Song of the Week! 18 August 2018

Now that the final couple of Taiko albums from the 8-fold Clarice Disc soundtrack project have been finally unveiled, here's the last in our small cycle of double feature, starring one song from each of the last two album releases.

Hoshikuzu to Rinia to Boku (星屑とリニアと僕) feat. Yuu (pLumsonic!)

Version
All	x4 (206)	x5 (290)	x5 (404)	x8 (707)

 Taiko 0 Y, Taiko 3DS 3, CD CC-7
 174.55-178.97
 none
hoslin


Our pick from the Baby Castella album is the second song in Taiko gaming that was brought up by the same composer/singer duo that gave us the Classic-genre Maow: renowned Bandai Namco musician Rio Hamamoto (濱本理央) and indie unit pLumsonic! (プラムソニック)'s singer Yuu (結羽). We take you back to our former Maow Song of the Week feature (link) for some more details about the two artists, while here we'll be digressing a little bit more on the song itself.

Hoshikuzu to Rinia to Boku ade its Taiko debut with the third Nintendo 3DS videogame, starring as one of the default Namco Original newcomers. With its title/songID label pointing to a tentative English title translation of "Stardust, Linear and Me", it's currently speculated in high reguards on how the song's singing subject is actually the linear motor, an electricity-fueled mechanism that is used to ignite several moving apparatuses, from terrestrial movement (cars, monorails, ...) to spacecraft propulsion. With the official lyrics set coming by, this inquiry might have a definitive answer soon enough!

Despite the BPM range fluctuation being addressed for the song at hand, Hoshikuzu to Rinia to Boku generally flows at a constant BPM value, with speed shift being set to generally accomodate either 1/12-based charting sections or the scrolling speed-enhanced drumrolls passing by. The Oni chart for this song, in particular, bathes itself in many cluster time metric shifts, with back-to-back cluster successions being just as dangerous as the many changes from the usual 1/16 note-placement metric, complete with some nasty 1/24 density spikes just to mess with Full Combo attempts some more.

No Gravity

Version
All	x4 (104)	x6 (156)	x7 (311)	x10 (674)

 Taiko 0 R, Taiko PS4, CD CC-8
 142-284
 none
nograv


After a lyrics-powered song, here's a full instrumental piece to round the soundtrack-related features out! No Gravity, like the featured SotW pick before it, can currently bolster one single release for both the console and arcade fronts; unlike for Hoshikuzu to Rinia to Boku, however, this track made its debut on the arcade rooms first.
During its release week, one conversation between the official Taiko no Tatsujin Twitter account and one of its followers (back when the people behind the Taiko series actually cared about fan interaction stuff) has pointed to the initial discovery that No Gravity's composer was a Taiko series 1st-timer contributor; we had to wait, however, until this track's reveal for the Katanuki soundtrack in order to find out who's truly behind it: an individual known by the nickname of Lyo. Unfortunately, that's all we know as of now...

Taking a page from other modern Oni modes with a slim note count in the likes of Suuhaa 2000 and Kokorobo, here's another song where the low-accuracy ratio is definitely stricter in order to reach a Norma quota for the song. It's all fun and games up until the first 1/24 long cluster hits the fan... from the Go-Go Time portion onwards, here's a serving with some of the most brutal deathstream-based sections in recent memory, coupling taxing base BPM enhancements with a generally handswitch-focused latter half where every ounce of attention counts, couple with the energy required to withstand it.