Style: Video game music, insanity, pure joy, worshiping the King of All Cosmos
Primary Emotions/Themes: How do you quantify rolling a bunch of stuff into a ball to create a star in musical form? Well this soundtrack does just that.
Thoughts: Burnout is a real thing. Somehow the past few weeks I've been pushing myself to the brink... and well I finally broke. Not sure what did it but I simply did not have it in me anymore and I had a complete breakdown. Something had to give, and it was my sanity.
Something had to bring me back from that though. Family. Friends. Music. That's my recipe to come back from the brink. In this came the music in question is the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. I had to bring out the big guns for this one, and there is no better album than this to bring me off that edge.
Katamari's music is one of the single strangest, wonderful, and joy filled albums in my collection. I would dare say it's among the most playful music I've ever heard in my life. The fact that it's a video game soundtrack is secondary as this music goes way beyond anything a simple soundtrack can create.
The concept of the game is simple. The King of All Cosmos sneezed and blew away all the stars in the sky. You - the prince - have been tasked with remaking the heavens... yep, all of it. You do this by rolling objects together in Katamari and then they get tossed into the sky by the king. You do this time and time again until you eventually create the moon.
That's the game. Such a bizarre and unique concept could only have a soundtrack to match. This thing represents a collection of genres that have never been combined before, and likely never will be ever again. It's big band at one moment, a piano concerto the next, Japanese hip hop, bossa nova the next... it's ever changing.
Ever changing, but there is one constant: the joy that this soundtrack brings me. It has a way of relaxing me like almost nothing else in my collection. The music grooves, it soothes, and it reassures me that there are still things that I enjoy when I get to my breaking point. There is nothing else like it, and it is an indispensable part of my collection.
I got into video game music vinyl after this had initially been released and repressed a few times. I managed to find someone to buy this off of for just over one hundred USD. I've often said on here that I don't like paying a lot for records, but I think this may be the exception to that. I would pay that price again, and again, and again. This soundtrack is worth every single cent I paid for it, and probably more.
Written April 12th 2024
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