Music info: VGMdb
Info
We’re once ahead advancing another year to another arcade shmup series: next up is 1987’s R-Type. This album is a bit more focused than the last two, covering almost the entirety of the original R-Type soundtrack with a couple of extras from R-Type II and III. R-Type’s music is mostly pretty short, but the arrangements here ended up developing the pieces a bit more than previous albums, so the average track length here is actually slightly longer (omitting the seven-and-a-half minute Salamander medley), which is nice.
The arrangement style here is significantly more electronic than anything we’ve heard so far, with several straight up EDM tracks and some 4/4 dance beats and synth riffs in a bunch of other tracks. There’s a decent amount of electric guitar in there too, mostly rhythm guitar to go along with the electronic beats though a couple of tracks do get into shredding territory. This is probably the coolest eki work I’ve heard so far in terms of sound design; it’s definitely not every track, but here and there there are some interesting synth choices or bits of electronic production that I like.
One track was arranged by Azu♪ (under the name azupiano), whom we last saw on this blog a couple of years ago on an original prog metal album. He was involved in the Japanese fan arrangement space in the 2000s, and while that had slowed down a bit in favor of professional work and original compositions by the time this album came out in 2017, apparently he found the time to contribute something! It appears to be the most recent fan arrangement he’s publicly released on an album (though not the most recent overall, he has one on SoundCloud from 2020 at least), so this album is vaguely interesting as a historical tidbit. His arrangement is also electronic with rhythm guitars, so stylistically it fits right in, though since he’s a pianist it does prominently have some piano in it in a way the rest of the album doesn’t.
Recommended tracks:
-
“TITLE” (Kousuke Matsuoka, orig. Masato Ishizaki from R-Type) begins the album with some of my favorite sound design; unfortunately the whole album doesn’t continue like this as much as that would’ve ruled
-
“BATTLE THEME” (azupiano, orig. Ishizaki from R-Type) “fixes” the weird syncopated timing of the original melody, which is a bummer, but in exchange it adds a little more syncopation in the 1:04 section, which is nice
-
“BATTLE PRESSURE” (Matsuoka, orig. Ishizaki from R-Type) has a nice extended intro with spooky chord mashing that sounds like an alarm going off
-
“RETURN IN TRIMPH ~ Ending” (Matsuoka, orig. Ishizaki from R-Type & Ikuko Mimori from R-Type III) has some of the album’s guitar shredding before slipping into a funkier version of R-Type’s stage 1 theme, which we heard two tracks ago
Leave a Reply