The Daily Spin, August 17
The 8-Bit Big Band | Choose Your Character!
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Choose Your Character! (2019)
Artist: The 8-Bit Big Band
Link:
With this album, as many cover acts, I’m of two minds. The first is that it’s always touching to see people pay homage to that which clearly meant a great deal to them - and few things exemplify that like a collection of classic video game tunes, since the music therein is one of the most tangible connections to those emotional hooks in great stories. The second half of me, however, feels like it will always have a bit of a off-color sheen to it - so much of what makes many of these tunes absolutely iconic is the media that comes with them - I can’t pretend that Firewatch’s ‘Prologue’ hits half as hard outside of those intro stories setting up the main plot of the game - and though I enjoy it and feel that nostalgia, there’s clearly something missing.
All that to say that Choose Your Character!, unfortunately, falls into that second bucket. It’s impressive in its own right, given that this is a full orchestra putting a lot of these tracks together, somewhere between 30 and 60 people pulling their weight and coordinating these arrangements. The jazzy spin is intriguing in most cases, but it winds up falling flat in others - good on ‘Luigi’s Mansion’, bad on ‘Still Alive’, best on ‘Delfino Plaza’ - you’ll note a pattern there, where songs previously jazzy stay good when jazzy flair is added.
At the end of the day, I’m mostly left feeling like I would’ve been just fine without this collection of tracks, and while I appreciate the effort, there’s just nothing here that holds me in any sense.
Rating: 6.2/10
Best Tracks: Delfino Plaza
Worst Tracks: Still Alive