WIUS AM 1570 Pick of the Week

Who thought up the retro thing? I'm not qualified to even make a guess, although I'm sure some cultural theorist has or will discourse on the subject at length. Regardless of if it predates the 1960s generation, I still choose to blame the Baby Boomers, who have subjected us to their appalling, sentimental nostalgia for years now. If I see one more montage of hippies frolicking in a field set to that Hot Tuna song about "goin' up the country," I'm going to burn my vinyl copy of Crosby, Stills & Nash and go work for a company that sprays CFCs into the atmosphere.\nWhat's my point? I've discovered two things in considering retro: It usually has no basis in the actual past, and, I'm ashamed to say, it can be halfway appealing when it rolls around to your generation. Take Architects of Character, the new CD from Arizona electronic duo Coin. This album is a hoot. Most of the music was supposedly written and recorded on an old Commodore 64, and it sounds like the greatest hits of the old 8-bit Nintendo, with vocals from the sister of OK Computer's "Fitter Happier" computer voice. This reminds me of those fateful days when I discovered that the endless complexity offered by the eight worlds of "Super Mario Bros. 3" was far more entertaining than any so-called "book." \nAs for this music's relationship to the original NES scores, well, again there's some revision of history here because "Castlevania" never sounded this good. The music is considerably augmented by what I suspect are live drums, or at least sampled live drums. And "Ikari Warriors" certainly never had a female robot singing along with the soundtrack (not even "Ikari Warriors III"). Never mind that she's singing either inanities (Girl, you know it's true/I'll spread my lovin' around) or geeky computer references (I'll take in the upload and cache all the images). The robo-vocalist's clipped tones lend a certain authoritative gravity to nonsense phrases like cartography of pleasure/cartography of pain.\nMy little brother got "Final Fantasy IX" for Christmas. The PlayStation game's score is a thoroughly respectable digital-orchestra composition, with dramatic swells at key moments, themes, motifs -- and no tunes! I can still hum the "Wood Man" stage from "Mega Man 2," and that's the sort of immortality that Coin is aiming for. God forgive me, I never thought I'd say it -- but sometimes I miss the old days.