Starship Velociraptor
This review was comissioned by @krinsbez
Same approximate genre of music as the last couple of cartoon music videos I looked at. Same basic aesthetic style and anime-inspired animation, at least for some of the tracks. "Starship Velociraptor" is a 2021 album from Jonathan Young/Galactikraken, and over the course of the last few years it's been accumulating animated music videos from a growing list of animators.
It's a similar kind of power metal to what TWRP did with Dan Avidan, and at least some of the vids have similar 90's anime-looking visuals to the Knights of the Light Table work that accompanied them, but as far as I can tell it isn't made by any of the same people. Which I appreciate, honestly. If this ends up being a popular genre for the 2020's, then future me will be able to comfortably think of it as a good decade for music.
By the comissioner's request, I'm tackling these in the order of video release, rather than the order of the songs on the album itself.
"Starship Velociraptor"
That background I just gave is kind of ironic, because the first track on the album - and the first to receive its Volt Animation treatment - could almost be a bespoke satire of "Starlight Brigade."
In a Tron-looking city, plastered from penthouses to pavements in holographic advertisements and commercial billboards, a beleaguered office drone is tormented by dreams of being able to purchase a "starship velociraptor." The lyrics are an infomercial, talking up the comfort, speed, and style of this glamorous consumer spacecraft. Advertised features range from such dramatic things as hundred-laser-cannon broadsides, to silliness like "ten entire bathrooms with leather-covered toilet seats, in case everyone needs to go at once." Time after time, the woman seems to get her hands on the starship velociraptor and the gaggle of sexy models who shill it in the commercials, only to find herself back in her cubicle or struggling through traffic, with the coveted product just out of her physical and/or financial reach.
On its own, the song is just a cute scifi parody-commercial, and the video is fairly well-trodden ground in the realm of anti-consumerist messaging (albeit in a more visually appealing and stylish package than most). The specific symbolism associated with stars and space in this genre of animation gives it a bit more bite, though, and makes it a pretty strong reminder of the power of capitalist recuperation. Any symbol of freedom from the system can be marketed BY the system to further enrich itself and subvert genuine thoughts of rebellion.
A work of anti-consumerist art warning about the perils of anti-consumerist art. That kind of irony always throws me. Anyway, powerful piece, no less so far how stunningly beautiful the spaceship and characters look even if their allure is meant to be superficial and hollow.
"Hyperspeed"
Continuing the trend of comparing these cartoon music videos to other cartoon music videos I've reviewed in the past, this one immediately made me think of Interstella 5555. Not because of the visuals so much (this one actually looks much less 90's anime than the previous, having a more abstract cartoony style. To a degree that almost seems like it's trying to invoke the feeling of a child's drawings, at least in some sequences), but rather the particular kind of high-speed electronic string section. It sounds enough like Daft Punk that hearing it while looking at anything even remotely space-themed is going to necessarily put me in mind of I54.
Back on Earth waiting for the damned ship to finish refuelling.
The thematic ground being covered in this one isn't the same as the previous track's, but it kind of...rhymes, I guess you could say. There's a similar duality between frustrating, lifeless planetbound scenes, and glamorous, empowering space action sequences. In this case, the lyrics don't suggest spectacle-consumerism so much as unrequited love. "If only I could be with you, I'd be an omnicompetent space fighter pilot with a ship to go with it." The end, which has our point of view character flying his ship into the sun and grimacing with mad determination as his ship is burned and crushed in its gravity well, includes lyrics about "flying too close to your sun."
Pretty sure this is a him problem, tbh. Unrealistic expectations leading to burnout and self-destruction in the pursuit.
At this point I'd be starting to think that unattainable wishes or false promises were the main theme of this album, but the next track throws me a curveball on that front. And on several other fronts too, honestly.
"Storm the Castle"
This really feels like it's from a totally different album than the previous two. Punk metal, rather than prog. Low fantasy rather than retro-scifi video. Perhaps more significantly, zero irony or introspection in its subject matter, rather than the other two's more self-critical themes.
A peasant rebellion tries and eventually succeeds at overthrowing a tyrannical monarch, set to the frenetic chorus of "Rise! Now! stand and sing - storm the castle, kill the king!" A quick visual montage goes through all the stages of the revolution, from the increasingly impoverished conditions, to the incitement pamphlets, to the brutal crackdowns, to the armed resistance, to the even more brutal crackdowns, to the stockpiling weapons for a successful decapitation strike. It covers a lot of ground in a very short time, includes oft-overlooked details (like the importance of military support for the rebellion; early on, some soldiers are seen abandoning their posts and joining the peasants in revolt) and it doesn't pull many punches when it comes to showing what the consequences of resistance often entail.
