Tracklist
01. Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra – Crono’s Theme
02. Yasunori Mitsuda – Crono’s Theme
03. Royal Crown Revue – Hey Pachuco!
04. Yasunori Mitsuda – Magus’s Theme
05. The Beatles – You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
06. Nobuo Uematsu – Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII
07. Yasunori Mitsuda – Boss Battle 1
08. Yasunori Mitsuda – Battle 2
09. David Wise – Krook’s March
10. Yasunori Mitsuda – Robo’s Theme
11. Malcolm Arnold – Siciliano
12. Michiru Yamane – The Tragic Prince
13. Tappi Iwase – Main Theme Arrange ~ Guitar Version
14. The Beatles – Hey Jude
15. Yasunori Mitsuda – Frog’s Theme
01. Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra – Crono’s Theme (Orchestral Game Concert 5, 1996)
For as long as I’ve loved music, I’ve loved instrumental music. I was surprised to discover just how much lyrics and vocals actually mean to listeners. Duh, right? I’ve met devout David Bowie fans who have overlooked his instrumental works, even though Low, one of his most praised albums, is nearly half instrumental! Don’t get me wrong, I do like words (nevermind the rate of my blogging!), but when listening to new music, words are often the last element to be processed. This is not a conscious decision. It’s simply how I’m wired, and it has influenced my taste in music for my entire life.
Lucky for me, the world of game music during my tenure was not only barren of traditional vocal music, but traditional voices altogether. Real audio in games? Forget it. The potential for complex, meaningful computer music was certainly there, especially considering I grew up in the 16-bit era, but the technical limitations of game hardware still dictated the form the music took. That form turned out to be a lot of brrrts and boops, so you had to be seriously into the function and/or construction of a piece from a game soundtrack (even if that function was something as simple as a good hook) to appreciate it. This was no problem for me. I grew to love the computer tones, and clearly so did many others. After I joined the band program in school, I better understood and appreciated traditional forms of instrumental music, which in turn made me wonder what my favorite game tunes might sound like played by real instruments. The sophistication of the SNES sound engine helped me fake it in my head, but I wouldn’t hear the real deal for years. Video games were toys, not art. No self-respecting orchestra had time for games.
Not in America, anyway. Japan, however, got to work at least as soon as 1991, recording and releasing the Orchestral Game Concert series in which professional orchestras play a wide variety of pieces from popular games, as well as a whole bunch of other shit from Japanese games I’ve never heard of. I guess if you were well connected with your imports at the time (also, rich?), you might’ve known about these records, but most of us didn’t find them until the dawn of the modern internet. When I searched Napster for “Crono’s theme,” I certainly didn’t expect to find anything live. Anything real. To finally hear it was, well, game-changing.
That said, I can appreciate this track today for being one of the first orchestral game performances I’d ever heard. It was a beacon of hope for a weird little genre of which I remain a serious fan. No one can take that away, even if the arrangement is dull and the mixing is muddy. Mitsuda’s original sequence calls for strings in the opening and trumpet in the melody. We have the inverse here, and while it does sound nice, it completely interferes with what makes the song tick in the first place. The strings in the intro (where they belong) set the epic tone, give the piece its atmosphere. The trumpet melody is the vehicle driving the whole thing forward on the rails of the snare drum. The trumpets sound great in the intro, but the strings are a serious drop in dynamics that weaken the whole thing. Beneath it all, the snare drummer is mixed so pitifully low that I can hear the guiro-type accessory percussion overpowering it on beat 2 of every measure. At first I thought the drummer was playing the wrong part, but it’s just I can’t hear the damn thing. It probably sounded a lot better in the concert hall than it does on the disc. Putting Marle’s theme in the middle is a nice touch, at least. Reminds me of Raiders March. But for Crono’s sake, we can do much better:
02. Yasunori Mitsuda – Crono’s Theme (Chrono Trigger, 1996)
One beat of rolling snare, AND GO.
That’s twice now that I put the rightful opener to the mix on track 2. It’s nice, at least, to get the pompous and airy version out the way so the true mon ami can cut through its blubbery wake like razor wire. “Crono’s Theme” is the pace of “FFV Main Theme” crossed with the epic scale of “Omen.” This is no bright and sunny adventure. These are cosmic consequences you gamble with when you fire up this game, and “Crono’s Theme” lets you know just what kind of ride you’re on.
