Back to the brony music of yore now, and by the end we'll be inside the top twenty at last! This week's collection starts off with one of the biggest breakout Pony hits, to the extent that many of the recent Bandcamp comments on the track are from people with no interest in MLP at all.
This one probably doesn't need any introduction, but you're getting one anyway! Ken Ashcorp, who rather exotically lives in the British Virgin Islands, specialises in game/cartoon-inspired material, but though he's still active this is his only My Little Pony song. On this evidence, that's a real shame, as "20 Percent Cooler" is a bona fide club dancefloor banger. (Hey, can I have a job on NME now?) It's barely three minutes long, but in that time you get quite a few Pony references and a beat that's truly impossible to ignore. It's also superbly produced by 2011 fandom standards and absolutely holds up today. A shame Ashcorp disabled comments on the video; that's not his normal practice, so I can only guess that there were flamewars or something. On a brighter note, you can find HQ goodness for a measly dollar (US) on Ken Ashcorp's Bandcamp.
No. 23 gets skipped for not meeting my inclusion criteria.
Next up we have an interesting experiment from Syllith. They describe this song as being "the instruments of Octavia but the melody and percussion of Vinyl Scratch" – hence the track name. It nearly works, and to some extent anticipates the ponies' canon duet in episode 100, but it doesn't quite gel as well as that. The artist re-did the track a couple of times in 2012, first with this re-orchestrated version and then with this improved release, which Syllith described as "a more accurate version of what [they] always hoped Scratching Harmony would sound like" and which adds some pleasant percussion. I'd recommend that third version to listen to, but it's not the one that made the 2011 chart. Sadly the Mediafire download in the description is just a 160k MP3.
More Vinyl now, this time from The Living Tombstone, though it's so old that he signs the video description with his former name, "Koolfox". He wrote this as a deliberate departure from electro stuff, and it's a little more ballad-y and reflective. This isn't one of my favourites of Tombstone's songs, largely because his Israeli accent seems particularly strong here and (to my ears, at least) rather gets in the way of the lyrics. The orchestration is pretty nice, though. Look in the description for a 320k MP3.
I said a little while back that WoodenToaster's "Pinkie's Lie" (late May 2011) wasn't quite the earliest enduring brony track I knew of. Because this is. Not A Clever Pony blazed brightly in the early days of the fandom and then was gone: their last upload is dated 30 July 2011. But this song, the one they'll be remembered for, was uploaded on 24 April. Not quite their first, as there are a couple of minor (and comments-disabled) tracks from a week or two earlier. But "For The New Lunar Republic" dates from the days when some fans raged at "Celestia's tyranny". By modern standards this isn't exactly a complex tune, being largely variations on a theme. But you can't argue with over a million views! 192k MP3 download in the description.
Next time: Your fears and horrors will come true. And not just because of my writing!
he signs the video description with his former name, "Koolfox"
ReplyDeleteI had no idea Tombstone ever went by another name. o.o The things you learn!
Ken Ashcorp is a fantastic musician. It's a shame he's not more prolific, pony or otherwise.
Yep, and the Koolfox channel is still up: https://www.youtube.com/user/Koolfox/videos The very first one is from October 2007 and is a short TF2 video with the Hebrew version of the Bob the Builder theme. Here.
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