Review Summary: Thank you Mario, but our comedy is in another castle. Sick beats though.
By now, the music in video games from the 1980s and 1990s has embedded itself into the hearts of many. Many fondly remember the classic chip tune melody when selecting a Robot Master in Mega Man 2, or the ominous sounds of Level 1 - 2 in Super Mario Bros. So fondly, in fact, that there are many outlets dedicated to paying homage to these compositions. Such outlets include Overclocked Remix, Miracle of Sound and – more recently – Starbomb, the comedy rap pop trio comprised of animator Egoraptor and comedy pop group Ninja Sex Party.
However, if you set out to make a comedy album, you might want to make it funny. This is where Starbomb fails to deliver more often than not, despite the potential of the franchises they chose to create parodies of.
Despite not always hitting the joke quota, there are instances of clever wordplay. “I Choose You to Die” is filled to the brim with Pokemon puns, though lines such as “He Magnemite not make it out of prison alive” are fairly cringe-worthy, and “Rap Battle: Ryu vs. Ken” sees Egoraptor throwing out Street Fighter references with lightning speed. “Crasher-Vania” and “The Simple Plot of Final Fantasy 7” also manage to get a few chuckles out of me, proving to contain funny premises without resorting to the main problem of the album: the abundance of dick jokes.
Immature and sexual humour can be funny, but an album’s worth of sexual humour gets very tiring, very fast. By the end, when “Kirby’s Adventures in Reamland” have the band bragging about having sex with Kirby in the back of car, it’s very easy to want the album to be over. The sex jokes can also get quite creepy; “Look at that old man from Zelda being a pedophile to Link, isn’t that funny? And look at Mario rapping about his genitals being large as a result of the mushroom power-up, how classic!” Comedy may be subjective, but when it gets old this quickly, one end of the two-way street has to step up its game, and it certainly isn’t the audience’s end in Starbomb’s case.
Luckily, the actual songs themselves save the album from being completely bad. Brian Wecht manages to create unique atmospheres for each of the songs, even the obligatory intro/outro tracks expected from Ninja Sex Party. “Sonic’s Best Pal” hops between dark crunching drums and a bubbly child-like synth line at a moment’s notice, “Mega Marital Problems” achieves the icy robotic sound you would expect from a video game series about robots, and the beats behind “Regretroid” wouldn’t be out of place on an actual Metroid game. Every song sounds crisp, and the hooks are fun to listen to, adding to the replay value of the album.
The other two members of Starbomb bring their own positive aspects to the album. Dan Avidan from Ninja Sex Party sounds lovely as always, while laying done some of the best harmonised vocal tracks of his entire career on tracks like “Regretroid”. He also takes the chance to portray some rather interesting characters, such as Mega Man’s unimpressed wife in “Mega Marital Problems” and the clueless Simon Belmont in “Crasher-Vania”. Even Egoraptor, considered the weak link of the trio due to a few over-the-top moments, shows off some nice rhymes, and his experience in voice acting helps when voicing characters such as Dracula, Mother Brain and Cloud Strife.
In the end, however, Starbomb has a lot of squandered potential. The comedy isn’t always there, but the strength of the compositions save the album from being a mess, and each member does their job competently. Whether Starbomb can improve on subsequent albums is up to their capability for change.