The feelings I have for this soundtrack have only grown over the years, as has my admiration for composer Yasunori Mitsuda. After two years of sound design grunt labor, he threatened to quit Squaresoft if he wasn’t allowed to compose, so they threw him a bone. Sure, it wasn’t no big fancy Final Shmantasy, but it was an RPG. And Mitsuda knocked it out the park. He gave them something arguably better than any Final Fantasy soundtrack. The man built his legacy in one game, one soundtrack, two and a half hours of the best shit ever made for the medium. I’m gonna try, try not to gush too hard, but the staying power of Chrono Trigger is remarkable. If I get to cheat out of talking about the Beatles because Beatles, then I can probably cheat out of the Chrono Trigger OST on similar grounds. The greatness of this game and its soundtrack are well documented. Except I want to talk about it, though I’m not sure I have anything new to add. I just still geek out pretty seriously over this album. May as well pace myself, cause for damn sure there’s more to come.
03. Royal Crown Revue – Hey Pachuco! (Mugzy’s Move, 1996)
Now that I’ve had a chance to towel off, it’s finally time to breach a new category in the musical history of Mr. Brick: band music!
I don’t know how it goes elsewhere in America, but in my local school system, the band programs were (and still are) focused primarily on brass, woodwinds, and percussion. Together these are called the concert band, military band, or wind ensemble. There’s plenty of great music written for concert band, but in the world of classical music the orchestra has always reigned supreme. People can’t resist those rows and rows of bows, swaying and sawing their notes away. How droll! This ain’t no MOVIE, grandma, THIS IS REAL LIFE, and I got this REAL BIG hunk of metal what goes BLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT. BLAT BLAT BLLLLRARARARARARARRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The concert band is popular in American schools because modernism has somehow not yet exiled the marching band (a concert band forced to its feet) from the football stadium below the professional level. Color me surprised; there are fewer places to feel more marginalized than in a marching band at a Friday or Saturday night football game. A tradition almost 110 years old and the only Hollywood representation we have is Drumline. I’d resent the entire institution…if I hadn’t spent nearly a decade in it.
When a marching band is finally shooed off the field, they spend the rest of the game in a remote block of the stadium, squeezing out fifteen-second pep motifs between downs and stand tunes on timeouts. Ahh, stand tunes: band arrangements of pop music played in a vain ploy for attention. If the arrangements were especially good and your band director was open minded, it meant tearing into such joys as “Louie Louie,” “Vehicle,” “Frankenstein,” and “Mustang Sally” on a weekly basis. (I didn’t say modern pop, did I? What I meant to say was dad-rock. Several degrees better.) Those tunes wouldn’t come for me until college. In high school we mostly played “Hey Pachuco!”, a slice of the 90s swing revival that picked up steam in a little motion picture called The Mask.
America was on a serious Jim Carrey bender at the time. What band director was gonna pass such hotness up? According to my research, not many. There’s video after video after video of a bunch of spastic band dorks playing the same Tom Wallace arrangement, doing their own variation of horn flashes and dance fragments that come standard with a marching band. If you weren’t in band, then you’re making a face right now. Don’t. You’re thinking, “Why?” DON’T. These are children, free children of America, forced to attend a football game, forced to move on a field to the delight of their parents and the boredom of everyone else, then forced to sit in the corner of outside. Gotta let that tension out somehow.
I don’t like “Pachuco” too much now (the backlash on the swing revival wasn’t kind to anyone), but I guess I liked it enough back then to put it on a CD. Napster was so mind-bogglingly stocked that I often found the “demo” performances of stand tunes from the CDs band directors got with the score. Except I couldn’t find that for “Pachuco,” so I picked the next thing and moved on.
04. Yasunori Mitsuda – Magus’s Theme (Chrono Trigger)
What were we talking about? Was it Chrono Trigger?
I can see that I was still using these CDs not as artistic compilations but as vehicles for music I didn’t own physically. And who could blame me? As I said, the breadth of Napster’s selection was positively unbelievable (for the Year 2000, anyway). By the time I got to it, Metallica and the RIAA were already on the hunt, and I thought that maybe the window to bottomless free music would be closing soon for good. (HA!) The law of the land was grab and go. The only thing keeping me from collecting entire soundtracks was, of course, a dial-up connection. Had to portion your internet very carefully, lest you go overtime and block the precious family land line. It’s a wonder any of us survived those days.
