4 out of 5

Label: Konami?

Producer: Akira Yamaoka

The quieter moments are like Phillip Glass’ Candyman soundtrack, and the louder moments are like someone tearing out your eyeballs with razors.  The ‘official’-ish version of the Silent Hill soundtrack is almost perfect, if not for some odd choices when patching the music together as well as some mixing chores which require it to be at full blast to get the most out of the minimalism.  Yamaoka’s composed like a bamillion tenzillion tracks and snippets for the SH world, and though I’m just starting to sift through them, the original seems like the freshest.  At some point he discovered / starting making use of frequent game v.o. actress / singer Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, and later scores are scattered with her singing pieces more than I prefer, as I sorta see scores as, uh, being score-ish.  Plus her vocals don’t do much for me.  So I’m a little bias that she’s absent from Silent Hill one, the 44-track version of the soundtrack saving vocals for one wonderfully musically-juxtaposed track (compared to the others) composed by Rika Muranaka – a tango style Spanish track towards the tail of the album that somehow perfectly matches the dusty feel of the game while also providing a nice twist to the somber and / or menacing tracks that come before.

There’s also the notion that this soundtrack set the template.  Yamaoka composed it without cueing it to the game, and certainly this is what would be expected going forward.  Not to suggest that there’s not massive creativity in the scores after this point, but being the first installment, he was free to pursue any given direction here, and not have to make it sound even remotely “Silent Hill-ish”.

As some of these bits are just for background elements or brief moments of the game, a bit of choppiness or some tracks being sound sketches instead of songs is totally expected – but the sequencing is sort of a plus / minus.  Leaving the longer compositions for the bulk of the album and piling the looser stuff toward the front is a nice way to keep things going one they’re going, but as there are expanded “complete” versions of this soundtrack that feature even more than this, I question if some of those loose ends could’ve been left out, as they’re not so different from some of the more structured tracks or striking enough to merit a needed place on the album.  Further hindering their effectiveness is that some of them just cut out.  Understandably these might be on a loop in the game, but the choppiness of it feels a little sloppy and ruins the buildup.

Regardless, once you’re in to the main compositions (excusing the necessity of putting the brilliant SH theme as the first track) even the soundtrack spooked me… walking to the train, I kept looking behind me, thinking I was hearing footsteps, half-understanding that it was actually some background noise on the score pumping through my headphones.  And the wonderfully pummeling tracks with names like “Kill” will have your heart beating with terror, expecting… something… horrible.

I feel like Silent Hill was one of the first “next gen” games to really make use of the soundtrack, and the game designers were lucky that Yamaoka came on board and did his own thing.  The range of industrial ambient gloom and clattering tracks of chaos were just as responsible for shaping the feel of the game as the look and gameplay, and can stand next to any major film score as an equal work of originality and effectiveness.