January 2022 Line Rider Roundup
WOW have we kicked off 2022 with a bang! This roundup is a little late, in part because we’re still finishing up the Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2021, and in part because holy shit there were so many good tracks to talk about. Enjoy!
Ethan Li and Ava Hofmann have returned for some excellent guest reviews, and we also have a new guest reviewer, gavinroo538, who would like to introduce himself:
Yo, I'm gavinroo538! You might know me as the guy who recently released the 54-minute Line Rider film A Rush of Blood to the Head. People also know me for tracks such as Trees, Kitchen Sink, Innuendo, and more. I love doing what I do in Line Rider and I hope you enjoy my reviews!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended
My Pal Foot Foot - Ava Hofmann
[cw: abuse, suicide]
Guest review by Ethan Li:
In the late 1960s, when Helen, Dot, and Betty Wiggin were teenagers, their father Austin Wiggin decided to push them into his vision for their future: the three sisters would form a rock band called “The Shaggs”. Instead of making friends at school or developing a social life, they would be homeschooled according to a schedule designed by Austin. It was a life where the sisters would be forced to practice music over and over for most of their waking hours, where they would face harsh criticism from Austin for playing badly. After a year of this, Austin used most of his savings to record a studio album, “Philosophy of the World”. Naturally, the songs on it sound like they were made by people who didn’t know how to play music together; when I tried to listen to it, I gave up very quickly. The sisters continued playing for nearly ten years, finally disbanding once Austin died of a heart attack.
This backstory is the narrative heart of Ava Hofmann’s track My Pal Foot Foot, set to a song of the same name from The Shaggs’s album. She creates brilliant and empathetic black comedy from The Shaggs’s dark past with a perfect combination of an emotionally expressive and scratchy drawing style, a visual narrative which imaginatively connects the song’s lyrics to the band’s backstory, and a wide-eyed character whose pained faces throughout the video express a combination of “in perpetual dread” and “on the last straw”. As the main character searches for their lost cat, Ava shows that they’d been depending on the cat as their only way of coping with life, and also that the cat isn’t so much lost as it is running away and trying to avoid being found. Then Ava reveals that the character is also on the run, trying and failing to escape a controlling parental figure who declares (in a paraphrase of the song’s lyrics): “If Foot Foot didn’t like to roam, he would still have a home.”
This plot development upgraded my appreciation of the track from “hahaha this is really darkly funny and this character’s faces are so relatable 😂” to “holy shiT 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬 this track hits me so personally and holds such a clear and unsettling mirror of my feelings about my parents, that it’s now my favorite out of all the Line Rider videos I’ve ever watched”. This may be a bold claim, so I’ll explain myself.
In the late 1990s, when I was a kindergartener who had recently moved back to the US from China, my mother decided to push me into her vision for my future: I would learn how to read and write Chinese at home. Instead of attending Saturday-morning Chinese school like the other Chinese American kids or playing outside with the neighboring kids, I had to stay at home practicing and taking tests every day after school. For a few years it was a life where I’d be forced to practice reading and writing over and over, where I’d be punished (usually by spanking and/or rulers) when I did badly on those tests or when I started misbehaving in response to the punishments. I started fantasizing about running away, but because my parents would threaten to kick me out or send me to military school when I talked back or resisted them, I learned that (to paraphrase My Pal Foot Foot) if I roamed then I would no longer have a home. Without any realistic way out, my fantasies of escape transformed into thoughts of suicide. My only trusted friends were a few teddy bears who accompanied me as I learned Chinese and witnessed me as I received punishments. In a way, they were the innocently childlike and nonverbal parts of myself which I split off into external beings as I gradually became a self-to-be-punished. But I also transferred my feelings onto them by throwing them, having one hit the other, even kicking them once when I reached my breaking point with Chinese. If they could’ve, maybe they would’ve run away to escape their abuse. As my friends (as parts of me), they deserved to be treated with more care and respect (as a child, I deserved to be treated with more care and respect). In the aftermath of my early childhood, I hope I’ve given them all the love and tenderness they deserve (as an adult, am I giving myself all the love and tenderness I deserve?).
When I think about it logically, the definition of “abuse” is consistent with many of my experiences with my parents - from early childhood until a few years ago when I took a break from talking to them, for my own sanity. But when I try to understand this at an emotional level, I get stuck. In school, the word “abuse” was always named as physical violence, of the variety depicted in the ending animation sequence of UTD’s Silhouette, or like the things I acted out in front of my parents with my stuffed animals; I never learned the words to describe my experiences in a way that I might feel understood. So when I watched Ava’s My Pal Foot Foot, when I saw so many aspects of my childhood experiences and feelings reflected back at me from a visual narrative made by somebody else, when I found myself empathizing with the main character and worried about their well-being, I felt startled and validated. By watching the track, finally I could see a direct connection between the thoughts in my head and the feelings in my chest. Finally I could see my childhood from an external perspective, not just through my own lens with all its residual distortions of self-doubt and self-criticism. Perhaps my reaction is like the impact other people got from the ending of UTD’s Silhouette, which hadn’t ever emotionally connected with me. In this way, My Pal Foot Foot helps me appreciate Silhouette more - even if the latter’s ending still feels alien to me.
