![]() In those five-plus decades, fans of metal have embraced the genre’s songs as intense declarations of individuality. At the same time, its true believers have created extreme global offshoots like death metal, doom metal, and black metal. Judas Priest tuned into Sabbath’s darkly jagged melodies to create their own intricate, law-breaking mini-epics, Metallica revved up Priest’s tempos to give headbangers cases of whiplash, hair bands like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot spruced up the music for MTV, and nu-metal mutants like Korn and Slipknot gave it a bleak post-alt-rock and hip-hop edge. ![]() ![]() In 1970, Black Sabbath convincingly evoked the true essence of evil with the lumbering, three-chord opening guitar riff to the song “Black Sabbath,” consecrating the first pure heavy-metal crusher, and the ripples have been spreading virulently ever since. This album brought me some serious joy.Thousands of years after the Bronze and Iron Ages, the true Metal Age dawned half a century ago. It’s kind of hard to review a covers album, so maybe don’t call this so much of a review as a recommendation? But I heavily recommend this nonetheless. She, combined with other vocalist and guitarist Mike Pelillo, do well providing their vocals to the latin sections in “Libera Fatality” and “One Winged Angel” as well. There are vocals, mostly courtesy of Beatrice Bini, who has a fittingly gorgeous and powerful operatic voice for the couple of ballads they cover on this record, those being Final Fantasy X’s “Suteki da Ne” and Final Fantasy VIII’s “Eyes On Me”. This isn’t an entirely instrumental album though. This makes sense since Nobuo Uematsu himself did The Black Mages for awhile, a band where he and his compatriots created progressive rock to metal covers of all sorts of classic Final Fantasysongs in likely the way he envisioned a lot of them when MIDI technology was all he had to work with at the time. When I put that thought into context for myself, a group of metalheads doing a smattering of Final Fantasy sound-track classics metallic justice only seems correct.Ĭhocobo Band channel this through a pointedly accurate decision to cover this music with a distinct old-school prog-metal flare to it. The games have never repeated themselves there’s an element of progressivism that is inherent to the franchise that embodies a lot of what makes extreme metal so appealing. Final Fantasy games have been crazy genre- and convention-pushing games with labyrinthine narratives and intricate layered systems of all kinds. ![]() But spiritually? Everyone knows it’s actually Final Fantasy, assuming you’ve been a devout long-term fan of the franchise like I have. Here’s the thing… most people will identify DOOM as the “metal” video game franchise because, on the most shallow vapid surface level aesthetic, it is. There is always a disconnect between Westerners’ understanding of metal and translating Japanese works into it that feels like the one covering the music just doesn’t quite “get” it. Sure there’s one-man cover guys on YouTube, but it’s just never the same. This is a group of metalheads wanting to express their love for one of the most important landmark gaming franchises of all time, and to pay fitting tribute to Nobuo Uematsu, one of music’s greatest compositional virtuosos of ALL TIME.Ī proper attempt by people who understand metal covering Final Fantasy music has rarely been attempted, especially this convincingly. Todays subject of review, Tales From Other Worlds by Chocobo Band, is the inverse. I wrote an article this year about the relationship and instances where video games and metal intersect, but I was covering it from the perspective of the video games including the metal and not vice versa. ![]() I’m currently replaying through Blasphemous (great game btw) while I check out all the albums I personally give a shit about. I’ve been working on a big project for the website (hence the lack of activity, but trust that I’ve been keeping up with the music), and I’ve been gaming a lot, so I had a real excuse to just sit down and listen to music. ( TheMadIsraeli returns to NCS with the following recommendation of a new album released by Chocobo Band from Italy.) ![]()
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