So with the purpose of this disc well established, we can safely subtitle Volume 3 The Chrono Trigger Album. The version of “Magus’s Theme” I originally burned wasn’t the actual cut from the game. It was some random VST remix, which (to my slight embarrassment today) I didn’t notice at 13 years old. Structurally it’s identical to the original, and I thought what I had was the original, so in the spirit of good intention, I’ll cover the original.
It’s great. Like the rest of the CT characters’ themes, it’s a perfect aural capsule of the character. A despondent, ever-descending minor key wail with howling wind, thundering timpani, and stark trumpet. (It takes a lot of class and black magic to play the stark trumpet.) With the tambourine going, it’s almost a dance. Mitsuda mixed a lot of genres into the Chrono stew, just one of the many reasons it’s still the best after 20 years.
05. The Beatles – You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (Help!, 1965)
LISTEN UP, you sad sack teenagers. There’s lots of stuff you should be hiding away, of course, but since you’re teenagers, you probably won’t. You may as well lean into it. TELL THAT GIRL/BOY/ANIME PILLOW HOW YOU FEEL and feel the force of the planet when it kicks you in the junk. Then get up, put your headphones back on, and stop sniveling. You have years to go, and hiding it away is actually a terrible way to spend those years.
06. Nobuo Uematsu – Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII (Final Fantasy VII: Reunion Tracks, 1997)
Final Fantasy VII is a game which needs no introduction. When Square split with Nintendo and took their legacy series to the PlayStation, Nobuo Uematsu considered the possibility of utilizing the new tech and recording the soundtrack with a real orchestra. He ultimately stayed digital for concerns of filesize. Rightly so: FFVII spans three discs of game and four discs of soundtrack. Nobuo must have caught on early that FFVII was going to be a colossal game and didn’t want to complicate things. VI’s score is a tough act to follow, but most major nerds will agree that VII’s upheld its predecessor’s legacy, if not surpassed it.
And anyway, with the technical ceiling of the PS1 still substantially higher than the SNES, Nobuo had lots of room to advance the sound of the fake orchestra. There is an uncanny valley in music, just as there is in video, and the closer you get to the singularity, the more dangerous it gets. Now 1997 was probably still a little too soon to be worried, and the 90s were hardly the first time experimental musicians were weirding people out with instruments pretending to be instruments. Gamers were so used to it that they didn’t realize they were in the valley. Even if 1997 wasn’t too soon to be worried about the fake orchestra closing the gap on the real one, the audience of this soundtrack sure as hell didn’t notice anything off. Maybe that’s why it was so well received.
Or maybe it’s just so good, who cares what it actually sounds like. 1997 Nobuo was prime time Nobuo. “Main Theme” is a fully thought out piece, with a start and a finish, declaring the game’s iconic theme (do re-mi tiiiiiii laaa) up front and following through with multiple melodically unique movements interspersed with the theme. It is not an overture yet still conveys a range of emotions connected to the story. It is truly a shame that Nobuo could not employ a real orchestra in 1997, because the few live performances appended to the Final Fantasy VII: Reunion Tracks compilation are nothing short of sublime. No complaints about the arrangement (which was Nobuo’s own), the performance, about anything. It’s just so good. I sort of forgot this one existed, and I’m glad I dug it back up. It was an accidental find on Napster, being on one of those Japanese CDs, but no surprise that it made the rounds. Here was our sign that game music had a place in the real world.
07. Yasunori Mitsuda – Boss Battle 1 (Chrono Trigger)
I did log a respectable amount of time with Chrono Trigger, at least enough to get through more than a few boss fights, and boss music doesn’t get better than this. We’ve got the rock engine chugging along, this time daring to hit several more pieces of the drum kit. We’ve got an organ gone mad, spitting nonstop triplets. And we have the star of the piece: a TEN FOOT TALL FRENCH HORN. If this song had words, they’d be fighting words. From start to finish, the whole thing clocks in at a meager 35 seconds, yet many Chrono players can only tell you the fond memories they had beating up bosses with this insane jam going nonstop in the back.
