Benny ‘Adventure’ Boeldt
Adventure – Adventure album review (Carpark)
Adventure is the pseudonym of 24-year-old Benny Boeldt from North Carolina, USA. While Benny Adventure is a member of the Wham City Arts Collective in Baltimore, Adventure is his debut solo album.
Adventure is a sure fire return to the early 1980s where analogue synthetic sounds were the order of the day. But Adventure owes more to those early computer game consoles ZX Spectrum and Sega Genesis than to Depeche Mode or the Silicon Teens.
Lo-fi synth melodies play happily over driving drum machine beats and bouncing synthesizer basslines. This is nostalgic feel-good factor music for those old enough to be revisiting their mis-spent youth or introducing retro analogue electronic soundscapes to a generation of polythonic ringtones, the Crazy Frog and Nintendo Wii’s.
Tracks like Travel Kid would be more at home on an 8-bit computer game soundtrack for Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy than an album released in 2008 – which means this release is wonderfully out of time. I love every track. In fact I love everything about this album.
Benny ‘Adventure’ Boeldt has captured the essence of this sound perfectly. For someone so young I can only assume there is a real love and affection for what he has discovered.
If you like the retro synth pop and nostalgia of Hot Chip but want to explore further and veer away from commercial sounding underbellies, check out Adventure. But be careful it might be the start of a slippery retro gaming slope.
How can it fail to raise a smile with titles like: Travel Kid, Battle Cat and Jurassic Park City?
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