ReMix: Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse 'Pools of Rust'

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Well, as usual, I overpacked for my trip to Montreal, taking a laptop, seven or so books, a plethora of magazines and cds, etc. and yet managed to forget headphones. Didn't end up mattering much, as the conference I was attending took up most of my time, but it was still nice to get home to the comfort of cultureless suburban sprawl, monolinguality, and local pizza delivery shops. Picking up where we left off, in with OCR01259 is goat, aka Chris, with another classic Castlevanian concoction from his tome of CV3 arrangements. This time it's 'Stream', one of the still-familiar but less-commonly-covered gems from the vault of Kukeiha pieces that lend themselves oh-so-well to Chris' style. I believe that's enough gratuitously-chained-hyphenated-phrases for this write-up, but I'll probably use a couple more before we're done. If you're familiar with goat's work, this won't be a huge surprise - i.e., it's rockin', solid from a mixing and performance perspective, and packs a serious rock wallop, transylvania-style. I can't help thinking how cool it would be if some Romanian gymnast used one of his pieces for her floor routine in the Olympics. Sure, there'd be very few that would get the connection, but it'd still be cool. But I digress - Chris intros with a brief stream effect but quickly kicks it full on with layered guitar and a nice moving bassline. You can always, invariably, without fail, count on Chris to take the original melody and add in all the things that make sense for a guitar adaptation - vibrato, bends, various articulations, wah effects, and myriad other ingredients vital to the composition of game OST guitarification. At 2'38" Chris tries something a lil' different with a short piano bit that while not rock-your-socks-off-virtuoso is a good change, which is followed by some rapid sixteenth-note guitar chuggin' that ends out the mix, with the 'stream' effect fading out. The effect in question does sound a little more like a brook, recorded from several inches away, than an actual stream, but hey, who's really that picky about small tributary terminology these days? I love how this effect is used briefly for a climax at 1'56" - very effective, and reminds me of the water-effect/guitar mixture on Guided by Voices "I'll Replace You with Machines" to some extent, albeit as a one-off and not continued percussive element. More consistently great CV rock material from goat, equally not-to-be-missed, equally agreeable in shreddage and variety, equally head-bangable, especially that last minute. Goodstuffs.

― djpretzel