>Deep breath, and straight in: Today’s New Band, Kezzie Beat, makes music that is nerdy, obscure, almost incomprehensibly repetitive and mainly of interest to a selected few who consider early 90’s videogames to have the Best Music Ever. For these reasons alone, we should laud bands like this as a precious commodity.

To take a Gameboy or a NES as a starting point from which to make music isn’t really as unusual as it may seem. Limiting your sonic options in this way is akin to a band picking the same combo of drums, bass and guitar as a million other bands have before. Kezzie Beat starts with her limited palette in an attempt to create something more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a success – and here’s where she differs from many of her peers in the Chiptune/8-bit/whatever scene: where most songs produced in this way can be admiringly described as “the soundtrack to a videogame you’ve never played,” Kezzie Beat‘s songs step gingerly away from the obscure-Japanese-videogame-composer template. Her music takes hesitant steps towards life, love and happiness – you know, the big things that don’t involve cheat codes, mid-level-checkpoints or CONTINUE Y/N?

In songs like Evaporating An Ocean, she attempts to inject as much life as possible, flailing to get out of the end-of-level boss rut with some satisfyingly tactile, fuzzy grunting sounds, a manically bleepy melody and atypical rhythms. 233 is joyously smart, bright and wide-eyed – almost touching. Not quite – the sheer mechanical nature of the 8-bit computer sounds have a defiantly inhuman sound – but almost.

Kezzie Beat: where the videogame bleep nearly held hands with human emotion. That’s close enough. Listen here!