flare is quite recognizable as "skyline demostyle". The way skyline switches chords behind leads of the same tone establishes this kind of "running through a million backgrounds" feel that's classic skyline.
 
4Arrangement Description
On one hand, there's nothing special about the instruments, it's very standard demostyle, the square waves, saws, sine basses, etc. The way they change throughout the song though (high instruments work their way to low keys, a tone change in one instrument signifies a new part is about to begin) is quite refreshing and gives a sense of newness to an "old palette".
 
5Sound Quality Description
Ok, it's very hard to rank production quality for a demo song, but I'm giving a 5 b/c it captures the feel of early nintendo-type music 100% and that appears to be its goal. No it's not going to be playable at a dinner party, club, etc. ....but that's not the point.
 
6Does it work as a piece of music Description
It's very very technically musical but sounds a bit emotionally cliched (not discussing the arrangement here but the actual tonallity of the song). If you have to think of it as "zelda levels", a song should have at least 2 levels worth of themes for variation...1:40 worth of tonal variation doesn't quite work to keep interest in mood for 3:29...on the other hand just a few chord tweaks should do a lot toward making a strong second mood to make the song sound more complete.
 
Comments

There are no comments yet. Be the first person to comment.