AG Drive Soundtrack
Various Artists
(Music Kickup)

With a compilation of famous video game musicians (Ari Pulkkinen, Burt Kane, Jonne Valtonen, Domestic Machine Movement, Tommy Baynen, City Cat, Little Bitchard, Tommi Salomaa) lending their talents to these 14 songs, one is immersed in a specific sound sphere with this soundtrack to the AG Drive mobile game. Each artist here is well known in the Finnish EDM “demoscene” and are on the forefront of supplying bleats, stomps and vo-co-ded vocals.

There’s Burt Kane’s opener, “AG Drive,” with its tight metallic beats, talking intro to the story, and sometimes very solid soaring guitar leads and the video game sounds and halting stomp dance (almost all instrumental) of Delta Course’s “Domestic Machine Movement.” Also, there’s the wild, loud spikes of synths and pounding beats of “Enter Sokudo” by Little Bitchard (his “Sigma Shock” is great too, providing some cool, woodsy-sounding percussion, a welcome sonic change-up to too many of these tunes that sound the same), and the swirly, near-disco-sounding clap and single-guitar leading of Tommi Salomaa’s “Riding High,” with a female vocal that actually creates a song. Next is just a synth/drum loop bed and the ender vocal edit of Jonne Valtone “Just What My Speed,” a song that’s trying too hard to be the single here, but does feature sexy female vocals. There is no escaping that we are in the world of electronic dance music as informed by/created for a video game.

Will the AG Drive Soundtrack be your cup of tea? It depends on how you like your dance beats, synths and gaming. You can play the game here.