It's possibly the closest thing we '76-'81er males have to a shared generational experience: sitting on a worn shag basement carpet, desperately trying to unravel impossible black wire knots, unsheathing the cartridge and superstitiously blowing supposed dust or dirt from its connectors, plugging it into the console, flash, flash, repeat. These days, that same age group is a high supplier of dudes in bands, and as such, it's no surprise to find the Nintendo Entertainment System's early game soundtracks exerting an influence on modern music. The unique sound produced by the console has lately been emulated by representatives from all genre corners, be it indie rock (Fiery Furnaces, Deerhoof), electronic music (Max Tundra, Jason Forrest), or hip-hop (Diplo's remix of Ludacris' "What's Your Fantasy?"). In most cases, those blips and beeps don't seem to be mere nostalgia exploitation, but rather evidence of NES music's lingering subconscious influence, musical touchstones as familiar as Beatles references were for an earlier generation of artists.
The Advantage, of course, represent the most literal faction of this phenomenon, with their four-piece instrumental rock covers of assorted level themes and boss music. Far from being the only band practicing this approach (see also: the Minibosses, the Power-Ups, NESkimos, etc.), they're nevertheless the NES translators with the most star-power, featuring one half of Hella and assorted other noise-scene moonlighters. But where some practitioners of 8-bit revival coast along on kitsch, the Advantage do more than just tickle your retro bone-- an, erm, advantage that was hinted at on their self-titled 2004 platter and is brought to full realization here on the cutely-named Elf-Titled.
Substantially upgrading the fidelity, and stepping away from the more obvious titles they've already covered-- your Marios, Zeldas, and Bubble Bobbles-- Elf-Titled is more stylistically explorative than their reflective, scrapbooky debut. Game composers designed music that was meant to loop infinitely without growing tiresome too quickly, resulting in brilliantly complex, maze-like melodies that the Advantage are all too happy to make their own. With guitars executing tightly choreographed, noodly maneuvers through songs like Bomberman 2's "Wiggy" or the music from the "Metal Man" stage of Mega Man 2, the band amps up the originals to reveal the songs as more than just background jingles.
Hella's Spencer Seim bears the heaviest interpretive burden, stepping up the drumwork on tunes that were, by necessity, percussively challenged. While his contributions to the first album sometimes sounded unnecessarily rackety, more restrained playing and production tricks keep his kit from overshadowing the melodies here, as with the thick echo taking the gravity out of the dreamy "Metroid: Kraid's Lair". But "Solar Jetman: Braveheart Level" demonstrates that fuller drumming can also beef up a song's potential, turning the thin original into a heroic, driving march.
It's inevitable that the Advantage will eventually run out of NES soundtracks worthy of revival and renewal. But the surprisingly majestic run through the much-beloved Duck Tales' "Moon Theme" and the weirdly Tortoise-like take on a song from Air Fortress suggest the Advantage don't need to stop when the games are sucked dry, indicating that they've hit upon a kind of post-rock sound that isn't saddled with that genre's predilection towards joyless pretensions. The next step is obviously to write original music in the vein of unsung NES composers' melodic pretzels, a task the Advantage themselves may or may not be equal to. But by reimagining the 8-bit ditties lodged deep in our memory banks as electrified indie-prog, the band is opening the door to less direct explorations of its generation's hidden canon.