One thing which excites me about multiple artists approaching the same topic from different angles is that they can explore different nuances of that topic. While UTD’s tracks point at themes of disclosure and healing, Ava’s track has a really interesting parallelism between the main character’s relationship to their cat and their relationship to their parent. This is most explicit in the latter third of the track: right after attempting to escape and being caught by their parent who says “Never leave”, the main character finds Foot Foot, catches them and picks up the cat amidst much clawing and scratching, and says the same words: “Never leave.” I think this is a direct reference to the ways violence and harm tend to propagate in cycles, both intergenerationally and among peers. With My Pal Foot Foot, Ava continues to show us the sheer depth of social complexity which can be expressed in Line Rider, even beyond what she showed was possible with My Boy (Mirror to Mirror). But how might we interrupt those cycles of abuse, so that it stops with us? How might we repair ourselves and our relationships? Can we understand the roots of someone’s abusive behaviors in a way that would help us/them break the cycle? Ava’s track doesn’t claim to have the answers, though it does provide a fresh opportunity to think about these questions. Such an opportunity, when offered without the urgent demand of responding to an immediate situation which threatens someone’s safety, is a priceless gift.
I’ve never rated a track in a guest review here, but My Pal Foot Foot is just too personal for me to hold back - my feelings compel me to assign a rating: 🙌🙌🙌
I only really have one thing I want to talk about to add on to Ethan’s amazing review above, which is how My Pal Foot Foot works not just narratively, but as a piece of art made in Line Rider specifically. First, the video opens with fittingly sloppy, awkward music-sync movement juxtaposed against a title sequence featuring the nervous expressions of the kids in the band. Then Bosh drops into a landscape that we travel through for the remainder of the track, that also serves as something of a sequential timeline, like a continuous comic strip with no divisions. It’s a technique that’s highly reminiscent of One Eyed Giant, where Bosh moves continually to the right but the giant keeps showing up, and it works so well that I’m left wondering why nobody I can think of has tried copying this visual storytelling technique until now, over 15 years after its release. Bosh’s movement fits into this beautifully too, interacting with the scenery in ways that add to the visuals without ever getting distracting, and traveling at just the right speed to convey all the story beats to the viewer and keep the text legible. This established structure helps later story beats land really powerfully, like the kid jumping out the window in an attempt to escape the abusive parent, or chasing and catching the cat at the end. Even as recently as a year ago, I would have had doubts that stories this complex, important, and powerful could ever be told effectively in Line Rider, so despite the heavy subject matter, My Pal Foot Foot points toward a future for Line Rider that is very bright indeed.
🙌
The Wild - Andrew Hess
You probably already know from tracks like Formation and Where the Grass is Green that Andrew Hess has an uncanny ability to pull off a slow burn that starts out so simply and then build to a climax so unexpectedly breathtaking that you can’t help but get completely sucked in. But every prior slow burn ever made by Hess pales in comparison to The Wild. It starts so simply and quietly, slowly adding bits of scenery such as flowers, a sun, trees synced to the guitar a la Where the Grass is Green, and even waterfalls that evoke Branches’ Pink in the Night, before slowing down in front of a striking forest-covered mountain vista. Then, suddenly, clouds fall away to reveal a night sky leaving Bosh in a massive freefall as orchestration sweeps in. A comet flies past animated stars; a ribbon floats through space; fireworks go off; a massive planet emerges and disappears, and then it’s over.
I screamed out loud approximately seven times in under two minutes while watching The Wild. It combines some of my favorite parts of some of my favorite previous releases of Hess’s - the freefalls through the night sky of Run Away With Me, the music-synced trees and nature themes of Where the Grass is Green, the epic slow-burn of Formation, and even the subtle, delicate movements of Release Me. The Wild is a stunning work of sublime art that I would highly recommend to anyone and everyone.
🙌
Lipstick Stains (Remake) - Ava Hofmann
The remake of Lipstick Stains is perhaps the only example I know of where a remake of a Line Rider track is dramatically better than the original, while still keeping the spirit of the earlier effort intact. The rough, awkward sledding over long, continuous squiggles from the original Lipstick Stains (Hofmann’s first release) is still present, but her use of the shade mod and color layers features, as well as her much stronger eye for composition and greatly improved control over Bosh’s movement, all come together to create a piece that is stronger in every way, including in its ability to evoke emotions. When the blue fills the screen to become sky, it’s breathtaking. When the blue forms into a head of hair and a pink hand reaches up to brush it away from a face with a pink mark near the corner of the blue face’s mouth, it’s perhaps the most romantic drawing ever crafted in Line Rider. It’s impossible not to feel something when the pink and blue elements surge together in a swell of overlapping scribbles - it’s such a minimalist portrayal of desire that also somehow feels deeply intimate. After the party-crashing celebration of My Boy last October and the messy self-discovery portrayed in (Qu)irk/eer in November, the Lipstick Stains remake is a touching portrayal of the grounded intimacy and embodied joy of queer love. It made my lesbian heart skip a beat.
🙌
Don’t Worry - Branches
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
For most of line rider’s history, the majority of tracks made have not been in color. Sure, there were a couple of colorization experiments, and claims of being “THE FIRST COLOR LINE RIDER TRACK”—and even color scenery in Line Rider 2: Unbound. Full tracks utilizing color, however, were either extremely hard to create and edit together, tied to terrible game made by a cash grab trash company previously connected to Steve Bannon, or both. And so, the majority of tracks continued to be made in black and white.
As time went on, people within the line rider community began to be overly attached to this arbitrary limitation in their medium. At some points, asking for color lines came to be viewed as kind of a newbie, outsider thing. Don’t they know that the monochrome art style is what makes line rider great?
