I'll start off by saying I hated the NES "Advantage" controller, an arcade style pad with a joystick and some awkwardly placed buttons. It just seemed like a whole lot of trouble compared to the flat little controller pad (however the Advantage was crucial to saving New York City in Ghostbusters II...it's what they used to steer the Statue of Liberty into the city and smash the slime covered museum to stop the possessed painting ghost from using the infant as a vessel to...I'm realizing this is a complicated comedy movie and a complicated digression). The Advantage that I'm featuring here is not a Dan Ackroyd payola prop nor is it a controller, but it IS indicative of the kind of music this band makes: all NES game music covers, done in a kind of "math rock" (remember math rock?) hyper metal style by members of the (defunct?) other mathy/metal group Hella. For me, its nostalgia coupled with genres of music I like, but for those who aren't familiar with the "Solar Jetman Theme" it's indicative of just how (sometimes) great, and ridiculously complicated these video game compositions truly were (the composers often had limited capability due to the size of these video games, having to find tricky ways to extend just 2 or 3 notes). If yer into this one their self titled is just as good.
Happily, Hella is still alive and kicking. What is more and, in my humble opinion, for the best, they have gone back to the original guitar/drums duo of Spencer Seim and Zach Hill.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.myspace.com/realhella