Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest Soundtrack (SNES)

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest Soundtrack (SNES), David Wise, 1995

While Donkey Kong Country remains the most historically important, and best-selling, entry in the franchise, it is Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest that players usually remember most fondly. Polished to a shine and bursting with ideas, Diddy’s Kong Quest remains one of the finest 2D platformers ever made.

If one component of Donkey Kong Country has aged best, it is arguably the soundtrack. Collaborating with Eveline Fischer, David Wise created a haunting, minimalist work that underscored the game’s lavish visuals with remarkable understatement. For Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, Wise returned as sole composer. In short, this may well be the defining masterpiece of his career. It is a stunning feat of musical world-building that pushes the ageing SNES hardware to its limits.

The most striking addition to the soundtrack’s palette is the much greater presence of overtly orchestral writing. Wise is not usually thought of as an orchestral composer, but his work here makes his talent in that area impossible to deny. The map theme, “Welcome to Crocodile Isle”, is driven and determined, and could scarcely be further removed from the sunny demeanour of DKC’s “Simian Segue”. Clearly, the stakes have risen, and it is not only the game’s more sombre colour palette that tells us so. Most impressive of all is “Krook’s March”, as multifaceted and sophisticated as any top-tier SNES JRPG composition. Its opening recalls the theatrical tone of “K. Rool Returns”, but before long Wise allows the orchestral drama to dissolve into a surprisingly spare passage for solo bassoon, string pizzicati, and glockenspiel. For all the fluidity of its orchestration, the cue’s structure remains admirably coherent.

These confidently handled dramatic gestures are particularly beneficial to the boss music. In Donkey Kong Country, those tracks were among the soundtrack’s weaker moments: repetitive and somewhat heavy-handed. In Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, they largely maintain the score’s overall level of excellence. “Boss Bossanova” combines K. Rool’s theme from “K. Rool Returns” with a sea-shanty flavour that feels entirely appropriate. “Crocodile Cacophony” likewise draws on the antagonist’s theme, which becomes the soundtrack’s most prominent recurring idea. Here and elsewhere, Wise pushes the SNES sound chip as hard as one could imagine. The metallic percussion in “Crocodile Cacophony” could scarcely sound heavier or more forceful on this platform.

Ultimately, however, what has made the Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest soundtrack such a fan favourite is the way it continues and expands the soundscaping of the first game. Many of Donkey Kong Country’s level themes were marked by a beguiling starkness. The stage music in Diddy’s Kong Quest is less hypnotic, but arguably more immediately accessible, while remaining just as memorable.

Take “Stickerbush Symphony”, an inspiration to numerous electronic musicians and one of the main reasons why a decades-old SNES soundtrack still receives attention in mainstream music publications, Rolling Stone included, even if that coverage is not always especially well researched. Originally written for an underwater stage, “Stickerbush Symphony” does not in fact differ all that much stylistically from DKC’s “Aquatic Ambience”. Both pieces open portals into soothing worlds of gently shifting synthscapes and wistful melodies gliding above ebbing, swelling electronic pulses. But “Stickerbush Symphony” places greater emphasis on melody, specifically a call-and-response figure that ranks among the finest melodic ideas on the SNES.

And so it continues across the entire soundtrack. While retaining aspects of DKC’s ambient character, the level themes are now more strongly guided by melodic progression than by hushed explorations of mood. “In a Snow-Bound Land” comes close to matching “Stickerbush Symphony” for emotional force. Its light pop inflection only makes the yearning quality of its ethereal melody more immediate and affecting. The cue’s treble-heavy orchestration offers few surprises, but, as ever, Wise shapes the sounds magnificently. This is easily one of the best-sounding soundtracks in the entire SNES library, such is his mastery of the single-cycle wave samples created for the project.

Diddy’s Kong Quest is also markedly more colourful than its predecessor. Just listen to “Hot-Head Bop”, which pushes the soundtrack’s melodic language surprisingly close to 1990s rock. For a cue that does indeed bop along with a distinct pop-ballad flavour, it never neglects the job of underscoring its sweltering setting. “Bayou Boogie” is equally adept at translating the oppressive atmosphere of its locale into musical terms. And when Wise convincingly imitates the sound of “In the Air Tonight”’s Roland CR-78 drum machine, it is not merely a clever act of pastiche, but something that heightens the humidity-soaked claustrophobia of the piece.

The biggest surprise, though, is “Disco Train”, which takes the Donkey Kong Country series somewhere genuinely new. Far from being an exuberant dance workout, the cue feels more like an eerie take on mid-1990s techno. An astonishingly well-synthesised bass drives a disconcertingly siren-like lead in a track one might otherwise expect to hear in a 32-bit futuristic racer released the same year. Add to that the jittery tension of “Flight of the Zinger”, which subtly unsettles the otherwise calm tone of the stage themes, and the Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest soundtrack emerges as one of the richest game scores ever written in atmospheric and emotional terms.