Branches’ latest track, Don’t Worry, blows this old (and admittedly already long-dead) assumption out of the water. Branches are, of course, unlikely to need any introduction at this point—their minimalist, sensitive style is essentially iconic within the line rider community. And with Don’t Worry, they bring this trackmaking style into the realm of color. Branches expertly draw flowers, sunlight, snow, and despair in a meticulous plethora of colors that powerfully convey the emotional moods and movements of the music – but this is a Branches track, so what did you expect? But it’s this use of color that brings out a new dimension to their work that may have been less obvious in their line rider tracks: the actual, genuine prettiness of their art.
A limitation of monochrome line rider is that the palette of things and emotions that can be described in line rider becomes restricted. This is not to say that monochrome line rider doesn’t have its own powerful depth, beauty and grace – who could deny that at this point? However, at least for me, when I see a flower drawn in line rider, I don’t see a flower – I see a drawing of a flower. When I see the flowers in Don’t Worry, I see a flower. Due to the vibrancy of the color lines, I am struck with the kind of beauty I also find in the world around me: the sky, the sun, trees, ice and snow.
All this is paired with this moment at the end where Branches abandon the pretense of Bosh riding on lines – instead, she flies through the air on invisible lines as if she is blown up into a whirlwind of vines and color and kind sentiments. Put together, the personal and interpersonally directed quality of Branches’ work becomes salient to me; I’ll admit that before this point, the little messages and dedications in their tracks were cute, but didn’t register with me all that emotionally – in part, because they weren’t for me! But despite being a track with a more general, universalized audience, it feels like it is speaking to me directly, saying Don’t Worry – and since I am admittedly a massive worrywart, their message helps calm me down.
And how can I really put a value on that? The land of words, structure, language—another field of monochrome line-making—fails. I have written several unsuccessful reviews about this track where I ramble incoherently with swears or broken language because I am once again reminded that it is the voice, it is the world, from which so much indescribable beauty, in all its weirdness and ugliness, arrives. The track is good, people.
Rating:
“Branches review, track. Is good and is good. Colors n shit. Compare other “flower” draws in RIDER, LINE. Flower actually flower. And flowers, so. AND CUTE. Flowers!!!!! Bit where vines go “woosh” around flybosh. Don’t Worry, problem with worry SIGNIFICANT personally. Sentiment… very very good. From the flowers. Thank, flower flower and Branchinesses pair of make art cute good color pretty, okay?” out of 10.
The color palettes of Don’t Worry is what really makes it click for me - flowers are drawn in gorgeous vibrant rainbow pastels, which contrast beautifully with muted greys representing depression and sadness, as well as harsh reds representing pain and stress, as the song moves in and out of acknowledging that pain and struggle will come, before reassuring the listener that we’ll get through it together. It’s completely absurd that this is the first thing Branches made using color layers; the use of color in Don’t Worry feels thoroughly practiced and effortlessly evocative. Absolutely gorgeous.
🙌
Little Deer - OTDE
Good grief, this track is excellent. All of OTDE’s strengths are utilized to the utmost extent in Little Deer, as they continue to show in 2022 that they are one of the most talented Line Rider creators around. The structure of the piece alone is inspired, with slow motion and falling in the instrumental sections, slow asymmetrical dual-rider music sync in the verse, Run Away With Me-style choreography in the choruses, and transitions between all of these that absolutely crush it. The music sync is The Little Lab Rat & the Big Escape levels of incredible - I want to draw special attention to the asymmetrical dual rider choreo in the verses, where brown-scarf sledder sleds along a bumpy hill landscape below, while green-scarf sleds on smooth waves and loops alongside where the lyrics are stylishly written above, and somehow they both sync beautifully, despite moving in totally different ways. If this sounds like there’s too much going on on the screen at once, it’s not - the zoom is far out enough and the speed is slow enough that you don’t feel like you’re missing anything - instead, it just encourages you to sit back and take it all in. If all that wasn’t enough, OTDE has an eye for visual composition and subtle theming in Line Rider that simply cannot be matched - the entire piece is one long chef’s-kiss moment, without a single creative choice that doesn’t work that I can see. I don’t have a ton to say about it, but I also cannot come up with a single point of criticism, so in conclusion, Little Deer is sick as hell and you should watch it.
🙌
Friends in Low Places - Ava Hofmann
[cw: cartoonish blood and gore]
There’s a lot to love in Friends in Low Places. Part lyric video, part animated music video, it’s stuffed to the gills with delightfully macabre imagery and themes all drawn in a fantastic sketchy style. If I tried to describe every detail I like in this one it would be an incredibly long and boring summary of the entire thing that would take twice as long to read as it does to watch, so I’ll just try to hit the highlights:
Delightfully adorable skeletons, zombies, demons, and ghosts
Sledders repeatedly dying and crashing into graves, after which the camera pans to reveal a new sledder
Creative use of red lines for blood, and white lines to draw on a filled-in black background
A Bosh marionette that first appears as an object being sold before gaining agency in an animated freeze-frame sequence
An incredible sequence near the end involving numerous sledders moving in and out of the camera frame and lyrics appearing on the screen with the use of layer automation
Possibly the first and definitely the best “it was all a dream” reveal in Line Rider history
Friend in Low Places is my favorite Halloween-themed Line Rider piece to date, striking a great balance of being spooky and a little bit disturbing, while still being a ton of fun. The drawing style is perfect for the themes, and the drawings themselves are stellar. My biggest complaint is how fast everything flies by, as a lot of the time it can be tough to read words or parse visuals. My guess is that this came from designing the movement first and adding visuals later - an approach which often results in movement that feels fine without scenery, only to be recognized as too fast for the desired visuals well after it’s too late to change. On the other hand, this also adds rewatch value - lots of details to miss upon first watch means lots more details to notice during rewatches, so even this aspect has its upsides.