08. Yasunori Mitsuda – Battle 2 (Chrono Trigger)
This track was actually cut from the final release of Chrono Trigger but still made it to the soundtrack. When I found it on Napster, it was listed as “unreleased” so I grabbed it. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t stand very tall next to the rest of the battle music from CT. Respectable, but cut for a reason.
09. David Wise – Krook’s March (Donkey Kong Country 2, 1995)
The most celebrated pioneers of video games (and game music) are Japanese, but a small outfit in the UK called Rare took everybody by surprise with a neat, tight side-scroller with cutting-edge graphics and challenging gameplay called Donkey Kong Country. That Nintendo even dared to put the legacy of one of their oldest, most treasured characters in the hands of outsiders spoke to Rare’s incredible talent, even in its fledgling stages. Rare’s resident composer, David Wise, expected his work for DKC to be overruled by Japanese composers. Fortunately, Nintendo’s trust in Rare extended to Wise, who wrote the lion’s share of the DKC trilogy soundtracks, including the insanely fun and confusingly titled second entry, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest.
The DKC trilogy covers a variety of environments: jungles, caverns, ice caverns, mine shafts, giant beehives, canyons, disco carnival mine shafts, haunted forests, swamps, and more. Wise’s music puts you squarely in each new environment as you go through the game (which can be helpful when the disco carnival comes right after the giant beehive). DKC music on the whole has a percussive, wild arc to it (this being a game of Simians vs. Reptiles), but “Krook’s March” is an eerie exception. Serving as the backdrop to a series of castle-themed levels late in the game, it’s a hauntingly low melody in the strings that is slowly joined by glockenspiel, brass (for the royal flair), and some seriously foreboding clarinet. Oh, mustn’t forget the snare. What’s a march without a little rolling snare? The DKC series, particularly 2, has a very Disneyfied twist to the sound, and I think it serves the game well. DKC2 was more colorful and cartoony than 1 while still retaining the deep detail of the original, and the soundtrack is as lush as the art. It was a technical leap in the day, and I think it all holds up exceptionally well.
You know what’s weird? In DKC1 the final boss is an alligator king (crown and all), and you fight him on a pirate ship. In DKC2, the final boss is that same alligator, only now he’s a pirate captain (musket and all). And you fight him on, well, a flying ship, but right before that you go through a bunch of…castle levels. Didn’t I tell you we weren’t gonna learn anything?
10. Yasunori Mitsuda – Robo’s Theme (Chrono Trigger)
I note with a little dismay that the three main character themes excluded from the Mr. Brick series are Marle, Lucca, and Ayla. The girls. 13-year-old me chose the brooding dark elf over the fistfighting cavewoman. Must’ve been the cooties. Sorry, ladies, the patriarchy’s a bitch.
“Robo’s Theme,” befitting his robotic nature, is heavy on the machine percussion and computer boops, but this is the happiest industrial music you’ll ever hear. Very catchy, too. When an unknown red-haired chap by the name of Rick Astley first heard it, he was inspired by the time travel story of Chrono Trigger to actually go back in time eight years and rewrite it into a pop masterpiece so enduring it survived the impact of Lavos himself. Behold:
11. Malcolm Arnold – Siciliano (1963)
In the right context, instrumental music pulls raw emotion out of your bones/balls/butt, same as any sappy pop song with words. After extraction, however, comes its unique triumph: there’s no pretty singer or corporate puppet telling you what to do with those emotions. They are now yours to mold as you see fit. This is huge. We’re all guilty of believing what some fuckhead with a microphone has to say, and we’re all guilty of looking to a fuckhead with a microphone to rationalize something ridiculous and intolerable we feel. These crimes can only be committed with words. Fortunately, even at the impressionable age of 13, I had the sense to look for emotional solace in both vocal and instrumental music.
As a band kid, I sometimes found that solace in the very works I was studying. “Siciliano” is the second movement in a suite of three titled “Prelude, Siciliano, and Rondo” (itself a rearrangement of Malcolm Arnold’s Little Suite for Brass), and it was the first of many band ballads I enjoyed hearing as much as I did playing. In keeping with the siciliana tradition, it’s built on dotted-eighth rhythms in 6/8 time. It’s slow and pastoral, great stuff for when you just wanna float aimlessly in whatever Big Sad‘s got you down. If you’re lucky, you’ll have taken respite by the end of the song without having to take to heart the advice of an overpaid ding dong and/or his overpaid songwriter. Not that you won’t later. Not that I won’t later. But we must always try.
