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Sonic Adventure Remix :: Review by Charles
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Album Title: | Sonic Adventure Remix |
| Record Label: | Toshiba EMI | |
| Catalog No.: | TOCP-65024 | |
| Release Date: | December 16, 1998 | |
| Purchase: | Buy at eBay |
Overview
Sonic Adventure Remix is about as traditional as one can get for a mainstream remix CD. There are plenty of voice modifications and futuristic dance / techno beats to go around and it's remixed by a variety of different artists. It's extremely contrasting to your normal video game rearrange album in that sense, but I think remixes go more naturally with Sonic Adventure style music. What do these unknown American remix artists have to offer to Sonic Adventure music?
Body
A lot of these songs are inherently more bad-ass then your normal Sonic tracks. No matter what artist worked on a specific song, they all share the same quality of being very traditional and even typical remixes. There's always a certain crowd for that I suppose. And if you do think you are in that crowd then you will probably like some of these remixes. My biggest problem is that none of these remixes have any sort unique qualities that truly set them apart form each other. "Unknown from M.E." and "Believe in Myself" demonstrate this right away. They feel like they were all thrown through the same "remix machine" despite the different artists.
Chris Vrenna and Mark Blasque triumphed over the rest with their remixes of "Open Your Heart" and "My Sweet Passion". They're still very generic in terms of remixes, but they are definitely the best crafted. Vrenna and Blasque definitely knew where to stick the sirens and techno beats enough for these to be pretty listenable. This final "Open Your Heart" remix definitely saves the album in the end from being even worse. Again, this is coming from someone who's not much into the remix scene, but I do have ears at least.
Moving on, "Big's Theme" is so drastically different. It basically used the 'hey big guy' sample and that�s all that is similar between the two songs. It's a completely new composition otherwise. Although I like the successive remixes of "My Sweet Passion", there is no way I could tell they were remixes either. A bit of the fun of a remix is that you hear a lot of the original source material getting remixed, right? Even if Vrenna's version of "My Sweet Passion" is pretty cool, a lot of what makes it awesome has nothing to do with the source. One might as well just buy a high quality techno, electronica, or dance album.
Summary
Maybe it's a personal taste issue, but I just don't care for these kinds of remixes. People that do like this sort of "technotizing"" will probably be a bit disappointed still on the lack of variation. It's not even that good for fans as they are mostly likely fans of composer Jun Senoue and not these assorted artists. But the concept kind of goes along with the game's feel and I think there would be someone out there to like this — it's not like it's totally hard on the ears. An acquired taste, not a must-have.