👍
True Love - vsbl
vsbl is the closest thing that Line Rider has to an outsider artist, with Freaks, the first thing they ever made in Line Rider, rocketing to 2nd place on the Top 10 Tracks of 2020 - an unlikely turn of events given the work’s shoddy appearance, basic movement, and childish themes. The success of Freaks came from its surprising ability to resonate with people deeply, in part because of its lack of polish and artifice. It was a pitch-perfect use of Line Rider as a medium to convey something true and honest in a disarming way. It’s fitting, then, that vsbl’s newest release is set to Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End” - the most well-known song from one of the most well-known outsider musicians, widely-beloved for his ability to create disarmingly honest music. Johnston’s music overflows with earnest longing, an affect created by his high-pitched, warbly, frequently off-key voice, his uncomfortably honest lyrics, and his incredibly simple guitar playing. Objectively, his music is inarguably poor quality - which is the reason that when he sings lyrics that would sound suffocatingly saccharine and naive if professionally produced and sung by a trained vocalist, it’s not hard to believe that it’s raw, genuine, and coming straight from his heart. The result is something that most people with any kind of “sophisticated” taste in art (read: cultural brainwashing into the belief that it’s possible for art to be “bad”) can see the value of, but for someone without any of those hangups, it has a unique power to evoke emotion. What I’m saying is: the vast majority of music training sucks because it makes it impossible to appreciate music like Daniel Johnston’s, and the people crying alone in their bedroom to “True Love Will Find You in the End” understand more about music than many “professional” vocalists ever will.
For similar reasons, I can confidently say that vsbl is perhaps the only Line Rider creator who could pull of a release like True Love. vsbl’s past tracks have been unnervingly direct on heavy subjects such as bullying, suicide, and self-harm, and True Love feels like it’s cut from the same cloth as the devastating Cold Death [cw: suicide] and the depressing-as-hell A Summer Song [cw: self-harm] - a continuation of the themes but with a new radically positive tone. Bosh is still sledding from left to right past drawings and scrawled lyrics, but the movement is more dynamic, the drawings are more charming and interactive, and the text is larger and more playful. The house drawings that bookend the piece evoke the dismal shacks of Cold Death, but seen through a more optimistic lens, a tone reflected in the rest of the drawings of adorable snails, lollipops, and even a rainbow. The scribbled lyrics remind me of A Summer Song, but the way they’re drawn - larger and messier - feel less like they’re disclosing internal pain and more like they’re expressing a vulnerable sense of hope.
It’s always a challenge to write about vsbl’s work, as it often feels reductive to try to give any kind of critique, lest it be taken as somehow definitive. True Love, like Cold Death and A Summer Song, feels intensely personal and vulnerable, and thus doesn’t feel like the kind of art that I (or anyone) can predict how it might resonate with others, or not. If it resonates with you, it’s in a way that provokes deep emotions that you might not want to share, or even acknowledge. I wouldn’t recommend True Love to everyone, because if they treated it dismissively that would be more upsetting than if they never knew about it at all. This isn’t a piece you tweet about, but it is a piece that you might share as a form of intimacy with a close friend or lover. In my view, that makes it better, not worse.
👍
Optimistic - pocke
In a way, Optimistic feels like the more presentable cousin of pocke’s 2020 release A Fool Moon Night. It doesn’t have as many ideas, but the ideas it does have are clearly defined and presented as distinct microcosms that flow nicely into each other. It’s not as messy or chaotic or sloppy, but that arguably also strips it of some of the charm of A Fool Moon Night. On the other hand, that feels tonally appropriate - the piece has a more serious, tense feel, and relatively long unbroken sections of biomes such as a barren rocky desert or a forest with enormous imposing trees help with that. And there’s some nice progression too - the first chorus sees offsled Bosh tumbling through in a cave with spikes and crystals, and then in the second chorus Bosh goes offsled again and tumbles through scenery that looks similar but heavily abstracted this time. The spikes and crystals are gone, and it’s just a mess of jagged overlapping lines that evoke a sense of anxiety. Another section that does a fantastic job conveying this anxious tension is mostly filled in black, with white dashes, circles, and soundwaves accentuated with small, sudden, camera shifts. That said, there are also some moments where it seems like pocke isn’t entirely sure what to do, such as a section that looks like a mess of lines that Bosh slowly tumbles through with movement that doesn’t match the music terribly well. The climax though, kicks Bosh into high speed and throws many of the previous themes at us in rapid-fire fashion, in a powerful sequence that makes me wish that A Fool Moon Night also got an ending like this. The button on the end sends Bosh moving so fast that the graphics rapidly distort and glitch as a short squiggle animation plays. Like a lot of Optimistic, it’s really cool, unique effect, and it’s not not thematic, but it feels a bit disconnected from the other ideas.
This is a big reason that a lot of pocke’s work tends to be slightly disappointing - there’s a lot of fantastic ideas there, and they’re all related to a central theme, but pocke often seems to shy away from saying anything about the themes. My favorite pocke piece, Abandoned Castle, is the one with a narrative - even if it’s cheesy and ends on a cliffhanger and doesn’t have that much to say, it takes the viewer on a journey and gets us invested. New Machines and Daydreamer might be far more visually dazzling, but they don’t tell a story that gets me invested like Abandoned Castle does, and even Abandoned Castle doesn’t leave me with any lasting feelings, besides “that was fun!” Optimistic feels like it’s reaching towards tackling something a bit more weighty than any of these, but I get the sense that pocke isn’t quite sure how to do that yet. I hope he keeps trying, and in the meantime I can totally dig Optimistic’s angsty vibes.
