You have to the love the fact that Joey Mariano aka Animal Style released his latest EP, Teletime, on an actual NES cart. That’s pretty hard to top on the awesomeness scale. Unfortunately, the old school format and limited release means getting your hands on the cart isn’t going to be easy. They’re sold out. The good news is you can download the album for free in mp3 format over at Pause or you can also get hooked up with the ROM file to play in an emulator to get the full audio/visual experience.
Teletime pairs Mariano’s dancy chiptune rock with snazzy artwork that cycles through like a slideshow with each track. There’s definitely a stronger video game vibe to the compositions this time around, perhaps due in part to the presentation. Musically, the high caliber tracks are on par with the tightness Animal Style fans are accustomed to. However, Mariano’s stellar guitar work (if it’s even present on this album – hard to tell since he masks it with an 8-bit sounding pedal) is far less prominent than on his Open Air EP.
“With every new generation of über-sexy, high-powered gaming consoles, another wave of outdated machines are inducted into the videogame hardware hall of fame – a graveyard of wires and small cartridges destined to gather dust on the top shelf of countless closets. It’s a grim fate for these once-beloved devices. But some old-school game consoles are being resurrected from the dead by the power of rock. Not content to let classic gaming gear from decades past go to waste, a tech-savvy array of underground musicians are digging out their retro consoles, dusting them off, and firing them up for a new purpose: to rock the living hell out of them.”
Nathan Meunier - Freelance Writer / Author / Indie Game Developer 