ReMix: Streets of Rage 'Drop and Roll'

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Fun. Not the type of fun that involves too much thinkin', granted, but sometimes that's what's called for. Big Beat, like death metal, fills a genre void by offering a form of musical instant gratification that might not be refined or have subtle gradations of tone and timbre coloration, but which essentially focuses on kicking posterior with volume and rhythm in copious quantitudes. Newcomer tefnek intros this Streets of Rage Stage 1 piece with some goofy synth squelch fx action, but the beat drops and rolls ala the title quite quickly, and it's clearly identifiable as Big Beat via not only the volume but the general groove. There's a good variety of synths here, the beat is sliced and diced, there's good fills that break things up, a slick bass slide around 0'46" that segues into a nice digital aliasing synth fx riff, and some wah guitar playfulness joins the beat stew further in - in essence, you've got a lot of tradeoffs to funky, pattern-based solos, layered over some thick drums. The ReMixer does an excellent job of making the genre successfully extend to five minutes without feeling awfully repetitive, one of the common pitfalls of the style even on shorter tracks. All that being said, there was a fairly divisive split on the judges panel, as though the mix is five minutes long and doesn't repeat itself sonically too much, from an arrangement perspective the original isn't being built upon compositionally to great lengths. Of course, the original itself was very groove-based and pattern-oriented, but it was still felt that more could have been done. In instances like these, what I've personally sometimes done is brought in another melody from the same game and used it as a chorus or break. Not the same thing as turning the piece into a medley, which would be covering the songs more as discrete units, but instead I'll sometimes mix the pieces into a new whole. I've seen others do this as well and it often adds a bit more to a piece where the sonic end is covered but the arrangement needs more beef. Perhaps that would have made this a clearer pass for the judges panel, but even without it, for the genre, this takes the original and without adding too much compositionally does certainly effectively transmogrify it into very convincing big beat. It's often difficult to extricate problems one might have with a genre at large from problems one has with a specific mix in that particular genre - in fact, it's one of the most challenging aspects of evaluating ReMixes - and that may or may not have been an issue here. The benefit of the doubt is an important concept, however, that should always apply. This might not have enough arrangement of the original for ya' to consider it truly exemplary, and that might be something the ReMixer should work on for future submissions, but in the meantime my strong suspicion is that you'll enjoy this for what it is and be too busy shaking your booty to care :)

― djpretzel