👍
I miss Wintergatan Wednesdays, so I spent 100+ hours on this music sync in Line Rider - DoodleChaos
DoodleChaos’s newest release is a pleasant, refreshing surprise. I’ve talked in the past about how even the best DoodleChaos releases in recent years are nearly always based on some sort of conceptual gimmick, and his work has also tended more towards fluffy, accessible entertainment for the masses than anything approaching hard-hitting social commentary, or indeed anything with serious emotional weight at all. However, I miss Wintergatan Wednesdays tells a compelling narrative about an artist’s struggle that is currently going on in the real world right now. Wintergatan’s Martin Molin, of Marble Machine fame, recently abruptly stopped uploading videos, after a one in which he informed viewers that he had decided to scrap and rebuild his Marble Machine X - a project he had been working on for years - with a more failsafe design.
The first couple minutes of I miss Wintergatan Wednesdays give off the impression that this might just be another cookie-cutter DoodleChaos piece set to Wintergatan’s “Sommarfågel” - there’s some nice thematic drawings of musical instruments and parts of Martin’s Marble Machine, but other than that it just seems like a standard dual-rider piece that leans on all the same music-syncing conventions that we’ve seen DoodleChaos do a million times before. It’s heavily reminiscent of Turner Wise’s 2019 release Sommerfagel, as it’s set to the same song and similarly features the occasional Marble Machine mechanical drawing, though the drawings are simpler and the movement is more controlled in I miss Wintergatan Wednesdays, a choice that makes the piece feel cleaner, yet perhaps overly-sanitized. However, a little over two minutes in, our main-character sledder suddenly slams into a rock that a figure is struggling to push up a mountain, a clear allusion to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, over and over for eternity. It’s the most powerful moment in the video, heightened by a sudden drop into slow-motion as our sledder falls away past stars synced to the music, and it’s clear even if you’re not familiar with Wintergatan that this is an allusion to the issues Martin is currently facing in the development of the Marble Machine X. As the drums come back in, the sledder is suddenly joined by five others, who join together in some fantastic group choreography. Then, as our protagonist repeatedly loses control of their sled, each other sledder in turn gives up their sled so our main character can continue on. Finally, at the end of the track, they reach the summit of the mountain they failed to climb earlier, sitting comfortably above the boulder. It’s a remarkable use of remounting, multiple riders, and slow motion controls to tell a powerful story that seems to directly offer some hope to Martin Molin himself, and more broadly to any creative struggling with painful setbacks, rejecting a narrative of individualist triumph in favor of a vision of community support and collective achievement.
In some ways, this is DoodleChaos’s best work yet. But most of the compelling stuff is in the last 90 seconds of a nearly 4-minute piece, and I wish the narrative had taken a more central role from the outset, especially seeing how the first couple minutes are relatively bland. The title also remains frustratingly clickbait-oriented - why is there so much emphasis on how many hours this project took to make? I think there’s a clear tension here between DoodleChaos’s literal job as a content creator for YouTube that requires appeasing the almighty algorithm, and the potential for deeply moving art - art that DoodleChaos is clearly capable of creating, if it wasn’t for capitalism getting in the way. In the end, I’m conflicted about I miss Wintergatan Wednesdays. I hope DoodleChaos makes more art that actually has something to say in the future, but even more than that, I hope he continues to explore art that has a purpose, a point, and a meaning, rather than just a new gimmick. I don’t know how hopeful I should be.
👍
HOLD YOUR BREATH - OTDE
I’ve long been something of an alt-quirk snob who will tell anyone remotely willing to listen how Lukking’s 2016 release Seen and Never Heard is the best example of music-synced alt-quirk, but that my all-time favorite movement in alt-quirk remains Pendulum - made by the grandfather of quirk himself, anomaly76, all the way back in 2009. Alt-quirk is a style that typically defies categorization - rarely sticking to anything that can be nailed down as a defining characteristic - and is often made in a feverish fit of inspiration. Rarely does anyone setting out to imitate someone else’s alt-quirk style come up with anything good, because it’s so easy to overthink what you’re doing and wind up with something that feels clinical, overprocessed, and dry. See, the best alt-quirk feels improvisational - keeping the viewer on their toes so they have no idea what is coming next, and that kind of thing is best made by someone who has no idea what they’re going to make next either. Alt-quirk has such high potential for this feeling of delight, surprise, and satisfaction that if a piece hits the spot just right for someone it can become a compulsive rewatch for years, like Pendulum did for me, even if others find it unmemorable. It’s a high-risk high-reward style, appraisal of which is impossibly subjective. This is why I once had an exchange with someone who swore up and down that Leomur’s 2009 release Volatile was objectively the best Line Rider track ever made, and that if I couldn’t see why that I just didn’t understand “real flow”. This stuff gets people heated. Which is why I’m delighted to announce that OTDE’s HOLD YOUR BREATH is objectively the best alt-quirk ever made.
