Baroque in the Future

The ominous omelette on the cover doesn’t exactly tell you what’s inside, but at least the contents are all they’re cracked up to be. In an eggshell: this is what you’d get if Keith Emerson composed music for Castlevania games. Which makes sense, since primary songwriter Motoi Sakuraba went on to create music for numerous video games, including the Tales of RPG series and the Dark Souls titles, not an unusual path for Japanese musicians at the time. His classical training serves him well here, the tinny keyboards adding a retrofuturistic vibe to the progressive passages found in ornate tunes like “Next World” and “Flash!” Sure, you may get the sense you’ve heard it before, but its uncanny vibe makes this one-and-done effort a future worth visiting.