Mario and Luigi As Frat Brothers
Picture your old NES joining Sig Ep and getting way too into ecstasy, and you’d have a good idea of what Brooklyn’s instrumental Anamanaguchi sounds like. They don’t make video-game music; they make music to play video games to, ideally while high-fiving and chugging Four Lokos.
Guitarist Ary Warnaar senses a certain similarity between his band and the outlawed caffeine-and-malt liquor beverage, which Anamanaguchi played a rally for in Union Square last fall. "It’s ridiculous and too much, but that’s kind of the fun," Warnaar says, referring to both his band’s music and Four Loko. He’s right: both substances are likely to lead to powerful sugar rushes, although Anamanaguchi’s music—with its faint whiff of parents’ basements never fully outgrown—is 80 percent less likely to lead to weird sex with a stranger.
Warnaar is acutely aware of the sexless stigma attached to "chiptune," the techbased genre of which Anamanaguchi are the most popular export. "People assume we’re a bunch of nerdy dudes, or a bunch of hipster kids trying to use NES to get that nerdy crowd," he says. The truth, of course, is somewhere between the two extremes. They’re nerdy enough to have mastered the complicated technology involved in making decades-old gaming consoles crunch out ’90s-indebted powerpop, yet hipster-y enough to have (of course) all met at NYU, and to, well, dress like hipsters. (But then again, doesn’t every twenty-something?) The band, though, has not exactly taken great pains to distance itself from the "video game band" tag: Their 2009 debut album has a cover rendered in pixilated ’80s graphics, and features song titles that could double as Super Mario Brothers levels ("Danger Mountain," "Blackout City"—the latter contributing to the lovably fratty aura surrounding these guys). They also did the soundtrack for 2010′s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World video game, a move Warnaar says the band was initially hesitant about. "It’s always an uphill battle with chip music, where people are like, ‘What cartridge do you have in there? You playin’ Mario?’ It’s like: no, this is a song I spent hours and hours writing."
Anamanaguchi’s 2010 summer singles series grew out of those Scott Pilgrim sessions. The band—Warnaar, along with Luke Silas, Peter Berkman and James DeVito—were writing songs "quickly and easily," according to Warnaar, and figured they’d knock out a couple of Anamanaguchi singles to release online for free. (The Internet’s role in both Anamanaguchi’s and chiptune’s success cannot be overstated.)
On songs like "Mess," the band dropped the Mario milieu for something a whole lot sexier—think a strip club designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. Yet "Mess" is part of the same series that gave us "Aurora (Meet Me in the Stars)," which, from the title on down, might be the proggiest thing Anamanaguchi have ever put to tape; you can almost smell the acne cream.
Of course, that’s all part of the plan. "We’re definitely gonna play around with a bunch of styles," Warnaar says, about their forthcoming LP. They’ve established a sound, and are ready to stretch within its parameters. Which doesn’t mean they plan on abandoning the NES (which is, keep in mind, older than every single band member) any time soon. "The distortion of the nostalgic side is what interested me—taking something really innocent, the sounds from games I’d played when I was young, and then destroying them and filtering them through an older me, for a mature audience," Warnaar says, of why he’s drawn to his instrument of choice.
That might sound like the raison d’etre of a thousand backwards-looking Brooklyn bands with VHS-aesthetics and unhealthy obsessions with old Nickelodeon shows, but it also comes nowhere close to actually describing what Anamanaguchi sounds like. A band like Ducktails sounds like a pensive kid reflecting by a pond he frequented in childhood; Anamanaguchi sounds like that same kid jumping into that fuckin’ pond, and having the time of his life doing it.