I don’t know why the heck nobody figured out how well alt-quirk pairs with jazz before 2022. A musical genre heavily characterized by improvisation was right there this whole time! Actually, I would wager that it may have something to do with the overwhelming whiteness of the Line Rider community both historically and currently, since jazz has its roots in African-American culture, but being white myself I’m perhaps not the ideal person to comment on this. In any case, HOLD YOUR BREATH, set to a fire clarinet solo by Doreen Ketchens, combines the playful, unpredictable, satisfying-as-hell music sync of Seen and Never Heard with the dynamic, inventive, improvisational quirk movement that I see in Pendulum (and that others see in Volatile). The best part of HOLD YOUR BREATH is how OTDE, freed from the constrictive demands of all-blue no-flowkillers-allowed quirk purism that dominated the Line Rider community for virtually the entire 2010s, is completely unafraid of throwing curveballs at the viewer. Creative use of multilining, which quirk purists would have viewed as taboo in 2010, lends a fresh take to anomaly-style movement that’s heavy on space recycling and temp stalls, but the coup de grâce is a horizontal pinch that syncs to a single clarinet note. This note is held for - no exaggeration - a full 26 seconds, and for this entire time Bosh remains stationary on screen, vibrating inside the pinch. It’s the most out-of-left-field movement I’ve ever seen a quirk throw at the viewer, and I found it impossible not to laugh at just now unexpected it was for the pinch to just keep going, and going, and going, and going, much like the clarinet note it’s synced to.
I think we can all agree that the satisfaction that comes from watching alt-quirk on its own is far from the most exciting thing that can be done in Line Rider today, so it’s a bit strange to feel that it’s beating something I passionately loved over a decade ago at its own game, while also recognizing that it’s not actually that good compared to most of the other releases this month. It’s certainly a testament to how far Line Rider has come, but I also get the sense that I’m probably not going to be compulsively rewatching this years down the line for nostalgia. My biggest source of disappointment with HOLD YOUR BREATH, though, in a time-honored tradition of my favorite alt-quirks, is that it’s too damn short! There’s almost nothing more after the long pinch before the video unceremoniously cuts off, and it feels somehow even more unsatisfying than both the frustratingly-short Pendulum AND the not-even-really-finished-at-all Seen and Never Heard. It’s fitting, I suppose, that my new favorite alt-quirk feels even more painfully unfinished. Maybe that’s just part of the charm.
👍
Bosh goes mountain biking - Malizma
It’s rare that someone attempts anything close to realism in Line Rider. Not to be confused with detailed shading, realism is an approach to art that attempts to portray something in the world exactly as it is, without distortion, stylization, abstraction, or supernatural elements. Some very early Line Rider scenery in tracks such as Die at the Slopes by D4N3TRAIN and Jagged Peak Adventure by unconed was arguably realist, with straightforward depictions of environments that Bosh might realistically sled through, but the vast majority of Line Rider work ever since has, at the very least, depicted fantasy environments or played fast and loose with physics. It’s also rare to see any attempt at a realistic soundscape as audio - the only example I can think of is Chuggers’s saunter, a relatively-unknown yet delightful experimental piece made in 48 hours for the original 2016 Track Jam on We Ride the Lines. The concept of saunter is Bosh sliding slowly to the right past relatively realistic scenery as a soundscape reflects the environments depicted, from the ambience of a breezy countryside, to a rushing river, to even the sound of machinery from a windmill. In Bosh goes mountain biking, Malizma combines these concepts of realist scenery and soundscape together with faster speeds and Linerider.com’s color layers feature, in the first attempt to use this feature to depict anything close to a realistic environment in Line Rider. Bosh goes mountain biking sees our sledder zooming down mountain slopes, past trees, through caves, and even over a rickety wooden bridge, loosely synced to realistic sounds of mountain biking.
It’s not exactly realism, of course - the colors are cartoony, the scenery isn’t overly detailed, the sounds are of mountain biking, not sledding, and sledding through this sort of landscape at such high speeds is highly unrealistic, let alone these kinds of smooth sweeping curves existing in the natural world in the first place. But that’s the thing about realism - it’s always easy to argue that a work of art isn’t true realism instead of asking the more important question of whether the stylized elements add to the value of the piece. For the most part, the choices Malizma has made around what to stylize work really well to create a compelling experience - the speeds create tension and excitement, the cartoony colors make it easy to parse what we’re seeing, and additional detail would be distracting and unnecessary. What I’m saying is that the core concept of Bosh goes mountain biking is super unique and works really well, which is why it’s disappointing how short the piece is! After just 30 seconds, Bosh wipes out and the piece abruptly ends, and there aren’t even any comedic crashing sounds! Much like saunter, I wish Bosh goes mountain biking was longer and explored the concept further, but as it stands it’s still a fun little concept piece.
👍
Pigstep - HypersonicPineapple
Guest review by gavinroo538:
I’ll admit, when I first watched the track, I didn’t realize until near the end of my first watchthrough that most of HypersonicPineapple’s Pigstep takes place in a Minecraft world drawn in Line Rider...or, I guess...a Linecraft world! I don’t know how I didn’t know until that point, since I play Minecraft quite a bit and especially since I knew the song “Pigstep” was a Minecraft song made for Minecraft. I'm just saying this because at first, I was confused on why HypersonicPineapple made the decision to occasionally change the line and background colors, but after knowing where the track takes place, it makes sense why he did that...because it’s Linecraft, of course! (okay, I’ll stop) ...Anyway, let’s actually review Pigstep!
I’ll just start off by saying that Pigstep by HypersonicPineapple is a delight to watch! I love the concept of having Bosh land into a well-known video game world and then beating the game itself. In Pigstep, Bosh first alt-flings his way into a forest of a Minecraft world; she then travels through a village, a cave, and even the Nether and all its biomes; finally, they teleport to the End and defeat the Ender Dragon! The idea is simple but delightful, and the execution is pretty good for the most part.
