Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack (2015)
37 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest
Olivia Ofrenda
Well. Surely this is serendipity at its finest? Today is the 2nd November, otherwise known as Día de Muertos – the Mexican day of the dead – and here we have an album dedicated to just that day. Surely there have been some ancestral forces at play in determining that. Thank you, ancestors!
I say the album is dedicated to it, it’s actually the game of which the album is the soundtrack that is dedicated to it. Grim Fandango, originally released in 1998, is one of the best video games of all time. The gameplay itself is in the classic LucasArts puzzle-solving adventure style, but it is its aesthetic and narrative that make the game truly iconic. It is a stunningly beautiful world with a unique and genius set of influences. The setting is the Land of the Dead whose architecture is a mix of art deco, Aztec and Latin American styles. The story is a classic film noir conspiracy and its cast the souls of the departed, making their way to the next world. They are reapers, gangsters, beatniks, revolutionaries, grizzled seadogs, colossal elemental spirits driving tricked-out hot-rods, and many more innocent dead caught in the crossfire. And all of this is set across four days: the Day of the Dead, four years in a row. I’m getting excited about it just writing about this game: that’s how much it impacted me.
The music is such an important part of this world building too. It suits the locations and the atmospheres to a T, and it uses just as many (if not more) influences. Throughout the soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell, are elements of Mexican son and mariachi, Andean music, Indian classical, surf rock and tango, which all fit in and alongside the main sounds – cool and smoky jazz, frenetic bebop and dramatic and occasionally avant-garde classical orchestral music. Not only is it the perfect soundtrack to Grim Fandango, but it’s also just an amazing album.
The particular album is actually not the soundtrack as heard in the original 1998 release of the game, but of the 2015 ‘remaster,’ in which the game underwent a full clean-up, transforming the incredibly polygonal models for shiny, round, high-definition ones without losing any of its unique visual style. The music underwent an overhaul, too. The original soundtrack had been created with a handful of musicians and a huge library of sampled sounds to recreate the immense textures of orchestras and big bands. The problem was that, although the music sounded real enough for a 90s video game (when gamers were still used to music made up of bleeps and bloops), the timbres sounded dated in the 2010s. So, they went back to the original scores and re-recorded the lot of it from the ground up, with all live musicians and a full symphony orchestra. It sounds absolutely luscious.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t really intending to buy the remastered album; after all, I already had the original soundtrack and those slightly clunky sounds had their own charm to them. I had the remastered version of the game to listen to the new recordings if I wanted to, so what’s the point. But then I heard the new version of the piece ‘Casino Calavera’. Here is the 1998 original:
And here is the 2015 remaster:
For the first chunk of it, it’s pretty much what I expected: the same piece of music in every way, a swanky big band toe-tapper with a slightly dark edge to it, sounding lovely and polished by its performance by human musicians rather than computers. But then…an extended, improvised Latin jazz trombone solo! I wasn’t expecting it at all, and to hear a piece of music you know so well and love changed up in that way is like finding that your favourite book had a handful of equally-enjoyable chapters at the end of it that you’d never noticed before. The solo finished and I was already getting my bank card out to buy that soundtrack when…a clarinet solo! Oh man. Is it silly to be that blown away by the soundtrack to a video game?
I love it, I love it, and I will recommend Grim Fandango to absolutely anyone. If you have any interest whatsoever in video games, film noir, jazz culture or just great storytelling, you owe it to yourself to experience this game. Delve into its world and you’ll find something truly wonderful and a spectacular piece of art. And if all you want is a great and varied hour of music to divert you, the soundtrack will do just that too. Happy Day of the Dead!
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