There's a little visual flourish that has the peasants depicted as herbivore furries (mostly sheep, rabbits, etc), the regime's enforcers as wolf furries, and the king uniquely as fully human. Maybe he's related to Lord Hikiji or something. Overall, the art and animation style is...kind of animesque, but only kind of? It almost reminds me of a less twee and more effortful JoCat. Apparently, the video was done by an indy duo with a similar-ish style.
One memorable detail is how, after the leader of the rebellion impales the king in his own throne room, phase 2 of the boss fight ensues when *the throne itself* turns into an NES Ganon pig monster and attacks.
The king himself barely put up a fight at all, but the throne-demon is by far the toughest opponent the rebels face in the video. The final frames of the video, coming after our deer-antlered hero has managed to slay the creature, looks down at the golden crown laying on the floor, seems to be thinking for a moment, and then screws up his face and crushes it under his new prosthetic feet.
Very blunt symbolism, communicating a very elementary democratic message. But it feels sincere, rather than pandering or performative. Not everything needs to be super nuanced or double-edged in order to be good.
"Glory or Gold"
This is the first track on the actual album, and I think the lyrics AND the accompanying music video do a good job at encapsulating the rest of it. The song is classic pirate metal, with lyrics about hopping aboard a spaceship and stealing your livelihood back from a plutocratic galactic government. The visuals are a bit more anime-leaning again, though not as much so (or quite as technically impressive) as "Starship Velociraptor's," featuring some schitzotech space pirates of the "literally sailing ships and black powder cannons in space" variety zooming around and doing their thing.
The two recurring elements that every piece so far has featured one or both of are "rebellion" and "space," so yeah, this covers the root of the album. Not much more to say about it, except that I like the pirate captain's pet space monkey.
Musically it's fine, but I didn't find it as catchy as the others so far.
"Man the Cannons"
Pirate metal again, but with a little more emphasis on the pirate than the metal this time. Has a wind and strings melody that's much more hummable than the last song, and also gives it a much more sea shanty-like sound.
The video features the same gang of pirates as before, but this time they're on a sailing ship with only a few bits of scifi tech sticking out of it, and the art style is much more abstract and watercolor-like. The lyrics are less political and more about pirating for profit, and the video is about the pirates provoking Poseidon into sending waves of ever-nastier sea monsters to attack their ship.
In the end he gets frustrated and just raises a volcano under them, resulting in the ship and crew burning to a crisp only to then happily resume their piratical careers on the seas of the underworld without missing a beat.
Cute.
"Army of Tigers"
And this track is just one gigantic shitpost.
Musically, it's standard power metal with a solid refrain and nicely varied pace. Visually, it's pretty much "YouTube animatic," albeit more polished and detailed than those usually ever get. Lyrically, it's about a guy who really, really hates the sun because it gives you sunburn and makes it too hot, and has raised a millions-strong army of tigers to make war on it. You could take this metaphorically, but I don't think it's meant that way, and the visuals are absolutely literal with no hint of anything beyond that.
From his underground high-tech bunker, he launches one tiger-based attack after another in attempt to destroy the hated star, only for them all to fail. Even the mighty trubechets capable of accelerating a living tiger to a substantial fraction of C fail him when the tigers burn up in the sun's corona, unable to get close enough to land a single scratch.
It seemed like this might be a cautionary tale about hubris...until the guy has the idea of making all his remaining tigers Voltron themselves together into a star-sized fractal megatiger and slice the sun in half with one claw swipe.
Well done, guy. Well done, tigers.
For all that he's condemned life on Earth to a cold, lightless death, the final confrontation scene makes the guy easy to sympathize with. Like, look at this smug motherfucker:
If you had to look up at THAT all day every day, then yeah, you'd start militarizing the world's tiger population too.
"Final Frontier"
Comparing this song and video to the previous one is some serious whiplash, but the transition is almost hauntingly smooth and organic. It has a lot of similar imagery, with sunlight beating down over a desolate landscape and humans glaring defiantly upward. It has a moderately similar art style, though with a bit more movement and much more anime influence (the animator seems to specialize in that) in the character designs. But the tone, goddamn. Animating these two back-to-back had to be a deliberate choice.
In a world ravaged by global warming, some surviving humans living atop the skyscrapers of a flooded city build a generation ship to flee the dead planet. The ship, the Final Frontier, is bound for a *hopefully* habitable exoplanet dubbed Terra Firma, but god only knows how long it's going to take them to get there, crammed into a horrible dark, cramped metal hold for lifespans on end. The refrain of "we are conquering the final frontier" is delivered with such cold venom and grim irony at the end of every stanza that it just gets more chilling each time.
I'm not fond of the screamo sound this song tends toward. I get that it needed to be slower and more downbeat than the rest of the album, but...I just do not like the screaming and moaning into the mic, and I doubt anything will ever change that. Still, the words are agonizing to read and think about, and the music video hits the right nerves to go with it.
