Dark Souls "Prepare to Fry" 3:00

Praise the Sun! With a minimum of 30 SPF! You may have been expecting something Lord of Cinder-ish given the game and ReMix title, but Argle gleefully subverts our expectations (or at least mine), transmogrifying Dark Souls' hushed, ethereal "A Moment's Peace" into a bright & beachy Latin jazz number.

OCR over the decades has had no shortage of ReMixers taking sharp left turns with source tunes, re-interpreting them in any number of playful, "how-did-they-think-of-that?" ways. According to Argle, this was the very point from the get-go: "...what would be the most inappropriate thing to turn into a beach song? The first thing that came to mind was Dark Souls. Obviously, Dark Souls... So, I present something utterly stupid [...] in a "Why??" kind of way." Why not? A little sense of the silly can make for great art.

Like a macaw on the wing, this is a colorful arrangement that never lingers in one spot. The solo guitars breezily glide through Motoi Sakuraba's original melodic line. Liontamer harkened back to the MIDI arrangement CDs of the 90s: "Lovely stuff. Reminds me a LOT of Japanese arrange album material - Konami's MIDI Power albums come to mind." I hear it too, although I initially thought of Masayoshi Takanaka's seashells & Seychelles aesthetic.

I especially enjoyed Argle's dynamic layering of the rhythm section; there are several percussion lines interwoven throughout, building a textured bed of tiki bar flavors that supply the track with tasteful fills and pattern changeups. Kudos to the ReMixer for plucking "A Moment's Peace" out of cobwebbed corridors of Lordran and dropping it straight into the pool. We're sippin' out of the coconut with this one.