MMC1: Power Up the Chips

Electronic Metal. A genre so underutilized and overshadowed by its industrial counterpart, that it’s almost surprising to see at least one or two great albums per year. Not only was this year graced with another entirely synthesized Master Boot Record album, but also the debut full-length of Multi-Memory Controller. MMC’s approach to electronic metal is one infused with adventurous power metal and par for the course chiptune for good measure. This approach is also appropriately saturated with a healthy dose of retro video game worship for its subject matter. This is a pairing that’s entertaining on paper and in execution, as MMC provides several tracks worth of enjoyable chiptune metal albeit with a few hiccups.

This album does a great job of capturing the spirit of what it pays homage to. Regardless of the quality of the tracks, each one is an excellent representation of the mood and genre from their respective games. I’m not all too intimate with NES era home and arcade games, but having played Mega Man, the track ‘In the Year 200X’ feels like a track ripped straight from the rom. The songs and their melodies feel wholly authentic, as if they were modern, metal renditions of classic video game themes, torn from the 80s with a more contemporary production style. This is especially pronounced due to the usage of power metal to convey these games’ action/adventure slant. The rapid fire of the keyboard and electronic elements are a powerful driving force for the album and fit in like a puzzle piece. This is a combination of factors that have an excellent symbiosis for the album that exudes an unrelenting charm.

However, charm can only get you so far and ‘Power Up the Chips’ is not without its fair share of glitches and bugs. While the writing of the tracks captures the spirit of all things retro, it stutters and sputters with a few moments of clumsiness that I can’t get over. Some of the tracks are missing that ‘peak’ of satisfaction or a gratifying climax. These songs personify arduous and challenging adventures, but some are missing the moments that are the most gripping and interesting. For example, ‘F-Zero Racing’ is a good track but is missing elements and moments of glory that made these games the way they are, so the track never elevates itself beyond being a decent homage. However, when the tracks go all out, they are endlessly enticing to listen to. The instrumental finale ‘The Age of Classics’ is not only a phenomenal sendoff for the album and an amazing track, but it’s also got all the twists and turns of the arcade games it mimics to pull off a dynamic ride.

The production is nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done. It’s obvious the strength of the album was channeled into the writing as this album sounds like it could’ve been released via YouTube under the banner of “Retro Games Metal Style”. That isn’t to say great material can’t be released under any medium, however the mixing and tones are just fine for what they are: they get the job done. I will say that the electronics sound great, and sampling actual sounds from video games is a nice touch to add to the songs’ depth. Everything that’s supposed to sound retro, does so in spades. The vocal performance of the band’s proprietor, Dominic Arsenault is easily the weakest aspect of this album. Power metal requires range, and Arsenault’s strained delivery is underwhelming in some cases. It doesn’t ruin the album, nor does it really bring it down at any point, but it’s in sore need of improvement.

Overall, MMC’s first full-length is a strong debut for the band. Through an excellent mix of homage and originality, Arsenault crafts several tracks’ worth of run ‘n gun chipmetal excitement. Arsenault has found a formula for excellence and made it his own with MMC and though not perfect, is a satisfying listen, bookended by manic metallic majesty. Power it up and leave it on.

Originally written for Antichrist Magazine

This is the first time I’ve come across a solo heavy metal project that’s also a university academic’s music research project exploring and expanding the aesthetic, historical and cultural links between metal and video games. Dominic Arsenault, with a PhD in video game and film studies, is a professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Montreal and the man behind the project Multi-Memory Controller, successor to an earlier chiptune metal project of his called 8-Bit Metal which existed on MySpace (2005 – 2010). “MMC1: Power up the Chips” is MMC’s debut album and the first to be recorded entirely by MMC in its own right, as two previous recordings were compilations of collaborations between MMC and other chiptune artists. (Chiptune is the electronic music created with programmable sound generator chips used in 1980s / 1990s-era videogame arcade machines, computers and game consoles, or music that intentionally imitates the sounds made by PSGs and/or combines them in more contemporary styles.) In MMC, Arsenault combines his major obsessions – video games (and the sounds associated with them) and 1980s power metal – into an eccentric and deranged music full of fun, energy, pounding rhythms and riffs, and lots of head-banging electro-grooves, all packed into nine anthems of futuristic videogame science fiction fantasy.

The singing may be a bit strained – Eighties power metal singing does draw on heroic operatic styles of singing, demanding a huge vocal range of two or three octaves and often more – and it’s probably the one weak element in this gleefully mesmeric music that runs rings many times around your head with shrill siren squeals, galloping thunder synth percussion and surprising crunchy noise guitar riffs. Song lyrics are homages to favourite videogames and often have a coming-of-age theme in which the hero is subjected to various moral tests. The album can be dense and frenzied, rarely pausing for breath save for those spaces that separate the songs. The beats are hard-hitting enough that listeners might be advised to keep headache tablets and water bottles close by, and the electronic music seems possessed by devilish imps flitting in and out of the quicksilver melodies.

While most songs are self-contained mini-soundtracks in their own right, with the only major exceptions being two linked tracks “Behind the Mask” and “Beyond the Mask” which share some melodies, if the album is heard straight through in one go, listeners can get the impression that later tracks coming after “Beyond the Mask” are even more unhinged and crazed than previous songs with more complex layers of music and even more insane singing. As might be expected, melodies can be very poppy though they often go so fast and are replaced very quickly with other pop-oriented tunes that they have less impact on the memory than you might suppose. The most deranged song (and probably the most memorable because it’s the album closer) is the instrumental “The Age of Classics (Fantasia: Cosmogonia in Arcadia)” which belts out one videogame theme music motif after another at a rate faster than they can all go out of fashion. By this point the music is sounding very rich in a decadent, demented way, with a perverse air as though something in the spirit of the music has snapped and whatever evil sprite was contained until then is now spreading mischief and mayhem all through the MMC sonic universe.

The album is worth hearing at least a couple of times to marvel at how 1980s-styled videogame music meshes so well with the speedy epic power metal music that was popular in the same decade, and to wonder why such a musical fusion didn’t take off when it could have. “… Power up the Chips” sounds so much like the music of that decade that it does come off a bit kitschy and the danger is that it might date faster than it should. Perhaps a follow-up album should ditch the Heldentenor singing attempts, to be replaced by an actual classic heavy metal singer … but then a major part of MMC’s idiosyncratic charm would be lost. The alternative would be to shift to more instrumental soundtrack-style chiptune metal that embraces more contemporary alt-mainstream metal genres.