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whitleyschn33 · 2 years

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RWBY8 Soundtrack

I did this last volume, might as well keep at it. Still don’t have any qualifications, so take this with a grain of salt, as always.

This is going to be interesting as someone that can’t actually remember any of the vocal tracks used in the show this volume aside from the OP. Let me know if I’m missing any.

1. For Every Life

Honestly... don’t really have a lot to say about this one. The weird beat it chooses for the chorus is still weird, and it hasn’t grown on me at all, feeling too jarring and off kilter to get into - which is a shame, because the normal verses sound good. I find myself half-humming the build up into the chorus under my breath because I genuinely like that section of the song, the tempo picking up slightly for “We failed to stop our own demise” in particular has gotten stuck in my head, and it sucks that the chorus choses to abandon that build up for this off beat music that doesn’t compliment the lyrics but instead makes the entire song feel disjointed.

The lyrics are... laughably incompatible with the show, especially in the second verse. ”We sacrificed/Pledged our souls and gave up everything” - what exactly did RWBY sacrifice? They were given everything they wanted on a silver platter last volume and then betrayed the trust of those who gave them those things. You can’t call it sacrifice to lose trust that you betrayed. “Our plans of triumph torn apart” - what plans? RWBY never had any plans, Ironwood had plans that they decided to both support and tear down at the same time because for some reason they can’t understand the concept of limited resources but wanted everything. It really feels like the main cast has no self-awareness, painting themselves as purely victims in a way that feels disingenuous to the way things actually unfolded last volume. It’s self-righteous and self-pitying in all the wrong ways, but I can’t really bring myself to care at this point. It doesn’t piss me off like War did, but falls more into the same camp as the V6 opening, where I like it lyrically if I just pretend it’s not actually about RWBY - except “Rising” is a far better song musically to me.

I honestly spent more time looking at the album art and picking apart everything that I didn’t think worked about it. I dunno, I’m bored already, let’s move on.

2. The Sky is Falling

I like this one more than For Every Life - it keeps a constant, steady beat rather than whatever the hell was going on with the OP, and I like the idea of the story that it’s telling; a hellish landscape bathed in death and despair as the sky is literally falling down around you, no escape, no way to wake up from this awful reality. I can’t say we really saw a lot of this in the actual show, though. Atlas doesn’t fall until the last episode, and while we see some of this hellish imagery in the OP, we don’t really get to see this in Mantle as it’s being overrun by Grimm. The emergency lights aren’t on, we don’t see any bodies or any real indications of death beyond that one suitcase - they had the chance to go all in on the destruction a la Beacon but turned up to 11, but they just... didn’t. Still have absolutely no recollection of it being played in the actual show, so I looked it up, and apparently it plays during the bike chase. I almost wish that this had been swapped with the opening instead, since thematically the two feel like they’d fit better in each other’s place - “Sky is Falling Down” for the horror of the invasion, and “For Every Life” for JYR chasing down Oscar, not going to let him go.

I do like the refrain of “Better cover up your eyes, my friends, the sky is falling” and “Hold on now, the sky is falling down”, and again, it really makes me wish we had gotten a more apocalyptic feeling for this volume, maybe taking place over a few more days, Salem just letting her Grimm do the work because why bother when you have all the time in the world to just wait it out and let your army slowly devour the cities, using her centipede Grimm to literally tear Atlas apart from the foundations and have the pieces falling from the sky. Leaving that aside, the song is... fine. None of the lyrics offend me, though some feel a bit clunky and awkward. I wasn’t a fan of the rap section - it didn’t really feel like it fit with the rest of the song and was oddly slow for a rap? But I don’t know much about that genre of music since it’s not one I usually enjoy.

So overall, serviceable, wish it had taken a draft or two more, but fine.

3. Be Strong and Hit Stuff

Who thought that was a good title, or a good line?