The most interesting part of the video for me is the ship's captain. An elderly man who looks, acts, and is flanked by guards in a way that strongly suggests he's either one of the plutocrats who caused this situation, or the direct heir of one who came of age just a little too late to change anything (to be clear, the lyrics set the date of the exodus as 2091, which would mean that the old captain was probably born around now-ish). While we see him looking with mournful regret at the flooded city and agonizing over old framed photos of his family, he and his henchmen are still so obviously having a better time of it than the working-class refugees packed into the lower decks. He gets to have a triumphant look on his face to counterbalance the earlier sad ones, as the Final Frontier takes off and reaches escape velocity. No one else does. He and his crewmen and bodyguards are manning a spacious, well-lit bridge, while most of the passengers are crowded into essentially a bunch of metal boxes.
How much has he actually learned, for all that he seems remorseful? How much power and privilege is he planning to keep, despite knowing that he and/or his ancestors accumulated all of it via the very destruction that he's now dedicating himself to saving people from? Who gets to be captain when he dies of old age in a decade or so?
There's one verse of the song, talking about the hope of being discovered by other intelligent life, that the screenshot above really resonates with:
“We only hope we’re not alone
But who can trust us once they learn why we’re adrift?
If we can’t even trust ourselves
We are but insects, undeserving of their gifts.”
With this guy still in charge, and the same social order that allowed climate death to happen in the first place still firmly entrenched? Yeah, if I was an alien I sure as hell wouldn't trust them.
The video does have some cartooniness and levity in it to counterbalance the bleakness. The deliberately cheesy look of some of the ship interiors. The way that Earth literally *explodes* after the Final Frontier takes off (not sure how climate change would do that, exactly ). The fact that the ship's outside looks remarkably like the SDF Macross (like I said, the anime influences are back in force for this one). But still, dark.
I think it's also significant that this song was the last track on the original album. A reminder of what happens if the rebellions fail, and what our dreams of the stars might actually materialize as (at best) in that event.
"Best Band In The Universe"
And now we're right back in shitpost territory!
The pirate crew appears again. They're back in space now, and very proud of that fact. The song is almost as much rock as metal, and almost as much bombastic wind section as electric guitar. It's a parody(?) of the archetypal "we're awesome" flex song, centered on the pirate captain (who I guess is Jonathan Young's fursona?) making ridiculous boasts about what Galactikraken allegedly is and does.
They're from the future. They're immortal. Their drummer is a fucking alien, and their guitarist is a robot. They don't follow the rules. They're good and everyone else is bad. Etc.
The piece saves best for last, though. See, this track is attributed to "Jonathan Young & Ninja Brian." Ninja Brian is apparently an exception to my earlier assessment that this wasn't made by any of the same people as the Dan Avidan songs, as he's another member of Ninja Sex Party/Game Grumps. Anyway, Pirate Captain Jonathan Young Fursona introduces Ninja Bob as an entity who has already saved the galaxy at least once prior to now, and then he appears as a giant ninja perched on top of a sun...and then all the other music cuts out so he can play a low-energy keyboard solo that completely clashes with every other sound in this track.
The animation (a very DCAU-ish style, even before getting into specific details like Ninja Brian having Batman ears and a yellow chestpatch lol) is by the same animator who did "Army of Tigers," though this one had a lot more work put into it. Fully animated rather than animatic-style, and far more detailed and colorful.
...also, I think the way Young delivers the opening line might be a "Sympathy for the Devil" reference, heh.
Anyway. Silly song, silly video, fun and stupid.
"Jetpack Race"
Animated by 64 bits, this music video reaches back further into anime history, like 70's-80's, and combines it with the aesthetic of...okay, you remember that genre of CGI commercials from the late-aughts-to-early-tens era? E-surance, Geico, etc? Well, it combines old school anime with that. And a handful of video game-isms. The music keeps the last track's heavy horn element, but leans a little more techno other than that.
Content-wise, it's sort of a retreat of "Starship Velociraptor," only replace the spaceship with jetpacks, and have it end with the frustrated office drone miraculously being rewarded for spending money on a pie-in-the-sky escape from alienated proletarian life and getting everything he ever dreamed of by virtue of being the designated protagonist.
I'm pretty sure the ending is meant ironically, since the entire video (and lyrics) up until then is spent reiterating how this isn't going to work and he's just chasing a dopamine rush as a momentary respite from being aware of how unfulfilling his life is. It would really throw me if it turned out to not be irony, considering everything. But it's the kind of irony that I think a large segment of the audience will probably take at face value, and that a moderately smaller segment will *defend* on face value. Making it less effective at being what I think it most likely wants to be.
The "Starship Velociraptor" track is catchier anyway.
"10,000 Light Years"
We're back to Volt Animation, the same people who did "Starship Velociraptor," and with them the same high-end fully animated anime production as that video's. It's also, for the most part, on the much more serious end of the space-cyberpunk genre spectrum. For the most part is an important part of that sentence, granted, but still.
