3 out of 5

I was going to knock this for being uneventful, but notable differences between the composers – Inon Zur, Jeremy Soule, Ian Livingstone – had me curious if I could draw any conclusions about their grouped compositions, and, as usual, repeated listens to do so allowed me to hear subtleties which made my appreciate the composition more.  More than the other CoH soundtrack I reviewed – Songs From the Front – as that was more overtly patriotic and, leaning heavily on Inon Zur, video gamey; All Heroes Rise, in comparison, seems uneventful because it’s not as boastful.  I can’t speak to how this tracks with the games, but it was a moderation of the usual action / adventure game bombast.

So, to those composers: Most of the score is buffered into a tolerable, occasionally interesting average by Inon Zur and Jeremy Soule.  Both of their contributions are fairly generic, with Zur leaning slightly more on a typical video game style, which I hear as insular: while perhaps performed by a full band and not on a keyboard, the structure feels hemmed in and too aware of time and gameplay constrictions, limiting the amount of drama it can ever build – get in, here’s a crescendo, get out.  Soule, on the other hand, has an old Hollywood flavor to his tracks, eyes on the skies, classic war film in black and white with planes zooming overhead…  But, his skills (we’ll assume the composers produced their own tracks as well) don’t match up to the vibe, and where some of his tracks do soar, others stumble in their build-up.  Zur’s don’t have this mar, and so each sort of balances the other out.  And it should be noted that each has their own fun sense of flourish here and there, particularly toward the ending third of the disc, when we’ll assume we’re getting closer to a game conclusion.  The winner, though, is Ian Livingstone.  He combines the grandness of Soule with excellent production and a touch of the modern from Zur; his are the only songs that consistently sound like they’re performed by a full band, swelling with pride in their performance as the songs surge.  All these guys have an even hand in the disc, but with average (Zur and Soule) out-numbering great (Livingstone) 2:1, the listen has trouble defining itself.  Not to mention this seems much shorter than Songs From the Front, with a lot of tracks closer to a minute than 2 or 3, which doesn’t give anyone much time to develop themes… which leads into a final criticism of the sequencing, or production of the album as a whole: despite songs fading into and out of one another, there’s not much linking the music.  They all feel like completely separate scenes.  It’s a soundtrack, so I can’t fully fault it for that, but my preference is for scores that work as an album, blurring the line between soundtrack pieced together and sold to us and a finished product actually made for a consumer.