Unfortunately, I have two gripes that bother me while watching this track. The first one is having quirk alongside the Minecraft world. In the first 20 seconds of the track, the quirk was alright, but having them in the world of Minecraft makes it look very jarring compared to the well-crafted scenery that’s in Pigstep. The second one is more of a “this is brilliant, but I like this” sort of criticism. That criticism being instead of using the LRACE-exclusive color transitions to show the different biomes of Minecraft, maybe transfer the track file to .com and use both color layers and invisible layers so it will hide the quirk and make the track look a little more “Minecraft-y”? I know it would make the LRA-exclusive different-width lines go back to just one width, but I think that could possibly be worked around. Thankfully, those are the only things I dislike about Pigstep.
Overall, the track is pretty good! I definitely would recommend this track to people who are fans of Minecraft. Heck, even the people who haven’t played Minecraft would probably find this track at the very least interesting! Keep on making tracks, HypersonicPineapple! You got this, dude!
🙌 for Minecraft fans.
👍 for everyone else.
There are two main ideas in Pigstep: one is a narrative that closely follows a playthrough of the popular game Minecraft, and another is syncing the recurring descending bassline wub in Lena Raine’s “Pigstep” with accelerating alt-flings. These are both good ideas, but I’m not sure they fit together very well. Sometimes it works well, like the final descent into the end portal to fight the Ender Dragon, but other times it feels like the alt flings clash with the visuals of the Minecraft-themed scenery. One side-effect of this is that, much like my favorite prior HypersonicPineapple release Mountain Song, there is occasionally a sense that we are going way too fast to see the scenery. The scenery itself is meticulously detailed, but the speeds simultaneously make them hard to see, while the amount of area there is to scene creates obviously copy-pasted repeat scenery, or things that zip by in the blink of an eye followed by large empty spaces. There’s also the use of smaller-width lines in the scenery, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but in this case the outlines are largely a specific thickness of line, while the shading is done with another specific thinner line type, creating a sort of cheap coloring-book aesthetic that I’m not a huge fan of. And finally, I get what HypersonicPineapple is going for with the color shifts, but keeping the background white and fading all the black lines to red, green, and then purple doesn’t look like Bosh is entering a new environment - to me it looks more like I’m trying to print the coloring book and the printer is malfunctioning.
That said, there’s still plenty to appreciate here. Fans of Minecraft will no doubt enjoy what I (someone who has essentially never played Minecraft and thus had to do a fair bit of research on it to write a competent review) assume are faithful recreations of all sorts of details in the game, and fans of music-synced quirk can absolutely appreciate that aspect as well. I personally really enjoyed the final sequence in the End, where Bosh climbs up the obsidian pillars to the end crystals before attacking the Ender Dragon and then dropping into the exit portal. The movement is varied and dynamic, Bosh travels slowly enough that we can see all the important scenery, there’s a narrative that’s clearer than in the rest of the piece, and the quirk doesn’t clash with the scenery much at all in this section, thanks to some clever touches to hide it. It’s a pity that all this is only really true of the last 30 seconds. Ultimately, I doubt anyone who hasn’t played Minecraft will get much out of Pigstep, but if you have played Minecraft, you’ll probably find plenty to enjoy.
🤷
Boss (Bullet Hell Monday) - CrazyGameMaster
Sometimes I feel like my desire to watch every Line Rider release on the web paired with the astounding frequency of releases from CrazyGameMaster have led me to become something like the guy in XKCD’s 2011 comic who becomes a connoisseur of pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich after being locked in a box with them for a year, except for this one particular relatively-unknown Line Rider creator’s body of work. In something that started out as a joke before evolving into something of a genuine critique, last month I ranked my personal Top 10 CrazyGameMaster Line Rider Tracks of 2021:
10. Underwater
Thematic scenery of fish, bubbles, and sharks help this one stand out.
9. KillerBeast
Accurate sync plus cool pointy triangles and scribbles for visualization land this one a spot on this list.8. Boxing Match
Accurate sync to a huge number of rapid-fire notes is very satisfying.7. Ghost
The best “classic” CGM track. Intense speed-sync movement and simple but solid visuals.6. Mii Channel but ̷i̶n̴s̸i̷d̵i̴o̵u̶s̵l̶y̸ ̶g̴e̴t̷s̵ d̸͎į̶ş̶c̷̹o̸͚r̷̴̷̴̤̣̟͉d̷̸̵̴̯̳̰ͅant
The misdirection in this one is a lot of fun, keeps me on my toes, and matches the song well.5. Space Invaders
A little scattered, but cool retro video game thematic scenery here, from lazers to asteroids to secret rooms, make this one creative and fun.4. Crystallized
Crystals in a cave plus cool music visualizations at the drops make for a nice concept with solid execution.3. Idols
The music-sync visuals on this one are super creative and extremely pleasing to my synesthesia.2. A Stranger's Dead
This one has some really solid movement that is more varied than usual, a great concept, and the best music visualizations of any CGM track in 2021.1. Mope Mope
The best concept of any CGM track in 2021 and a remarkably solid execution juxtaposing a silly children’s tune with horror elements make this one my favorite CGM release of 2021.
