Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Advantage - Air Fortress

Air Fortress

The Advantage were a dead serious Nintendo cover band. It's easy to do fun nostalgic cultural reference, but not at all easy to do the revisionist practice of finding great art in the sea of mass marketed crap. I know plenty of people already take video games seriously as an art form, but during all those hours of staring at our little avatars trying to get to the right side of the screen, did it occur to us how good the music was that was looping on each level? Maybe not, and maybe because some of it wasn't. Thankfully the dudes in the Advantage did the easy work of finding the best of the Nintendo music and the hard work of arranging it for rock quartet.

Their two albums are both fantastic from start to finish. The track here is from Air Fortress. I never played that game and have made no attempt to research it, much as I have no nostalgic relationship to most of the Advantage's music. It can be heard out of context for what it is: great prog rock minus the fat of narcissistic virtuosity.

Worth noting: the drummer, Spencer Seim, played guitar in Hella -- who maybe is going to reunite? and who I'll surely end up writing about here.

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