Watch Out for Snakes…And Silly Genre Names

Imagine if classic video games inspired by movies featured better, digitized digitized soundtrack excerpts? For example, imagine Top Gun for the NES, but with more thought put into replacing the dulcet tones of Kenny Loggins with blips and bloops.

Watch Out For Snakes, the musical project of self-professed geek Matt Baum, sort of does this with his new album Upgrade. Difference being, Baum imagined his own movie about a hospital patient ending up with cybernetic powers. Each song follows the ebbs and flows of emotion he imagines for each of the film’s sequences. Basically, it’s like prog rock for folks who’ve grown up glamorizing the days of Giorgio Moroder and the Atari 2600.

Clever stuff, although it’s impossible to not poke fun at such genre names as “chipwave” and “chiptune.” Both could pass as the names of straight-to-DVD sequels featuring Alvin and the CGI Chipmunks. Or they could somehow be inspired by how much cat butts look like banana chips. That there’s what I’d go to nerd conventions for – cats.