I've been waiting almost since the first one came out and it's lived up to all my expectations. The instrumentation was stepped up a quite a few notches on this one. The last album had maybe five instruments at most on one song this one almost reaches big band numbers on "Earthbound - Title Intro, Fourside". Of course numbers aren't everything, the track itself sounds very Metropole Orchestra and flows so naturally that you would think that this was the original and not VGM. Nearly all of the tracks show a marked improvement on the arrangement side of things as well and the last album was amazing to begin with, IMO.
What surprised me the most is that on one particular song "Kirby's Dream Land 3 - Iceberg" I could swear that it had Hadrien Feraud on bass and Damien Schmitt on drums. The song itself sounded like it could have come straight off of Hadrien's debut album. The playing was a dead ringer for those two so I went to the album site and lo and behold, it
was those two! I practically jumped out of my chair when I saw because I dig them so much!
While the album spans quite a few genres I think jazzheads and casual jazz listeners especially will get a kick out of this because quite a few tracks follow the style and sound stunning. I've often heard covers of songs attempted in a "jazz style" that sound terrible, as if no thought had been put into making it so but the tracks on this album are the opposite. They sound as if there were made from the ground up to sound that way - like they're not covers at all.
Of 12 songs here are only 2 that I don't care for too much but I would recommend this to anyone who likes good music regardless of whether or not they are in to video game music or not. Even as a very avid video gamer I only recognized 4 songs but loved basically all of them. Check it out, at the very least it's worth a listen
You can check them out here:
http://www.retroremixrevue.com/
