Pitchfork

Let me open this review by confessing that, when I was ten, Nintendo almost made me kill my parents. Having at last reached the final stage of Castelvania III, I was informed that my allotted daily hour of game time had long since passed, and that I would have to turn off the system. Ignoring my squealed threats of violence, my parents yanked the power cord before I could even write down the access code for the last level. As anyone who's ever played Castlevania III would surely understand, I snapped. Limbs flailing wildly, I charged for my dad, hoping to inflict some kind of bodily harm to at least partially rectify the massive injustice that had been committed.

Needless to say, Nintendo meant a lot to me as a kid. So when I heard about this, the debut album from California five-piece The Advantage, I just about shit a pixilated brick. The Advantage play heavy, dynamic covers of Nintendo classics-- something like the bastard lovechild of Don Caballero and Mario Mario. Driven largely by the always-impressive drumming of Hella guitarist Spencer Seim, The Advantage go far beyond simple nostalgia, exploring and often enhancing the brilliance of their source material.

The music for the Nintendo Entertainment system was created under tremendously limiting circumstances-- during the time that most of the songs covered here were written, composers had only three individual voices to work with at any given time, each consisting of little more than a modified sine wave. That being the case, melody was almost invariably given precedence over rhythm and texture. In this way, the songs covered here offer a perfect balance to the sprawling, rhythmically intense post-rock played by Hella and their contemporaries-- the simplicity and melodic strength of the source material focuses the players, and the players flesh out the source material beyond its original technological limitations.

Of course, certain songs fare better than others. The theme song from Bubble Bobble, hands-down my all-time favorite "gamepak," is equal parts bouncy and chunky, anchored by two bass guitar tracks and Seim's insistent drumming. The breezy jazz underpinnings of "Super Mario Bros. 2 Overworld Theme" serve as another highlight, perfectly articulated by dual clean electric guitars. Two downbeat songs from Castlevania III provide a welcome change of pace, and finally prove my theory that Radiohead's The Bends is just a thinly disguised cover of the game's soundtrack. In fact, my only real gripes with the song selection here are that The Advantage inexplicably omitted their excellent version of the "Moon Theme" from Duck Tales, a criminally underrated NES fave with a wonderfully catchy score.

Unsurprisingly, the intensely repetitive nature of the songs on The Advantage prevents the album from rising entirely above its novelty, but the band never apologizes for the whimsical nature of their content, and the resulting geeked-out enthusiasm makes this a great album for headbangers and button-mashers alike.