Style: Hip Hop, video game music
Primary Emotions/Themes: Jet Set Radio tribute, playfulness
Thoughts: Jet Set Radio is one of the first games that truly got me into my Dreamcast. The fact that you could skate around the entire city and do things however you wanted was kinda crazy for me. I enjoyed the hell out of that game.
The music in it was also at another level. It was quirky, bizarre, and completely off the wall. I had never heard anything like it before. I've never been able to find the soundtrack outside of the game so in it's place I'm settling for an artistic tribute to perhaps one of the strangest and most wonderful soundtracks to ever come out of the Dreamcast.
To say that 2 Mello recreated the soundtrack would be an outright lie. The music here sounds like it could have been on the soundtrack, but it's not the same. It's a hip hop artists' tribute to the music that's in the game and nothing more.
That sounds like a pretty harsh take, and it probably is. The music here is not on the same level as the game itself. That said the music is hardly bad, but it lives in the shadow of the source material.
What we do have here is a pretty damn cool interpretation of the hip hop style that is seen on a lot of the tracks within JSR. These tracks range from vocal driven to purely instrumental. No matter what we have going on in the songs though, the beat is the main focus. It's the driving force of the album.
The smooth sway of Say Somethin' contrasts nicely to the more upbeat and quirky Old to the New. Honestly the later of those two tracks truly sounds like it could have come off the original soundtrack. The vocals are sampled and manipulated in strange and unpredictable ways. There is an old school funk to the bass groove as well that was found throughout the stage in JSR. It's a bit of a strange bird at first, but after a couple of listens it's become one of my favorites on the album.
2 Mello had a high bar to reach here, and while he didn't quite make it the album is pretty damn good on its own. It's got a lot of variety and is quite quirky. Honestly if it wasn't tied to the game so intimately I think I would enjoy it more, because it stands on its own pretty damn well.
Written February 5th 2024
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