Would I recommend any of these to a friend? Maybe Mope Mope, if they like horror aesthetics played for comedy, and maybe A Stranger’s Dead if they can’t get enough of tracks like Andrew Hess’s Brain Power, but beyond that probably not. Boss (Bullet Hell Monday) I think I would place above Idols but below A Stranger’s Dead. CrazyGameMaster’s movement sync remains solid, and there’s the occasional gesture towards a recurring movement leitmotif even if it never really settles into a structure. But the concept of a claustrophobic cave that Bosh zips though at breakneck speed is surprisingly compelling, the signs throughout with arrows or with words like “caution” or “danger” on them create a nice sense of tension, and CGM never breaks the rules of the cave world he’s created. The result is something that feels more like a physical environment Bosh is travelling through than anything CGM has released previously, and that makes the ending, where Bosh zooms past a bunch of signs indicating danger to slam into a dead end of the cave, really land for me. In the end, well… it’s ok. The concept gets old after a minute or so, the lack of an overall narrative structure to the piece means it drags in the second half, and the whole thing feels pretty rushed. However, Boss (Bullet Hell Monday) shows a lot of potential for continued growth, and CrazyGameMaster has flatsled movement sync down to a science. I hope in 2022 he can continue experimenting with stuff like contiguous spaces, or - even better - new fresh experimental concepts like we saw in my favorite track of his to date, Mope Mope.
🤷
Saturday - Garry the fish
Guest review by gavinroo538:
Before digging through this track, I want to take the opportunity to write about my relationship with the band who made the song this track syncs to, that being Twenty One Pilots. For a few years in my past, I was somewhat of a stan of Twenty One Pilots. I would listen to literally every song they’ve made, I would use references that are confusing to people who are not part of the Twenty One Pilots fandom, and I even wrote an essay on them during my sophomore year of high school. That’s why most of my 2018 releases are synced to Twenty One Pilots songs. Fortunately, I’ve grown out of that phase and now I’m just a regular, casual fan…who still has listened to every song they’ve made as of now. With that in mind, when I saw that Garry the fish synced Line Rider to Twenty One Pilots’ 2021 song “Saturday”, I was excited but also nervous to see their take on the song. This is due to the fact that I usually come up with a specific track concept whenever I listen to songs that I like — “Saturday” included — and the tracks from Garry are at best painfully average. But after seeing the track Saturday, I could confidently say that this is Garry the fish’s best work that I’ve seen from them! Still, there are some problems I have with the track that I should address.
First of all, Garry decided to sync Line Rider to the music video version of the song, which has background noises that are confusing if the viewer hasn’t watched the “Saturday'' music video. Second, Bosh’s movements on their own are a bit uninteresting, especially since the song itself has a funky dance-groove feel. When I hear the song, I usually think of dynamic movements that have great flow, and that track unfortunately doesn’t have that. Last but not least, there are some weird syncing decisions that don't land well with me, like when the song goes into a section when Twenty One Pilots frontman Tyler Joseph samples a phone call between him and his wife into the song, Garry made the decision to have Bosh hit every syllable of the sampled phone call, which leaves me a little annoyed. There are also some minor things that I dislike about this track, but those are fortunately the only major dislikes I have, so let’s transition to the one thing that makes this track the creator’s best work.
Surprisingly, the visuals Garry put out there work quite well with both the lyrics of the song and the track itself! Here are a few of my favorite visuals in the track. At the lyric “I can’t feel the waves anymore. Did the tide forget to move?” Garry drew some abstract tides which leaves me satisfied whenever that part hits. When the lyrics talk about circles, we see both Bosh and the animation spin around in some sort of circle, which pleases my lyric-loving self. However, my favorite visual has to be at the 3-minute mark where Garry threw out many great animations into the track for about 10 seconds, and I can’t help but smile whenever my eyes experience that little hodgepodge of cool animation ideas.
So overall, could it be better? I believe so. Is it the best track I’ve ever seen? Not at all. Nonetheless, this track shows that Garry has the potential to make some memorable tracks in the future, and I really hope that instead of making tracks that are painfully average at best, they will improve from this point on. Good luck, Garry the fish!
👍 for Twenty One Pilots fans.
🙌 for Twenty One Pilots stans.
🤷♀️ for everyone else.
Garry the fish has been pumping out mediocre music-synced Line Rider tracks at a remarkable pace for over a year now, but I’ve never felt a pressing need to mention any in these roundups because there’s just never much to talk about. There’s little that differentiates the typical Garry the fish track from CrazyGameMaster’s most uninspired pieces, other than slightly sloppier movement and an even stronger tendency towards juvenile meme music. The only other Garry the fish piece I’ve reviewed was crab rave from December 2020, before these roundups were public. Throughout 2021 it remained the only Garry the fish release to date that I didn’t find entirely forgettable, thanks to thematic environmental scenery and at least an attempt at an overall structure, but serious struggles with controlling Bosh’s movement kept it from being anything worth recommending. Since then, Garry the fish has focused on beatmap-esque movement sync almost exclusively, abandoning scenery except for the occasional thematic drawing floating in space. Don’t get me wrong, Garry’s movement chops have improved over the past year, but their resistance to experiment with anything new has resulted in an interminable parade of boring releases. However, in 2022, Saturday has finally caught my attention as something new worth writing about.
First off, compared to the typical Garry the fish release, where the desire for Bosh to slam into a line anytime anything happens often prevents any buildup of momentum, the majority of Saturday sees Bosh moving at a refreshing clip. This gives Garry a lot more room than usual to experiment with different methods of syncing, including minimalist synced visuals, iconography, and even some animation. It’s a bit all-over-the-place, and there are long stretches where nothing interesting happens, but there are also plenty of fun moments that highlight Garry’s potential to create vastly better Line Rider material than anything they made in 2021. Ultimately it winds up feeling like a budget version of Bucky29’s Ride, but I agree that it’s their best work to date, and I hope we get to see more like it in the future.
🤷
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