🪨🎸 Starship Velociraptor: an amazing album

Because I don’t know what else to put on this blog and as an excuse to have another blog post, I am now reviewing music on this blog. Also, the comments on the YouTube video’s of the songs are turned off, so I am instead dumping my opinion here.

I haven’t posted anything in months. I often feel like I need to categorize posts on my website into more than just the blog. For example, that’s why the art portfolio exists. The posts on the about my own music, 3d renders and drawings could also go on this blog but I decided to split it off. When I feel like I should write down some knowledge I have I don’t go to my blog but write it down somewhere else or, just don’t. I feel like I should use my blog more and put sort of casual stuff on it.

To get to the topic of this post, since @violencia:matrix.org in the Music Appreciation room of the The Apothecary community on matrix recommended an album on 2023-04-16, I tried it and got instantly hooked on it. I liked it so much that I bought it on Bandcamp to get the audio files in lossless quality and to donate $5 to the band.

I aquired a lot of my favorite music in lossless quality to listen to it on my laptop with MPD and my headphones. Through my experimentation with MPD, I am now able to listen to all of that lossless music on my laptop and my phone via MPD, at least on my local network for now. MPD is kind of a music server. It plays back the audio e.g. via PipeWire or an HTTP audio stream and MPD clients can connect to the server to control what music is being played. There are many clients, graphical and console ones. That way I don’t have to store that huge collection of music on the pretty limited space of my space and sync the files between my laptop and my phone. I am also not dependent on any music streaming service. I have kind of aquired a dislike or even hate for them. The ads are annoying and if you pay to make the ads go away, you still don’t truly own the music. You are bound to have a network connection at all times and play by the rules of the service which is harvesting your usage data for money.

Lossless music often costs a premium. In my tests I couldn’t distinguish lossy and lossless music, so one could say lossless music is not needed. For me, it’s kind of a piece of mind thing and being able to reencode the music into different formats in case everyone shifts to new, better lossy formats.

The lyrics of the album are so poetic. They even have cool topics like, fighting against authority, being a pirate (arrgh!), being oppressed and enslaved by authorities, spaceship stuff and some funny and cheesy stuff. The whole theme seems to be space, sci-fi, epic music. People on Bandcamp are saying it’s got a 1980s vibe.

Today I was just listening to the album another time (I listened to it sooo many times now.) and 10,000 Light-Years playing and I had such a good time. I think I never felt that good listening to music. I was really feeling the song, the lyrics, the instruments all creating this beautiful masterpiece. Glory or Gold, Hyperspeed and especially Starship Velociraptor are such catchy songs. I think me liking this album so much has got to do with the band being a kind of Power Metal band, the genre of metal allmost all the metal albums I like are of.

The lyrics are being sung with so much energy and emotion. I often want to sing along, dance according to the music and pretend like I have one of those on-stage handheld microphones.

I also really like the choice of piano in Final Frontier, the final song of the album. You can clearly hear the piano at the beginning of the song. It makes me feel like it’s celebrating the history of something, looking back at it and it reminds me of the piano in the song Jedes Wort ist Gold wert from Sido and Kool Savas.

The songs even have super cool animated cartoon music videos on YouTube. Starship Velociraptor (the song) for example.

Other favorite Metal or Rock albums of me include Mutter and Rammstein by Rammstein, basically all Amaranthe albums, Bullet Hell by RichaadEB, Personified by Lollia, INTERNET PROTOCOL by MASTER BOOT RECORD, Dark Connection by Beast in Black, SUCKERPUNCH by Maggie Lindemann and the albums of дора, even though I don’t understand her russian lyrics.

I think I can wrap up the review here. I don’t think I have anything else to say.