4 out of 5

Label: 5 Rue Christine

Producer: Eric Broyhill

Do you bill it as a covers album?  Hardly.  ‘The Advantage’ or one of a gaggle of artists doing reimaginings or whatever of classic video game songs – like mostly NES-era classic – but, sue me for being wrong, I believe they’re one of the only ones on a label that has (or had, when there were music stores) fairly wide distribution through, what, the Secretly Canadian ring or the Touch&Go ring, whatever.  And further sue-me more, I’m sure I’m just projecting because they’re the only band of this nature I keep in my collection, but I feel like there’s a reason for that – namely that this is anything but a covers album, this is a group absolutely inspired to bring some frackin’ crazy tunes to full instrumental life, and yet somehow they do this only by accurately transcribing it to guitar, bass and drums…

Which I think is part of why this works so well, because it’s not filtered through keyboards or other computery instruments, thus rooting it still to its bleep and bloop origins, nor is it turned into a springboard for wankery jams, nor is it played out in some kind of wink-wink kitsch method.  8-bit composers were pretty much madmen, coming up with just these insane themes of odd tunes and beats to match the feeling of a game, and to hear them played out at full fidelity really exposes not only the skill of the original composers, but the skill and patience of The Advantage in knowing to just let the music do its thing.  Which, ugh, leads to the docking of the star, is that you can’t really allot too much emotion to any of these tracks, and it probably doesn’t work as well if you don’t get a little nostalgia bubbling in your booty, but whatevs.  There’s love to be heard, and the production work varies to properly capture the deep echoing beats of one track or the clipped notes of another…  Impressive shtuff.