Since a lot of these band tunes are written for developing musicians, the parts aren’t always the most complex, and nobody gets shafted in this department more than the tubas. I can’t tell you how many times I got saddled with whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooole noooooooooooootes and haaaaalf noooooootes in the low grade pieces. Even as we took on tougher material, I got “upgraded” to two measures of quarters and maybe a couple eighths copy-pasted over a page and a half. Mr. Arnold and Mr. Paynter took good care of us, though, giving us the response in the call-and-respond melody and some tense descending lines at the end of the bridge. It’s not a lot, but I’m not asking for septuplets every measure (Robert W. “Not The Cure” Smith got us covered in that department). Just some sweet, steady movement, like a good bassline deserves.
What, you want me to talk about the other instruments? Yeah, sure, they’re nice. Good job. Get out of my face.
12. Michiru Yamane – The Tragic Prince (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, 1997)
HEY IT’S A GAME I ACTUALLY BEAT! And I mean I cleaned this sucker out. I wasn’t the only one. Symphony of the Night is the pinnacle of the side-scrolling enthusiast’s boner, boasting an enormous, labyrinthine map (which you end up having to clear twice), wisely chosen and hilariously game-breaking RPG elements, and a gothic-rock-baroque-fusion soundtrack to die for. “Tragic Prince” is one of the better known numbers in the bunch, of course, ’cause it’s the track with crazy guitar wailing. Real guitar, too! Backed by a super-fake orchestra, which almost brings the tune down, but nah, this sucker rocks. Boiling bass, solid showmanship at the drums, and wait till the double kick drums come in!
Symphonic rock is a musical flavor in perpetual danger of going rancid between bites, but Michiru Yamane’s got a great ear for balance. Even if the symphonic component sounds a little dated, the blood-drenched guitar prevails. And let’s be honest, if SotN is famous for anything other than sick guitar and side-scrolling priapisms, it’s camp. Exhibit A:
13. Tappi Iwase – Main Theme Arrange ~ Guitar Version (Suikoden, 1995)
Look, if you’re gonna subscribe to Japanese media, you’re gonna get some weird conjugations, and you’re gonna get some tildes. As I understand it, in speech you employ the tilde to make things just a bit cuter~ or fancier~. Ugh. It feels weird ending a sentence with it, but looks even weirder sticking a period after it. I’m not cut out for the otaku life.
Suikoden was one of my brief dips into the gulf of JRPGs for the PlayStation. This and maybe two other songs are all I remember about the game. Once more we have a real guitar (two, in fact) with fake support. Unlike the demonic electric of “Tragic Prince,” however, these guitars are tender acoustics, and their only backing is a mock glockenspiel that makes me think perhaps we should’ve been worried about the uncanny valley. Anyway, it’s a tiny part of the song, hardly enough wood to crucify a song upon. With only each other to interact with, the guitars take a loose, rubato approach to the tempo, giving “Main Theme Arrange ~ Guitar Version” a comforting, relaxed feel. Perfectly good, mellow music for your next otaku campfire. Probably less likely to get your ass kicked playing this, as opposed to “Wonderwall.”
Legit question for guitar people: is at least one of these guitars playing with nylon strings? My guess is the lead is playing with nylon, the support is playing with steel. Write in, let me know, there’s like four people that wrote this soundtrack and none of them are returning my phone calls.
14. The Beatles – Hey Jude (1968)
Hey Jude, what’s going on, man? Hope you had fun at the wedding. We need to hang out again, dude. Anyway, tell everyone I said hey. And thanks for reading!
15. Yasunori Mitsuda – Frog’s Theme (Chrono Trigger)
What were we talking about? CHRONO. TRIGGER.
Yasunori Mitsuda slaved so hard over this soundtrack he literally gave himself STOMACH ULCERS. So when you listen to this courageous anthem for the greatest Elizabethan English-speaking amphibian knight of all time, remember the price of glory. That price is stomach ulcers. Beats life as a salaryman, I reckon.
Third time is…not the charm, but certainly more charming. Still lots of game music, but I at least managed to break in a couple of new games, a new category, and I think we’re done with the Beatles. Though there are a couple tracks I’m not really hot about these days, nothing on Volume 3 straight up embarrasses me. Good enough for me.