Style: Video game music
Primary Emotions/Themes: A classic reborn
Thoughts: Let's clear the air right now of a couple of things. One - this album fucking rocks. It's by far the best recreation that Sam has done and it matches the original soundtrack beat for beat. Two - Donkey Kong Country is one of my favorite SNES games, the game already had a banger soundtrack and nothing needed to be changed from it.
The recreated soundtrack here has nearly zero deviations from the original brilliance that David Wise put together years and years ago. Rather the approach that Sam has taken here is to take the original instruments and recreate them as they would sound before they went through the compression process to work on the SNES sound chip.
The end result is nothing less than stunning. The music is exactly as I remember it, but instead of the distortion that comes with the original soundtrack everything is crystal clear. All of the instruments are truly allowed to breathe and shine like they were meant to be.
The lead trumpets in Jungle Groove sound cheesier and clearer than ever. The beautiful Aquatic Ambience has never sounded as good as it has here. King K. Rool's theme is as intense and epic as ever, though now even more so due to the clearer instrumentation.
How do you improve on near perfection? You take the limitations of the original work and open them up with modern technology. You let the listener hear the music in it's full glory like the composer did when he was creating this in the first place.
I'm still up in the air if this is truly better than the original soundtrack, there is a charm to be had with the limitations of the SNES and the nostalgia that brings. That said, this is a damn fine recreation and for my listening pleasure this one hits the table much more frequently than the original soundtrack does.
Written March 4th 2024
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