Far Out There: Character Soundtrack - Stilez

Last time, when we were doing Bridget’s playlist, I blathered on and on about how she’d only like some very specific breeds of heavy metal, since she’d like the speed and energy, but a lot of it would be too clean and technical for her tastes. Now let’s talk about that very exact thing! This time, our character is Stilez, and everybody’s favorite giant catgirl is all about POWER METAL. Well, that and certain strands of speed metal and the faster extremities of hair metal, but the core of Stilez’s musical tastes consists of a thick, over-caffeinated core of DragonForce-style power metal. Much like how Bridget’s soundtrack coalesced around Motorhead, the early drafts of Stilez’s playlist were at least 50% DragonForce, with other songs squeezed in where I could. It’s a perfect fit, really. DragonForce is loud and fast, like Stilez, they’re bombastic and overpowered, just like Stilez, and they’re laughably childish and ultimately harmless, just like Stilez. I mean seriously, I like ‘em just fine, but DragonForce are the TRUE innovators of bubblegum metal, not BabyMetal. Oh, and much like Motorhead on Bridget’s playlist, my harping on how DragonForce are the perfect favorite band for Stilez obscures that fact that they only turn up twice on the final track list. Again, I used them as the template, but wound up squeezing most of those original choices to make room for stuff from other artists. In the end, the playlists is bookended with the one DragonForce song everybody’s heard –“Through The Fire And Flames” – as the opener and “Valley of the Damned” as the penultimate track. 

The other DragonForce picks (God help me if I can remember which ones, if you can tell 90% of DragonForce songs apart, you’re a liar) gradually gave way to some other power and speed metal stalwarts like “Battlefield” by Blind Guardian (aka “The Other Robot Unicorn Attack Song”) or “The Dragon Lies Bleeding” and “Fury of the Wild” by Hammerfall. For the record, I also tried to fit in “Highlander (The One)” by Lost Horizon for the longest time, the source of that wordless “WAAAAooooOOOOAAAAAAHHHHHAAAAAHHHHHooooooOOOOOOOHHHH!!!!” vocal sting that was a meme for a while. Unfortunately, that’s the single best part of the song, and it’s only at the end… of a song that’s twelve minutes long. There’s no way Stilez would have the patience for a song that long, or that dull. Thankfully, Pandora came to the rescue. This is another instance of those old character stations and their mysterious song selection algorithms introducing me to bands I never would have heard of otherwise. Thus, we also include “Getting; Dangerous” by Axel Rudi Pell and “The Wind Beneath My Wings” by Sonata Arctica… and if you’re wondering, yes; that is a power metal version of the Bette Midler song. Because life is amazing if you allow it to be.

There are also a few “real” metal bands to balance out the camp a bit, too, and I’m talking about the big guns. No less than Iron Maiden and Judas Priest made it onto this playlist by its final form, with Maiden in particular represented by probably the most obvious choices imaginable: “Number of the Beast” and “Run to the Hills.” The obscurity-loving snob in me desperately wanted to go with some SLIGHTLY less familiar tracks like “2 Minutes to Midnight” or “The Trooper,” but for some reason I kept going back to the two everybody knows. I guess it makes sense that Stilez of all people wouldn’t have the patience to dig for any deep cuts. At least the Judas Priest pick is a bit off the beaten path, going with “Metal Meltdown” as opposed to something like “Living After Midnight” or “Breaking The Law.” Actually, I HAD put “Painkiller” in the designated Priest slot for a while before swapping it out, and I can’t for the life of me remember why I did it at the time. NOW it makes since because it fits in with the unintended trend of songs with “Metal” or “Rock” in the title.

Seriously, I didn’t mean for it to happen, but the whole “Metal bands singing about Metal” trope ended up being SEVERELY over-represented on the final playlist… which, again, probably fits Stilez’s need to keep things really, really simple and straightforward, but still. Dream Evil contributes “Fire! Battle! In Metal!” which gets a bonus for all the exclamation points.  Finland’s favorite real life monsters Lordi double up with “Bringing Back the Balls to Rock” and “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” And speaking of theatrical monsters, Seikima-II (somewhat ironically in this context) provides “Heavy Metal is Dead,” and also fulfill my compulsion to include at least one Japanese band in as many playlists as possible. Oh, and the final track is also “God Gave Rock & Roll to You II” by some obscure little group called Kiss, who are TOTALLY just a lame bunch of Seikima-II wannabes.

And because Stilez is essentially just a giant child, we of course need to include at least a few kid show themes into the mix, which actually ISN’T as weird a thing to say as you might think. First we have Lion’s version of the Transformers theme from The Movie, which a surprising number of people these days seem to forget WASN’T the theme to the show. And also there’s Ron Wasserman’s “Go Go Power Rangers – Redux,” technically not the original show theme, but it’s the same guy rerecording the same arrangement, so it might as well be. Man, remember back when kids shows had awesome themes? I should have thrown in Silverhawks just for good measure…

(There’s honestly not a lot to remark on regarding the act of putting this one together, aside from the usual warning that videos of Japanese artists are blocked in Japan, so sorry if anyone can’t get the Seikima-II song to play. If anything, the most noteworthy thing about this one is how exhausting the act of listening to these songs again ended up being. I don’t really listen to metal in general very regularly anymore, and these songs in particular stay out of rotation most of the time these days. It’s not that I don’t like them anymore, but… well… Okay, remember that big long “I don’t like anime conventions as much as I used to” blog post I did? …no, not that one, the other one. I mentioned that I have trouble listening to most of the Japanese music I got into via the convention scene, because I’d always listen to it AT conventions to keep myself hyped up. Now, after years of getting totally exhausted, I can’t listen to that stuff without triggering a Pavlovian response and getting tired again. Well, it just so happens that I developed a pretty hefty taste for power metal right around the height of my congoing schedule, and for a while it was ALSO one of my go-to “stay awake during this long drive” convention music choices. It also helped that Japan has always been one of metal’s more ravenous markets, so getting more and more into Japanese rock meant discovering a lot of new metal bands anyway. Alas, that means it’s also fallen victim to the same mental associations as the Japanese stuff. I seriously can’t listen to DragonForce or HammerFall or any of those other bands I got into around that period without getting a little sick to my stomach, because these sounds are so connected to the memory of being physically DESTROYED at the end of a convention. Admittedly, though, I just don’t listen to stuff this fast and loud as much as I used to in general. I mean, as soon as I’d finished checking the region restrictions on the videos, I spent the rest of the day listening to vaporwave. I am a living, breathing sudden tonal shift.)

Stilez's YouTube Playlist