3 out of 5

Label: Materia Collective

Produced by: Grant Kirkhope

I’m sure I’m a bad Grant Kirkhope fan, and a bad videogame fan, for not having much connection to this score. I was a big SNES DK fan, playing through all three games pretty repeatedly, but once we got to the N64 era, the game didn’t click with me as much. So factor that lack of nostalgia in, but… I’m also gonna do some over-theorizing here on the nature of DK64’s music.

Before that, though, we can appreciate what Grant and label Materia Collective have brought to us: the original soundtrack to this game has long been out of print, and has never – to my knowledge – been on vinyl. With vgm on wax having exploded over the last decade+, and with many classics having been represented to new and old fans, it makes sense we’d get to this game as well. But instead of just remastering the music for the format, Kirkhope remixed (and remastered) the tunes, and we have titles that are better suited to what they represent – be it level or boss themes. Furthermore, the classic “DK Rap” that was a gag that became a classic, has new vocalist Substantial fully bumping it out of meme territory. On the packaging front, though it looks a little chintzy to me – the original logo styling and font looks funny against the chill CG painted art, and the inner liner notes are barebones – the art itself is from DK game artist Kevin Bayliss, so… props. There’s passion behind this project, and I appreciate that.

As for the music itself, though, that’s where I’m back to feeling rather middling about it. While you can sense’s Grant’s zhuzh throughout, massaging themes in surprising ways such that a diddy (no pun intended) gets resurrected X minutes into a track and suddenly becomes fresh again, the majority of this ends up sounding like “Grant-lite,” or like a score to a game that was following in the wake of some other, more successful platformer.

…And yeah, that was some of the criticism at the time, that DK64’s music somewhat reflected Grant’s work on Banjo-Kazooie. Which is where my theorizing comes into play, somewhat backed up by Grant mentioning that his DK work was meant to carry original DK-er David Wise’s style into it a bit: I think this score is a bit too beholden to what came before. It’ feels walled in; the tracks tend to take quite a bit of time before they break out, and otherwise don’t really establish an immediate sense of their settings (the mining level; the pirate level; etc.). There are definite bops, and the work Grant has done enriches the music substantially, but it’s more of a slowburn versus Grant’s typical platformers, with the more directly lively tracks perhaps limited by being “inherited” from another composer, even if these are truly Grant’s own takes on Wise’s.