Once again, I feel like I don’t really have much to say. There’s nothing musically wrong with this song, it’s perfectly fine to listen to, but it just doesn’t really do anything for me either. It doesn’t actually feel like a Nora song despite starting out in the more bubbly style they use for her, because it quickly devolves into the usual rock/metal, and then ends with this weird outro that kinda comes out of nowhere? It feels generic in its style rather than a Nora piece if that makes sense.

And then the lyrics... it really feels like they’re saying, “hey, don’t worry about it, you’re perfect just the way you are, no need to worry about yourself or the person you are right now, of course you’ll grow at some point but there’s nothing wrong with who you are now” which, for a character that’s meant to be feeling lost and unsure of who she is beyond her best friend/romantic interest, that’s not really all that reassuring to her future development. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like a Nora song - because it’s really not. It’s not Nora’s voice, it’s the singer/the writers speaking to Nora, this character-less voice speaking to Nora’s anxieties and telling her not to worry about it or self-reflect too hard. Don’t try to self-reflect and work on yourself as a person, despite the fact that that’s really the only way you can truly grow, just be strong and hit stuff like you always have without thought. You’ll become a better character without having to put any actual work into the process.

4. The Truth

Oh hey, one I actually remember.

....They wasted that instrumental on a song about Cinder doing chores. That’s such a pretty piano piece, building up to a final crescendo and high note to leave you dangling, but the lyrics... uninspired, to say the least. Next.

5. Treasure

The one that the BB shippers were screaming over.

You know, this might have been super sweet and romantic if the show had actually let Blake and Yang have a few healthy talks about their relationship and work through their issues and cement them as finding their relationship worth working through the pain of separation, but as it is, it reads as incredibly unhealthy and creepy.

They’ve been separated a day, two at most, and Blake (? That’s who everyone is saying this is from, but I don’t believe that’s been confirmed by anyone official and there really isn’t anything in this song that’s specific enough to pin to any specific character, more about that in a bit) is talking about how her life is on pause when “you”/Yang isn’t there, that her life doesn’t have a purpose or she doesn’t really exist unless they’re there, but that’s okay because she’s sure that they’ll be back real soon, but if they’re not, that’s fine, they’re willing to wait forever. I don’t think I need to point out how kinda fucked up that is, to have assigned so much of yourself to the presence of another person that them having left your side for A DAY would leave you feeling like you can’t go on with your own life until they come back. And again, if their relationship had been better defined at this point, if they’d been solidly together for the past couple volumes and had grown as characters, this could have been romantic - Lord knows there’s been plenty of songs about faithfully waiting for your true love to return to you after a long while away that have hit the mark far more effectively. This just isn’t working for me on that front, though, chief, not in the context that it’s been given. In a relationship that’s built largely on a trauma of abandonment, a song like this without any kind of resolution to those issues just comes across as creepy.

However... I do think that that context isn’t really evident in the song. If I hadn’t seen Tumblr blowing up about it being a BB song, I would not have guessed that it was a BB song, and I certainly wouldn’t have pegged it as a Blake song. Blake’s never had any kind of motif with “treasure”, and as far as I can remember she’s never had a theme of loneliness (”all alone in crowded rooms”) - that’s always been Weiss and to a lesser extent, Yang. This just doesn’t feel like a Blake song to me. If you had given me this song completely unattached to the show, I would have - well, honestly, I probably would have said it was a fan song for Merlin about Arthur from the BBC series - but if you had told me this was a song from RWBY and asked me to match the character, I probably would have guessed Taiyang. This feels a lot more like a song from Tai about Summer than a song about Blake to Yang - and I know that makes no sense for a V8 song, but this song doesn’t make sense as a BB song to me. Blake hasn’t ever waited for Yang, they were only separated for a day, Blake hasn’t had to wander through life numb waiting for Yang (especially when it was Blake that left but making this a Yang song would be so much fucking worse), Blake’s never been one to struggle with loneliness as a major part of her character, this just doesn’t fit Blake. Taiyang, though? Taiyang watched Summer walk out for seemingly an ordinary mission and completely vanish from his life, waiting night and day for any sign of her, any hint that she was coming home or that she was alive, and going through a depressive episode when it became apparent that she’d been lost. “Treasure” also just... seems more fitting a motif for Tai? I can’t say why other than “treasure” makes me think “gold” which is very much a Tai color (and there’s apparently a rumor that his allusion is King Midas which... makes absolutely no sense, if I was going to pick an allusion I would have said The Cowherd from The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, but I digress) but that’s honestly more than Blake’s got going for that motif.

