TUESDAY, AUGUST 22ND
THE ADVANTAGE
- AFTER PARTY FEATURING DJ DSTAR
$7.00
8:00PM
Kitchen Distribution
20 Auburn Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14213
THE ADVANTAGE
The Advantage play heavy, dynamic covers of Nintendo classics something like the bastard lovechild of Don Caballero and Mario Mario. Driven largely by the always-impressive drumming of Hella guitarist Spencer Seim, The Advantage go far beyond simple nostalgia, exploring and often enhancing the brilliance of their source material.
While their music has a kitschy nostalgic appeal for listeners who were weaned on Nintendo games, the Advantage’s approach is respectful, even reverential, toward the original source material, much of it written by classically trained Japanese composers like Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo and Yoko Shimomura. Mr. Kondo, Nintendo’s in-house composer, wrote the Super Mario Brothers theme and is regarded by aficionados as the Mozart of video game composers.
The music for the Nintendo Entertainment system was created under tremendously limiting circumstancesduring the time when most of the songs covered by The Advantage were written, composers had only four individual voices to work with at any given time, each consisting of little more than a modified sine wave. That being the case, melody was almost invariably given precedence over rhythm and texture.
Some of the music, composed at insane tempos, was obviously not written for humans to play on normal instruments. To deconstruct the songs, the band used software that decodes NES Sound Format files ripped from Nintendo games, allowing them to separate the component parts and listen to them at reduced tempos, allowing note-perfect facsimiles.
In this way, the songs covered by The Advantage offer a perfect balance to the sprawling, rhythmically intense post-rock played by Hella and their contemporariesthe simplicity and melodic strength of the source material focuses the players, and the players flesh out the source material beyond its original technological limitations.
The music can take listeners by surprise. It can easily be mistaken for long-lost Yes songs, or for a homage to John Zorn’s East Village avant-rock. For those familiar with the songs, however, what it enshrines above all are misspent youth and the cathode-ray glory days of Nintendo.
» http://www.theadvantageband.com
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