Saturday To Get Bitten

July 26th, 2014 at 11:11am
Kip Wingerschmidt

No, this is not a post about vampires……True Blood may be ending this year but that shit died a long time ago.

Rather, this post is for those of us old enough to remember classic video games and the blippy soundtracks within (and of course, those of you who aren’t old enough to remember such things but have a penchant for the “old-school”)…….lest we forget that there was a time when, to our young ears, nothing sounded nearly as sweet as Mario‘s magnificent music, Donkey Kong‘s dulcet tones, Contra‘s killer keyboard lines, and so on and so forth…

Well of course there are bands like Powerglove, The Advantage, Minibosses, and Horse the Band (the latter actually coined the term “Nintendocore” as a joke and fyi are about to tour again) that excel in bringing the style and sounds of the video games of yesteryear into the foreground. Some of these bands do actual covers of video game themes, others simply just create sounds that make you feel like you’re riding an Excitebike.

But beyond this phenomenon, there are also plenty of dudes (and at the risk of being sexist, prolly few if any dudines) that take classic songs and even full albums and turn them into 8-bit gold.

It seems too good (bad?) to be true, but it absolutely is and I’m about to prove it.

For the record, this post was actually inspired by an 8-bit cover of a classic Miles Davis song off his seminal 1959 album Kind of Blue (which, incidentally, is the jazz album I usually suggest newbies get down with first…..eventually you can build your way up to far crazier sounds)……apparently there was a whole album of this stuff called, appropriately, Kind of Bloop. The biggest irony about the endeavor is that the producer responsible for the album made sure to take precautions in securing all sorts of rights for the music, and then of course he got slapped with a potential lawsuit over the album’s pixelated cover art.

Anyway, you’re here to hear some 8-bit covers of famous rock/metal songs/albums, so (after the Miles cover) I’ve posted some of my faves below. Check out this insane YouTube playlist for plenty more…