Now we return to the Equestrian Trot 100 chart for 2016. I haven't really got anything much else to say up here this time, so it's a pretty short introductory section today. Here's the usual reminder of my inclusion criteria:
Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.
We've had two weeks of being able to feature all five tracks in the relevant portion of the chart, but unfortunately the very last song this time wasn't one I could find anywhere online from the actual artist. It's not super-famous, so it has to be skipped. Sorry! Here's what I can feature:
85: FritzyBeat hugs Port Blue – Seagulls
84: GhostXb ft. Wubcake and many more – Unleash the Magic (remix)
83: Aurelleah – Rainbow Factory (remix)
82: Exiark & Chi-Chi – Life Still Left in Me (Club Mix)
81: skipped
Rule 1: uploaded to YouTube 22 Jan 2016
It's no real surprise to see FritzyBeat's name show up on a song from this era – but who, you might be thinking, is Port Blue? I'd never heard of them, and it turns out that's because they weren't an MLP musician at all. "Seagulls" was the title of an instrumental which was then overlaid with FritzyBeat's vocals. The result is a really rather nice pop song of the sort you might reasonably expect to find on the radio. It's a song about Trixie, with the perspective swapping between her and Fritzy from time to time. The mixing is by µThunder, and a fine job he made of it too. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the instrumental is by a third party, there's no Bandcamp download, but you can grab a 320k MP3 via the YouTube video description and it's on FritzyBeat's Soundcloud archive.
What we have here is a symphonic metal remix of the highly popular song from Friendship Games. The closest that film gets to a villain song, its drama is rather well reflected here. GhostXb appears to be still fitfully active on YouTube, although the last MLP song there was over four years ago. The vocals here are provided by Wubcake, most of whose online Pony content was deleted in 2020 and who has since become unpopular for reasons irrelevant to here; if you feel the need to know, search them up yourself. I'm not sure this remix quite hangs together as well as one might like, but it's probably a pretty tricky song to metallise so I may be being unfair. It's certainly good, though. Note that the song itself here is less than four minutes long; the rest of the video is a spoken, animated postscript by GhostXb's furry character. (I don't know why.) You can get the song, minus the postscript, from GhostXb's Soundcloud.
Surely WoodenToaster's "Rainbow Factory" can't need any introduction to anyone in this fandom? No, thought not. But it's been covered and remixed an awful lot of times in the decade-plus since its release, and Aurelleah takes it in a fairly unusual direction. Orchestral dubstep! If you know my musical tastes, you'll be entirely unsurprised to hear that I prefer the "orchestral" part here to the "dubstep" part, even though the whole works perfectly well. It's such classic source material, after all. You can get hold of this remix with high quality sound for $1 on Aurelleah's Bandcamp, though the artist really went to town on distribution and several more options are given. Bandcamp is usually best, though.
I'm slightly surprised that I'm not already acquainted with this Luna-themed club banger from two such fine musicians as Exiark (music) and Chi-Chi (vocals). To quote from the video description, the song "describes the moment Luna realises her exile on the Moon does not coincide with the end of her existence, but could mean so much more to her". It's a really great song that makes even me want to get up and dance, and I do not dance! There's a companion acoustic version available on Chi-Chi's account which has a rather different atmosphere, but both are well worth it. Each version is €1 on Exiark's Bandcamp (Club Mix, Acoustic Mix) but rather oddly the two-track collection of both is name-your-price.
Spectra's remix of Seagulls is one I really like :)
ReplyDeleteLife Still Left in Me is another fav :D damn, it's good to hear again
The Spectra remix is on my list to listen to! I didn't really know about "Seagulls" at all until now, not even the original instrumental.
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