Spotify, YouTube, whatever you use to keep your wits about you.
By and large, I cannot stand the Gran Turismo 7 official soundtrack. It’s not that I take issue with some good old fashioned racin’ jazz fusion—far from it! Talk to me about Casiopea, I dare you. Every Gran Turismo from the first up to and including the fourth had a stunning selection of menu tunes (the licensed race jams, I could take or leave). With GT7, though, Polyphony Digital greeted fans with cheesy ditties, ham-fisted covers of public domain classical, fodder for anime music videos, and the ultimate bane of my existence, “The Entertainer.” If all that sounds good to you, it’s your lucky day, because much of it’s available on music streaming services as of today.
I have to say that while I won’t be queuing up “Hungarian Dance No. 5 (Music Rally Version)” during my festive week travels, it genuinely makes me happy to see Sony go to the trouble to release this. Music made or curated for games tends to get passed over for legitimate distribution, unless you’re talking about a series that fans actually expect that from, like, say, Final Fantasy. GT’s had more than its share of hits over the decades, from “Slipstream” to “Mr. 4WD.”
While those regrettably aren’t making it to Spotify and the like, as they’re not in GT7, the latest rendition of “Moon Over the Castle” is, joining T-Square’s original “Knight’s Song” with the slap bass and electric flute (my favorite version) and that interesting take from Bring Me The Horizon, if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are actually two GT7 soundtracks on streaming as I write this: “Best Lap Vol. 1,” which even has race intro and outro and license clear tunes on it, and Volume 2, which, weirdly, has all the holiday music that plays in the game’s menus this time of year. And just holiday music. “Scarborough Fair,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” you know—all the songs that immediately call to mind spinning Mitsubishi FTOs and the vistas of Trial Mountain. I won’t lie though—the “Scarborough Fair” cover is a groove. Hopefully this isn’t all Polyphony plans to release from GT’s musical past, and we get some gems from earlier games. This is an encouraging start though, and a fine Christmas present from our friends behind The Real Driving Simulator.
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