The mournful power-ballad lyrics tell of a man who met the love of his life a little too late in his career, resulting in him being sent halfway across the galaxy from her on an inescapable contract before he could make a change of plans. The video...well, the lyrics and the animation tell different stories, this time. In the video, a blue-haired spacer named by the captions as Magnus is crewmates with his paramour, and the thing that separates them is a deal gone bad that results in her death and the destruction of the space station that said deal had been taking place on. Magnus is the lone, wounded survivor among his crew, who gets away via escape pod with only some old photos to remember his lover by.
His pod lands him on the planet the station was orbiting, which fortunately proves to be human-inhabited. And, while recovering, Magnus makes the acquaintance of a more realistic/lowkey looking version of Jonathan Young's fursona, who is looking for experienced spacers to crew his pirate ship.
The subcaption here is a little fourth wall breaking, methinks.~
Magnus was seen among the cartoon pirates/band members in their previous appearances, so I guess this it his origin story. Time will tell if the fucking alien who plays the drums or the robot they've got on guitar will get their own dedicated backstory episodes.
The disaster's date was given as "eight years before the kraken," which I'll take to mean that it took a while for the two to meet and join up. The date of their meeting, meanwhile, is a Serial Experiments Lain reference that I doubt you need me to specify, which got me to chuckle.
There's also a final gag, where it turns out that the real reason the lady from "Starship Velociraptor" never actually got her spaceship is because its delivery was the target of the new pirate gang's first heist. Which is pretty lol.
They're not driving the Velociraptor by the time of "Best Band In the Universe," though, so either they replaced it at some point or they upgraded and jerry-rigged it beyond recognition. Well, pirates, go figure.
Interesting mix of silly and serious for this one, like I said (this even extends to the scifi aesthetics. The space station introduced in this vid, for instance, looks like it comes from a much harder scifi setting than all the recurring elements). It's also one of the few "slow songs" on the album, and not as depressing as "Final Frontier." Anyway, it's nice to see the Volt animation work again. And, um, apparently we're getting lore now, so that's something.
The last song on the album, "Settle It With a Swordfight," turns out to have gotten behind schedule with its music video's development, and thus doesn't have it out yet. So, instead, @krinsbez asked me to top off this review with another Galactikraken music video. This track is apparently a preview of the upcoming sequel album, and it and its music video just came out a couple days before my time of writing this. Wonder if the last track of SV will get a video before the rest of SV2 drops? Well, anyway.
"Pterodactyl Surfing"
Very minimal animation on this one. The song is softer and more retro-techno leaning than the Galactikraken average, almost like a metal/disco hybrid. It's another infomercial, this time from a less than reputable company advertising vacations in the Late Cretaceous, where they provide pterosaur surfing excursions among other extremely ill-advised prehistoric diversions.
Very catchy chorus ("let's go pter-o-dac-tyl surfiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing! Soa-ring through the skyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"). Other than that, not a lot to talk about, especially with the visuals being relatively minimal this time around.
Anyway. Closing thoughts.
I'm too old and disconnected to be able to credibly claim to know what "kids these days" are into. Hell, it's been over a decade since I was an example of "kids these days." I didn't feel the change happening, but it did happen. While the online spaces I hang out in do lean toward a younger userbase, I don't know how representative of a sample they are. So, take what I'm saying here with a big grain of salt.
From what I observe, "Starship Velociraptor" is an encapsulation of the early 2020's youth culture, or at least of the parts of it that you can find online.
The way that it's simultaneously absolutely sincere, and completely irony poisoned to the point where the satire is sometimes only evident by the context going in. The total mistrust of authority, accompanied by a grudging acknowledgement that it can't really be gotten away from. The open, unabashed embrace of childish aesthetics, almost more as a fashion statement than anything else. A lot of these trends started in my generation, but they've kind of gone in a different direction for the subsequent ones, and I think this album captures exactly what that direction is. I can "get" everything in this collection, I think, but I can tell that it wasn't quite made for me, and I don't think someone in my cohort could have made it.
Of course, the 90's anime fixation is just part of the standard 25 year nostalgia cycle; the zoomers and alphas didn't choose that, of course, but it's necessarily part of the cultural environment they exist in and that shapes them.
Honestly, I like what I see for the most part. Zoomers and alphas seem to be both wiser and more comfortable with themselves than we were in our youth. In this album, the latter manifests in the way irony and sarcasm are used less as a shield, and more as just a background assumption. Which means you can just adjust yourself to the ambient irony levels of the album and then take everything at face value from there, which is kind of liberating in the same way that reading much older stuff is kind of liberating. Provided you can adjust to that ambient i-toxicity level in the first place, of course.
Good stuff. I'd like to see and hear more like it.