I dunno - just this fails so hard at being a good BB song due to how skeevy that context makes it, but it also fails so hard at explicitly being a BB song that it would honestly work much better as a Seasonal Depression song. Moving on.

6. Friend

I didn’t listen to this one when it came out because I didn’t want to hear it after what they did to Penny, and I’m not looking forward to listening to it now.

....Nope. Nope. Nope. Not a fan. A lot of people have discussed this at length in ways far better than I could, but I really don’t like this swerve that they took from V2 Ruby assuring Penny that she’s just as real and human as anyone else, that what she’s made of doesn’t affect her still being real, to this idea that Penny is real underneath the nuts and bolts, that Penny has to be freed from her body to be human - that she’s made human rather than having already been that from the start. This song tries to retcon it so hard - “ You saw my soul/Through the nuts and bolts”, “ But I found that humanity/It came with sacrifice” - and it honestly just makes me very uncomfortable paired with how RWBY treated prosthetics and Penny this volume.

Throw in all the call backs to Beacon era that are blatantly trying to pull on your heartstrings like “See? See? Remember how much you loved Penny back then? How good of friends they were and how bright the future looked? How sad is it that it’s all been ripped away for good - again!” and I can’t feel good about it. Also, heh, funny that they have to make callbacks to Beacon rather than anything that happened between Penny and Ruby in V7 or 8... because nothing happened between them in V7 or 8 except Penny dying again. Aside from one line, you could have released this on the V3 soundtrack and no one would have batted an eye. Really shows you how well Penny was utilized for Atlas, right? How much she actually got to do and grow as a character instead of retreading the same ground from Beacon? •◡•

No thank you.

7. Awake

Does this one even count? This isn’t actually written for RWBY, just used in the show.

Getting some real Evanescence vibes. It’s alright, I guess? Just not leaving much of an impact, and knowing it’s not actually written for the show doesn’t make me want to take the lyrics all that seriously. Although, if you don’t include this track, V8 only has 6 original vocal tracks, and one’s less than a minute long. Not great. I know that with That That Shall Not Be Mentioned, production for the volume and the release of the soundtrack was pushed back and complicated, but... still. It took a half year longer than it usually takes to get the soundtrack released, with two fewer songs than they usually produce (not including acoustic covers, remixes, and instrumentals, V1 had 12 songs, V2-6 had 8, and V7 had 9, for comparison) and only one remix. It feels fairly lackluster that this is all we’re getting out of the volume - and that’s probably why I only remember actually hearing two of these in the actual show, because there weren’t that many vocal tracks to begin with.

And that’s the end. Overall? Nothing about this volume’s soundtrack jumps out at me. I can’t see myself downloading any of these songs to listen to in the future, and while nothing on the list makes me as unreasonably pissed as War did last year, nothing captures my attention like Hero did either. Kind of a straight shot of “meh” with the occasional peak of interest (good or bad) every so often.

I’m kinda tempted to do a ranking for all the volume soundtracks, but I already know what my number one and bottom three picks would be, so it would only really benefit me to see what 2nd through 5th places would end up being. Let me know if any of you would even be interested in that.

And once again, I’d like to reiterate that this is all just my opinion. Music is probably one of the most subjective things out there, and again I have no musical training whatsoever, so my opinion is no more or less valid than yours.

Have a good night, everyone.

#rwde #rwby #rwby8 #rwby8 soundtrack

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