Sonic the Hedgehog Vocal Traxx: Several Wills
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CD Details
Edition: Music CDFormat: Import, Soundtrack
CD Release Date: 2007-01-22
Music Label: MSI:AVEX TRAX
Soundtracks:
- His World
- Dreams Of An Absolution
- All Hail Shadow
- My Destiny
- His World (Zebrahead Version)
- Dreams Of An Absolution (Lb Vs Js Remix)
- His World (Crush 40 Version)
Music reviews of Sonic the Hedgehog Vocal Traxx: Several Wills
Music Review: A for effort, C- for content. (F+ for value)
Rating: 2 Stars
Sensible as it may seem due to the nature of the material, splitting the music from the 3D Sonic games into a double or triple album for the score and an EP for the vocal soundtrack makes for a major thorn in the Western importer's side. While director Jun Senoue was able to scrounge up the best summary he could for American release for Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes, a failure to sell kept him from doing the same to Shadow the Hedgehog. And his efforts in Shadow the Hedgehog kept him off the most recent and confusingly second self-titled Sonic game. (Third if you count the 8-bit series.)
Or it would have, in theory, if Jun considered his work a typical 9 to 5 job. But just because he was too swamped to pen new material doesn't keep his guitarwork and his ever-morphing project Crush 40 off the game, offering up a Bond theme cover of Magna-Fi's "All Hail Shadow"; a side-by-side comparison with the original will prove how much fun it truly is to listen to Jun's infectious licks and lead vocalist Johnny Gioeli's trademark orgy of overdubs.
But as one might imagine, that only covered Shadow's theme. The task of the main theme/Sonic's theme (one in the same on this title) was thrown to Zebrahead mouthpieces Matty Lewis & Ali Tabatabae, collaborating with Gioeli to pen "His World", an synth/orchestral exercise in simply trying to satisfy too many criteria at once. It's too sluggish, despite Ali's rapping, to be a true Sonic theme, and it lacks the punch to roll over the end credits effectively.
So, the three collaborators decided to have some fun and turn this disc into a half-soundtrack/half-remix CD. Matty and Ali took His World back to Zebrahead, cranked up the tempo and turned it into a true rap-rocker, rewriting the tune to fit the band's usual caliber. Johnny stripped the work down to his own contributions and finished writing the song on his own terms, returning something entirely different from Crush 40's usual fare--you can barely tell it's the same band that sung AHS earlier on the record--Gioeli's first contribution that not only goes beyond lyrics, but composing the entire song. The fans of the two bands can bicker circles around the question of which one's better, but it's apples and oranges and all that's really apparent is both songs blow the album's opening track out of the water. Shame Sonic Team didn't use Crush's version as a main theme and Zebrahead's as Sonic's, but the game never mustered up quite as much interest as its soundtrack anyway.
This takes us to the two remaining songs, which cripple the disc. The beauty of EP's is it keeps the tunes from running together, but the material has to be consistent in quality in order to work. The Remix Factory's Lee Brotherton tries his hand at Silver's theme with "Dreams of an Absolution", but like the character, it succeeds in being little more than white noise. Once again, Jun Senoue steps in for backup, and brightens the arrangement some, but there's only so much you can do with such a droning melody. I guess the four chiefs of this disc understand that to a certain extent because they don't even touch "My Destiny", the six-minute ballad. It's simply unbearable for a whole new set of reasons. Not because of the smoggy mixing, like Shadow's SA2 level music, and not because of the cheesy lyrics, which plagued Sonic Heroes. No, it's because it's a damned six-minute ballad. Anyone could have told Sonic Team this was a bad idea, but--ever-so-unfortunately--nobody did. And here it is. (If only your CD player could total up the time a song FEELS like.)
All in all, the effort that went into His World is so impeccable, it's almost a shame that the only other highlight here is a rehash. Slap a $25 price tag on that and it's just flat-out unimpressive in the worst kind of way. The sad truth is that if Sonic Team continues down the line of producing multiple 3D games at once, there just won't be enough Jun & Johnny to go around.
Description of Sonic the Hedgehog Vocal Traxx: Several Wills
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