I followed Grant Henry, AKA Stemage’s Metroid Metal project ever since before the Bandcamp days, and the fusion of metal arrangements with Metroid’s classic tunes blew my mind. Back then, I would have never guessed that we’d eventually get ourselves a platform like Bandcamp, where a musician like Stemage could release his work in a more concrete platform than ephemeral Quicktime embeds and downloads. What a time to be alive.
In the time since its inception, Metroid Metal has expanded from a mere novelty and an experiment, to a full-fledged project. I have here the Metroid Metal trilogy: Varia Suite, the Expansion Pack EP, and Other Album.
A big part of the reason this project always worked so well is down to the strength of Metroid’s music to begin with: the triumphant strains of that classic Brinstar theme echo the kinds of iconic melodies employed by Iron Maiden and their ilk, while the ominous rhythms of Lower Norfair find the home they’ve always yearned for in this project with an extra layer of distortion and drive.
And the guitars are the most massive part of this, in production and performance: similarly to millennium-era Iron Maiden, Metroid Metal uses a triple guitar attack that beefs up the melodies and gives room for a solid rhythm guitar beneath the riffs and melodies.
When I listen to these albums, it’s a curious cocktail of emotions: there’s nostalgia, with my treasured memories of playing these games and getting lost in their deep alien worlds, but there’s also the feeling that these tracks work so well outside of their native context, because the melodies and the rhythms dig deep and anchor into your brain. Whether in-game or rearranged as metal tracks, this is just good music. And the first release, Varia Suite, is easily my favourite.
A decade ago, a friend turned me towards the similarities between the opening chugging rhythm of Alice In Chains’ Them Bones and certain parts of the Space Pirates’ theme in Prime. I still can’t unhear that. But it just goes to show how well this theme goes with a metal arrangement: the spiraling melody feels as though it had always been written for the guitar attack of a traditional metal band.
You’d think there would only be so much that could be done with something as small as the Item Room theme, but the band makes lemonade with the lemons they’re given, arranging the simplistic melody above a chugging section whose stop-start guitars and cymbal clashes wouldn’t be out of place on a metalcore album, before the second half drops the breakdown and brings the whole band in on the main melody. But if you’re an entrenched metalhead who cringes at the thought of most anything with “-core” in the genre tag, don’t worry; this and the following Item Collect track, rearranged into a concise little piece clocking in at under a minute, feel more like breathers between the first couple of iconic tracks and the ones that follow.
For the most part, though, the arrangements employed by Metroid Metal use the kinds of leads, riffs and melodies you’d expect from a band in the traditional metal sphere. I can appreciate that. It’s right in my wheelhouse.
Expansion Pack is a neat little EP. (Get it?) If you’re into physical media, I’d recommend picking up the version of Varia Suite that comes with EP packed in (which is the version I own), since that’s two-thirds of Metroid Metal’s physical catalog right there for you.
While Varia Suite, I would argue, has the lion’s share of the series’ most outstanding tracks, there’s some great cuts on EP. Metroid Prime’s title melody goes great as a triumphant lead guitar line, while Super Metroid’s Crateria theme gets juiced up with a beefy rhythm section and great lead lines. Incidentally, the title theme/Bryyo medley here is the only song on these three releases that re-arranges material from Corruption.
Other Album’s title is obviously a reference to the much-contested Other M, although it could also be seen as a backhanded knock against the controversial game, considering no songs from Other M are actually included on the album. Curiously, it’s a shorter offering than Varia Suite (8 cuts instead of 14), and even then, they felt the need to include a non-Metroid tune to cap off the album: a cover of the Autobot City Battle score from Transformers: The Movie, composed by Vince DiCola.
It’s by no means a bad cover (in fact, that’s the film that pretty much single-handedly got me into more rocking forms of music), although it does reveal the intrinsic limitations of this project, as well as reveals why there hasn’t been another Metroid Metal release since Other Album: maybe there’s just not enough iconic music left in the series that would really make for a great metal rearrangement to do another full-length. There are some themes that would be really nice to see (Elysia’s theme from Corruption could make for a nice atmospheric metal track, and Sanctuary Fortress from Echoes is a sore missed opportunity), but until Prime 4 drops, I suppose this is pretty much what we’re getting. And I’m okay with that! I could listen to these albums all day.
The tracks on Other Album are more rhythm-heavy than the offerings on previous releases, especially the centerpiece rearrangement of Torvus Bog. As absurdly specific as this is, this is not actually the only metal cover of this track: American prog-metallers Vangough covered Torvus Bog as well on their second record Game On!, an album full of video game music rearranged for a metal setup. (I should get to reviewing that one someday.)
Comparing the two, Vangough’s is probably the more atmospheric and ‘faithful’ interpretation, conveying the murk and gloom of Torvus just the same as the original version, while the Metroid Metal version takes more liberties: that jagged rhythm underneath the lead line when the main melody breaks in, and the other surprises to make things a bit more lively and up-tempo, do change the original mood, but not in a bad way at all. I find Vangough’s tasteful use of keys help it to secure the atmosphere it’s aiming for (as opposed to Metroid Metal, who do their work with a strictly ‘conventional’ metal setup: guitars, bass and drums). Whichever version you seek out will be worth your time.
I find myself loving elements of this release as well, like how the clean guitar gradually breaks in above the distorted riff that ushers in their rearrangement of Prime’s Tallon Overworld theme, before the main melody sees us through. The effect kinda reminds me of the rain constantly battering down the Overworld.
If the concept of Metroid music with metal arrangements sounds good to you, then ideally you’ll want to hear them all and complete your experience with Stemage and co.’s excellent project. But if you were forced at plasma-beam-point to select just one, I’d go with Varia Suite, which is packed with some of the games’ most iconic tracks and loaded with some of the series’ most unforgettable melodies, their timeless impact supercharged with metal arrangements.
I suppose the ultimate test, then, is this: if you sent a metal fan links to some Metroid Metal stuff, and they not only didn’t play Metroid, but didn’t play video games at all, would these songs still entertain them?
I’m obviously not the right one to make that call, as subjective a thing as it is, but if they enjoyed these kinds of melodies, I’m sure they’d like it. In what capacity, that’s up to this theoretical non-gamer to decide; a lot of instrumental metal projects and songs tend to be a bit flashier than this, or have more complex structures (a lot of vocal-led bands, when doing an instrumental, will employ structures that they don’t normally play around with, given leave to write any kind of soundscape without worrying about lyrics, if I’m making any sense).
On the other hand, my favourite metal instrumentals do tend to be those that return to central motifs (as many of Metroid Metal’s arrangements do) rather than just spiraling from crazy movement to crazy movement. IE, I prefer Dream Theater’s Enigma Machine to The Dance Of Eternity (the former is anchored around a motif, the latter has more wild time changes than the TARDIS).
Either way, I – as an avid devotee of both metal and Metroid – am precisely the target audience for Metroid Metal. And in a way, I was already guaranteed to like this: I already liked these songs, I already liked the kinds of rearrangements we see on these albums, and at the risk of downplaying the clear effort present on these records, all that remained was the Fusion of the two things together. These arrangements stand on their own, and are not mere Echoes of the OST versions. And that’s just Prime.
