It's an exciting day for "Sounds of 2014", for today we're entering the top quarter of the Equestrian Trot 100 chart for that year. By this point, all the songs featured today will have been heard widely during 2014, if not necessarily first released in the year. As always, here's the summary of the criteria I use for deciding inclusion:
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.
I've got used to being able to feature all five songs in an edition by this point, and you know what? I can do the same again today! Yay! Here's the quintet:
25: Sim Gretina – Hearts Strong As Horses (remix)
24: Synthis, 4EverfreeBrony and FritzyBeat – Cold
23: BlackGryph0n & Baasik – Crusader (Are We There Yet)
22: SlyphStorm – Pegasus Device
21: Aftermath – Bats! (remix)
Come with me to the casb—er, past the jump break and there'll be the usual embedded YouTube videos and thankfully brief rambling from yours truly.
We start off this time with yet another of Sim Gretina's perennially popular remixes, this time of one of Friendship is Magic S4's best loved songs. This one does have even more vocal distortion than some of SG's other tracks, which is a bit of an acquired taste. Still, the beat and vocal chops are as assured as always, and the use of Dori-to's art as the cover image delights me. Not least because I bought an A4 print of that from Dori-to himself at UK PonyCon 2016 and he seemed a very nice guy. Sadly there's no official HQ download at all, not even an MP3 link in the video description. Boo!
Rule 1: uploaded to YouTube 27 Jun 2014
Quite the team-up here! Synthis last posted a Pony track as recently as October 2023, while 4EverfreeBrony has been right up there for years and FritzyBeat is still active too! "Cold" is a song about the young Celestia gaining the ability to raise the sun and winning her cutie mark. More recent canon may have jossed this a bit, but who cares? It's a lovely pop rock number with a chill feel (appropriate for the wintry theme!) and some really nice harmonies. You can only pick it up in HQ as part of the name-your-price Empty Skies album on Synthis's Bandcamp.
Rule 1: uploaded to YouTube 19 Oct 2013
Okay, this came out in 2013, but it was such a massive hit – indeed, remains so to this day – that it's hardly surprising it made the upper reaches of the 2014 charts as well! BlackGryp0n and Baasik produce one of the great Cutie Mark Crusaders songs here, a beautifully crafted song with something of an Owl City sound to it. The lyrics are all about the CMC's struggles to find their special talents, which back in 2014 still hadn't reached the delight of "Crusaders of the Lost Mark". This was followed up in 2016 by "Here We Are", but the earlier song stands perfectly well on its own. Get it for 99¢ on BlackGryph0n's Bandcamp.
SlyphStorm's track is of course inspired by Wooden Toaster's 2011 classic "Rainbow Factory", and it does help to have some idea of the story behind that (although the song pre-dated the fic). Indeed, this song uses tags from "Rainbow Factory". Even without that knowlege, though, this is a real banger of a track right from the ominous synth intro. Sure, it's about a grimdark world in which "failed" pegasi meet a terrible fate, but it's still catchy as all hay. Want it in HQ? Spend $1 on SlyphStorm's Bandcamp. The luxury of rainbows comes at a price, you know.
It's nine years now since Aftermath's YouTube account boasted anything new, let alone Pony stuff, but back in the day they were a pretty big name. The "Bats!" song from S4 was a big hit with remixers, and here's yet another example of the breed. I'll admit it's not my favourite, in that I feel the rapid beats jar a bit too much with the relatively unchanged show vocals. Sure, that was doubtless the intention, but it's still not altogether to my taste. If it is to yours, though, the track's a name-your-price pick on Aftermath's Bandcamp.
I love that HaSaH remix :D "Are We There Yet" is also a top-tier banger. I feel like I haven't heard the others before, but that Synthis track is the perfect synthesis (heh) of his style and 4Everfree's. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm genuinely startled if you haven't heard "Pegasus Device" before -- but then there are songs I don't know that turn out to be massively popular, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised.
Deleteoh, of course I have! that's not the original, is it? I assumed it was a cover o_o I maybe needed to have read the blurb a bit closer
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