Exiark, one of my favourite musicians in the fandom, has graced us with yet another album. To quote his bandcamp page, “This album was based on a simple concept: Stab Your friends in the back and run away…” Make of that what you will, and catch the full album review after the break!
The album open with a chilling quasi-ambient piece entitled Cold Blood, which sets up the premise for the album’s theme. Already we can hear Exiark’s skill when it comes to making deep basses and atmospheric sounds, and how insanely clean the mixing on his tracks is!
The sheer number of songs inspired by the season 5 finale alternate timelines/universes astounds me, and yet we have another one here. Tides of War is based upon the first one visited in the episode, where Sombra was never stopped. Classic Exiark wubs fill this soundspace in this song, making it feel simultaneously chill and heavy-hitting.
We saw the solo release of Second Hoof Medely on YouTube back in Februrary, and I’m glad to see it featured on this album. An original electronic track filled with sampled vocals from various songs from various season of MLP, this song starts off as an upbeat trance piece, then dives into dubstep for the second drop.
Exiark always manages to get some of the best vocalists in the fandom to feature on his songs; FritzyBeat, Chi-Chi, and Itchigotchi have all featured on past songs of his, and now Megaphoric joins that list! Hear Me Roar takes a slightly brighter approach to the sound design with supersaws to fill in behind Megaphoric’s vocals.
Another song we saw on YouTube a while back that features here is Pinkie Pie on Arsenic. This hybrid track apparently got its name from a comment someone made about it before it was released. Exiark manages to manipulate sampled voiced beyond recognition in this, I can’t figure out where some of them come from!
Moonlight [If You Follow] is a clever interpretation of BlackGryph0n & Baasik’s song of the same title from a couple of years ago (on of my favourites by them). This track takes some glitchy samples of Gabe’s vocals and overlays them on heavy midtempo beats.
And speaking of glitchy vocal samples, Exi shows a bit of love for Daft Punk by chopping up the vocals to Harder Better Faster Stronger in this next song. Aside from the vocal splices, Exiark’s custom bass sounds take center stage in the majority of this song too, with atmospheric pads and leads making the buildups feel even bigger.
The final track on the album is The Castle of Mortal Delights, a somewhat more commercial-sounding track than the rest of Exiark’s works. He’s rather secretive about the influence and meaning behind this song, leaving the interpretation of the end of this album somewhat open-ended.
Showing his usual flair for deep basses and atmospheric sounds, this album is pretty much full of the sort of songs I would expect from Exiark. However, apart from Second Hoof Medely, I don’t feel like any track in particular stands out like a few did on his previous album, Let There Be Light. This is understandable though, since Exiark has moved away to halfway around the world from his home studio, and with the tools he had at his disposal, this album is still a solid release.
This album is available to download for any named price on Bandcamp, or for free from Mediafire (if the Bandcamp credits run out), and I expect we’ll see some more songs from it on Exiark’s YouTube channel in the coming weeks.
Horse Music Herald 