5 out of 5

Label: Fangamer

Produced by: Adam Gonsalves (vinyl master)

Grant Kirkhope was off and running from the start: getting to rework a David Wise soundtrack for Donkey Kong Land 2; paired with Graeme Norgate and Robin Beanland on Goldeneye, and a three year run from Banjoe-Kazooie to DK64, Perfect Dark, and then Banjo-Tooie. His partnership with Rare would continue for a bit thereafter, if at a slightly slower pace, but it’s the single year during which Dark and Tooie landed that I feel like we get the peak of early Kirkhope, before the face of gaming – the scope of games – would start to shift in the years to come, and thus Grant’s style as well.

While Dark gives us bleep-bloop cinema shooter perfection, Tooie is the platform equivalent in terms of mood setting, and accomplishment, picking up themes from Kazooie – which used a generalized platformer bop as a springboard to an incredibly enjoyable, memorable score – and boiling them down to their most necessary attributes, then spreading them out across a larger game world. Top down, that translates to an immediate improvement in the curation of this 4xLP set from Fangamer, providing a wider range of themes and thus avoiding the sense of repetition for which the previous curation allowed; more intimately, though, the simplification elevates these from bops to a journey: I could give you broad level themes based on a tune before, but Grant really taps in to a more organic, exploratory vibe here that maps to checking out the corners of a cave, or the distant coast of an island. …Perhaps, in game, in search of collectables, but it serves the purpose of a listener very well for superseding a notion of this as background music: the compositions are pretty brilliantly simplified to a bass and synth / string layer (with occasional full-out jams, of course, focused more on the game’s / album’s E- and F-side “conclusion”), and the grooves are so quirky and enjoyable that it’s hard to not pay attention. The four LPs go by quickly.

The packaging mimics the previous sets, with color-coded printed inners, and a cheeky box; some liner notes from Grant highlight the frenzied pace of composing this, but something about that sparked the right creative juices to make music wholly in line with the first game, while also offering something unique to the second. As before, the recording is bright and pretty Earthy; Grant favoring bass tones and drums and game sound effects which read as ambience provide a good layer to mask any digitalness, but I feel like Fangamer’s vinyl masterer, Adam Gonsalves, upped his game slightly between BK and BT, and even Andrew Kolb’s artwork – thought absolutely in line with before – comes across as more engaging, with the slight color tweaks and character expressions in-line with the slightly more grounded musical experience.

Yeah, I’m reading into all of that too much, but BT was an iteration on the large steps taken with BK by Rare, so it makes sense that the music (and it’s years later presentation on vinyl) should follow suit.