4 out of 5

Label: EA

Producer: Jason Graves

The soundtrack to Dead Space was an integral part of playing the game.  Atmospheric clanking and wonky strings really set you on edge while wandering the dark corridors, when all of a sudden things would flip to insane and you’d be running and swearing your head off.  Jason Graves score follows a similar mindset – there’s really no middleground here, with things going from spookily quiet for a minute or so to thumping drums and screeching strings and some random touches in the background of off-key horns or interesting percussion.  I kept questioning what was keeping the whole thing from clicking as a listenable album in my mind – because it’s really excellent at evoking memories of playing the game, and the whole mood is absolutely right-on with fear and gloom – and it’s that very lack of, heh, ‘space’.  The calms before the storm are so tepid that I questioned if music was playing at moments, and there’s not really a sense of building terror so much as just shiiiiiittttt thump-thump-thump and then a sudden stop.  So from afar, the experience is one-trick-ponyish, but I don’t want to discredit it, because that one trick was exactly what the game needed.  Something more thematic wouldn’t’ve fit (thus the “theme” that opens the album is again so sparse as to be nigh silence), and the game doesn’t really do ramp ups either – it just creeps you out then suddenly drops the bomb.

So these tracks are an excellent match.  And there are many unique flourishes to the pacing and timing of bringing in random elements that step it above just being a quality work because of how it syncs with the game – taken as separate entities, each of the more propulsive songs are really fascinating.  But when paired together it loses impact.  Still, the intention of these things IS to complement the playing experience, and as I said, this score goes far beyond that to actually defining part of the feel.  The fact that we can listen in to these compositions later is just a nice added bonus of the upped production qualities of games nowadays.

I’d also like to note that this does sound legitimately orchestral, which adds to the richness of the sound.  I suspect that more soundtracks than I think are orchestral, but a lot of times the mix washes out any fullness that brings to the recording and makes it seem like it could’ve been constructed on a keyboard.  Whether or not this actually was done on a keyboard I can’t say, but it sounds live, so kudos to Graves for whichever way he pulled that off.