Formative Albums, Part 9: The Cat & The Castle
The Cat & The Castle by Zenuel
(Bandcamp link!)
From a story-driven concept album with a zillion vocalists, to a story-driven concept albums with almost no vocals whatsoever. (Maybe some spoken narration in one or two songs toward the end.)
Of all the places to find an album, this one came from an ad banner when I was browsing Fur Affinity. Zenuel is a furry musician who, at the time, was known for... uh...
Look, you know how I mentioned that my exposure to Rhapsody was eye-opening because it gave me an entire new genre to delve into? I'm still not sure what exactly you call this kind of music, or where one would go to find more of it, except for more Zenuel albums. (And even then, he changed genres and Corpse Medicine is more a soothing ASMR ambience piece akin to the Hiiro soundtrack than anything else.) If you have any leads, please let us know! This is fantastic and we're definitely interested.
The Cat & The Castle is a sort of... chiptune... trance... thing? It definitely has chiptune-like sounds in it; with styles and sound fonts ranging anywhere from NES/Famicom to Amiga to what I swear reminds me of Ultima VI in "The Ash Golem." It freely mixes in modern instrumentation as well, though, so it's more like music that happens to include various chiptunes as instruments/samples along with all the other instruments, rather than any kind of full-on chiptune piece that could be played actual hardware. "Trance" is kind of a catchall umbrella term for anything from headache-inducing club wubs to new age spa music, so it's almost useless as a label. So.. I don't know.
Anyway, The Cat & The Castle is a... whatever genre this is... concept album. It's the story of the Cat, who is on a video game-like quest to enter and conquer the three-story Castle, and to defeat the villain residing in its core. There are almost no lyrical cues (again, some spoken word toward the end but that's about it;) most of it is a story one is meant to infer from the track titles and the sound of the music itself. Each track captures a stage in the Cat's journey--a room, an obstacle, an enemy, an event that happens. The moods are all conveyed amazingly well, too. As one example, listen to the... I don't even know what you would call that instrument, but that repeating one-two reverberating riff that serves as the introduction to "Save Point" and tell me that doesn't just somehow sound exactly like a save point.
We have been making a habit of re-listening to each of these albums when we do the posts for them. Some of them we hadn't heard in ages, and reconnecting to them was an important part of the experience. Making The Cat & The Castle the 9th album of the ten we chose ended up being torturous for us, because out of everything in this entire list, there was no album we really, earnestly wanted to listen to again more than this one. We hadn't heard it in a while, it's unique and incredible, and we just... really wanted to hear it again! But we had eight other albums to get through first. :(
Here we are now, though, and it was well worth the wait. We really missed this one, I think, especially since we're still waiting for that Rhapsody-like launching point. This has the feeling like it will become the start of something someday, though, if only we could figure out what. It is a key in search of a door. This is a cross-posted entry that originated from https://kjorteo.dreamwidth.org/470248.html. Please leave all comments there; I am no longer actively maintaining my LiveJournal blogs.