Musical-comedy group Starbomb dropped its third and possibly final studio album, “The TryForce,” on April 19.
The band, composed of musical-comedy duo Ninja Sex Party (Dan Avidan and Brian Wecht) and internet personality Egoraptor (Arin Hanson), took four years to release this new album. In the opening track to the album, “Intro (Try),” Hanson explains this was due to the group being “really busy playing video games and eating stuff.” Hanson also mentions the ending of Starbomb, the first of four tracks to allude to finality.
“Hi, I’m Arin Hanson, and I’m back with my bros Danny and Brian to fulfill our promise to you and complete the three-album Tryforce with our third and probably final Starbomb recording,” Hanson said on the track. “And if this is the last Starbomb album, we’re gonna go out with a bang.”
The band went on a retreat for a week and a half and wrote the whole album together. Hanson felt that this third album had a more collaborative feel to it than the past two.
“I feel like my footprint on the first two albums wasn’t super huge,” Hanson said in a YouTube video. “It was sort of like Ninja Sex Party does video game songs, featuring Egoraptor. Whereas the third Starbomb album really feels like we all wrote it together.”
To give this album a special edge, the group worked on the album with Tupper Ware Remix Party, the backup band of Ninja Sex Party, and Emmy-award winning producer Jim Roach.
The new tracks on the album continue the group’s pattern of parodying famous video games. One of these includes “Filling in the Name Of,” a “Killing in the Name” parody about a long Tetris piece who begins to lament his place in life after being used constantly to finish Tetris puzzles. In yet another track, “Welcome to the Mario Party,” the famous Italian plumber throws away the concept of the family-friendly Mario Party in favor of a booze and alcohol-fueled rager.
The only full-length track on the album with no swearing is “Donkey Kong Joonyer,” in which Donkey Kong attempts to train his son to fight Mario but Donkey Kong Jr. isn’t very sharp. Hanson described this song as Wecht’s “magnum opus” and Wecht’s daughter appreciates the song as well.
“Audrey always wants to listen to the Donkey Kong song,” Wecht said in a YouTube video on the album’s release. “It has no swearing in it, so I’m not a bad parent.”
Outside of new songs, the album’s tracklist consists of callbacks to previous popular tracks about certain games. The track “A Boy and His Boat” completes the trilogy of “The Legend of Zelda” songs, with Egoraptor and Avidan listing off the excessive amount of items Link needs to complete his task. The track parodies the similar premise in “The Wind Waker” game. Items include a bow and arrow, a skeleton key, a second place trophy from a local spelling bee and 46 copies of “The Jerk” on Betamax.
“A Wild Guitar Solo Appears!” completes the band’s trilogy of Pokémon-related songs. Following the events of “I Choose You To Die” and “The New Pokerap,” Pikachu and Ash Ketchum have repaired their relationship and are back to Pokémon battles together, but Pikachu now shreds on the guitar when he should be fighting.
One of the trio’s favorite series are “The Simple Plot of…” songs, which consist of a simple games talk show host trying to make sense of some of the most notoriously complicated plots in gaming. Previous albums brought us “The Simple Plot of Final Fantasy 7” and “The Simple Plot of Metal Gear Solid.” To bring things to a close, the band tackled the mother of all complicated plots: “Kingdom Hearts.” In “The Simple Plot of Kingdom Hearts,” protagonist Sora tries to explain his game, leading to the talk show getting canceled.
To wrap up the album, as well as the band’s legacy, the track “This Song Sucks” gathers Starbomb song concepts that never came to fruition. These include a rap about butts called “Ass-Ass-in’s Creed,” a song about “Grand Theft Auto,” but you’re in a neverending traffic jam and a song where “Bomberman” goes through TSA and “you can guess the rest.”
“[This song] encapsulates all of our rejected ideas that we never actually made a song about, so we made one super terrible song which turned out to be great,” Avidan said in a YouTube video about the album’s release.
“The TryForce” debuted on the iTunes Top 10 Overall Album charts, as well as number one on the iTunes comedy charts, sending off the group with a notable conclusion to its musical journey.
_Edited by Joe Cross | jcross@themaneater.com_
