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BLACK Excellent,
exciting orchestral music - like film music used to sound! A review by JAMES SOUTHALL As anyone who knows me will quickly attest,
I'm an old-fashioned grumpy old snob, twenty years before most people my age
reach quite the same level. Sometimes this results in me holding
irrational prejudices against things - for example, men with ponytails (though
this rule was subject to be discarded if the person in question had written film
scores for five or more Franklin J Schaffner films), microwaves and Tony
Blair. OK, so perhaps the latter prejudice isn't that irrational.
Sometimes, of course, even a grouch like me comes to accept new-fangled
things. One of these is computer game music. Being as oh-so-smart as
I so clearly am, for several years you may have spotted me cropping up on
Internet messageboards suggesting that - with the obvious exception of Bruce
Broughton's Heart of Darkness, for no particularly worthwile reason - the
music couldn't possibly be of as much value as proper film music. I
didn't let the obvious quality of the music of Michael Giacchino, Christopher
Lennertz and others get in the way of my prejudice. Oh no - that would be
giving in to the young fools who like the stuff so much. Well, guess what, I was wrong. I have to
finally admit it. I still think that the actual argument I used to
convince myself - and tried to use to convince others - that by definition the
music had to be generic because there was no clear mapping of where the gameplay
was going to pan out - was a worthy one. However, I have since come to
realise that there is another argument which counterbalances - and probably
exceeds - this one - and that is that computer games actually remove composers
from the shackles of having to hit precise dramatic points, and allow them
instead a far greater degree of freedom to write "proper" music of
real form and structure. A check back through the archives will reveal
that I've virtually always given positive reviews to these things, but probably
always with too many reservations attached. So it's time for me to remove
those reservations, set my shackles free and admit I was wrong. Some of
this computer game music is really very good indeed. Perhaps my general lack of knowledge about the
current gaming scene (I could quite happily tell you about platform and strategy
games on the Atari ST 15 years ago, but little else) leads me to the false
conclusion that it was Giacchino who really pushed the boundaries out and
allowed the genre to become what it is. If it wasn't him, and somebody was
doing it beforehand, then I apologise - but it certainly seemed that it was his
music for Medal of Honour and its sequels that raised the bar and set the
standards to which others have since been attempting to reach. Of course,
Giacchino has since moved on in a big way, and has scored one of the most
successful films of all time (The Incredibles) and is still scoring one
of the most popular tv shows of the moment (Lost) - not bad! He
still finds time to contribute to the occasional computer game score -
remembering his roots, and all, I guess! - but these days it seems to be in the
role of "overseer" or similar, rather than being the main composer. Giacchino's associate Chris Tilton is now
starting to come to the fore, and his latest effort - with the main theme
co-credited to Giacchino - is Black, a new game from Electronic
Arts. Most of the previously-notable game scores (well, at least the ones
that have been released on CD) have been from games set during various
conflicts, usually the second world war; this one isn't directly, but the
description of the game I found online suggests it's along similar lines.
("Reduce cities to rubble in a world where virtually nothing is impervious
to your bullets -- if you can see it, you can shoot it!" - hmm.)
Ironically, a score for a film about special forces operating deep-cover
missions around the world would probably get a score by Graeme Revell or someone
like that and consist of drum loops and sampled percussion, but a computer game
about the same gets a fully-orchestral score recorded in Los Angeles. As I
seem to find myself saying in every new review I write - these are strange times
indeed. The music is vivid, colourful and
exciting. Energetic almost from start to end, Tilton employs intricate
orchestrations on large-scale music, which is always great to hear. This
is the sort of music most film music fans just love to hear, and usually have to
wait for John Williams to find the write film before they get. Indeed,
there are certainly echoes of Williams's latter-day action music style (Attack
of the Clones, Minority Report etc) through some of the sequences
here, but there's plenty else besides. It's all bolstered by an epic,
sweeping main theme - and yet again I find myself thinking that it's the sort of
thing that you just don't get very much of in modern-day film scores, where
producers seem to be scared for the music to have any real personality at all,
more often than not. How wonderful it is to hear an obviously-talented
composer seemingly let loose to "do his stuff" without the
creativity-sapping constraints a multi-million dollar film production inevitably
imposes these days. The music is only available as a download from
the internet - which remains one of the pet hates which I haven't yet
discarded! Still, it goes without saying that if it's a choice between
being available as a download only, and not being available at all, then there's
only one option. And Black is an excellent piece of music, which is
bound to be appreciated by fans not only of the previous game scores by Tilton
and Giacchino, but by all fans of full-bodied orchestral action music. Tracks |