Style: Jazzy hip hop, video game music
Primary Emotions/Themes: Like meeting an old friend but something has changed
Thoughts: Final Fantasy IX is a game I never finished. For whatever reason I never got past the second disc and even now, decades later, I never went back to finish it. I suppose I should at some point. It's often hailed as a fine return to form after the experimentation of VIII.
The one thing I do remember though is the music. It was excellent (much like all Uematsu's works around the time). It was more grandiose and seemed to have a larger scale to it than any of his previous works. Almost as if he was now truly comfortable with the 32 bit sound chip as opposed to that of the 16 bit of the SNES.
So where does Terra Gaia come into this? Well this album is a reinterpretation of many of the composition from Final Fantasy IX. The style used here is a mix of lofi hip hop, lounge, jazz, and some other pretty low key genres. The overwhelmingly present mood on the album is calm and peace. This is an album to relax to after a hard day.
The one thing that is immediately obvious is the care that was taken to create these tracks. The artist (who is anonymous) has a deep reverence for the source music. Most of the tracks are recognizable within the first few measures of the song. It's always fun to listen without a track list and be pleasantly surprised when a familiar melody crosses the speakers.
Remix/reinterpretation albums are always a bit of a hit or miss with me. Too often they are lazy recreations of the original. I say about 90% of the time I would rather listen to the source music than another "lofi" version of a familiar soundtrack. Here though, there is a lot more put into it than normal. These tracks have been transformed into something new, yet retaining the identity of the original. This is what I need out of cover albums. This is how you do it.
Written May 21st 2024
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