2 out of 5

Label: Sumthing Else

Producer: Billy Bell (post-production, otherwise assuming each composer produced their own work)

Another review for the Darksiders soundtrack compared it, positively, to the “violent and moody” God of War soundtracks.  Seems apt, except I don’t know if it’s a positive comparison.  I don’t own the GOW soundtrack, but when the third game was coming out and they released a separate soundtrack, I thought that they must be releasing it for a reason, so I listened to score while I was actually in-game.  …And it was pretty much exactly what I would expect – some chanting, some pounding drums, some strings building to some more strings and horn lines.  It’s total background music; it’s every film score of someone in a non-wartime, non-Western setting marching heroically to a battle.  Which is what it should be, I suppose, just vaguely evocative of something but not distracting from the game.  Or that’s what it could be.  The scores I own and re-listen to have taught me that you can get me more involved in the game by having music which makes me nod my head or tap my toe.  I guess it’s all a matter of what school of soundtrackery in which you were trained.

And the Darksiders crew – Mike Reagan – whose tracks feature the most varied combination of sounds, willing to take a couple sonic risks here and there, Chris Velasco – seemingly in charge of the thumpa-thumpa heavy tracks for when some Darksider is riding gloomily to some battle, and Scott Morton, or horny fellow, tasked with making the most generic sound pieces – seemed to be trained mostly in the Hans Zimmer school of strings/drums/horns quietquietquiet PUNCTUATE WITH MINOR CHORD and we’re out, OR, in a few bright spots, there seem to be some Danny Elfman notes of dark pop.  But I don’t really find Elfman that interesting either, sorry.

The problem, I guess, can be seen from the very beginning, with “Darksiders Theme.”  Because I couldn’t identify a theme at all, or the theme is so generic that it doesn’t sound like anything I could pick out of a crowd of similar sounding compositions.  So if, with scores, the goal is to pick a theme and then mostly play variations around that theme, this fails for just playing variations on empty space.  That sounds overly harsh, but I’m cognizant of there not, probably, being a budget for a James Horner million-person orchestra to blast me out of my seat with horns, and also that the mellowness could come from recommendations from the designers, or from the composers training, which is why we end up on a 2 out of 5 – this is competent work, and it does build up some appropriate oomph here and there, it just would not catch my ear while playing the game, and doesn’t do anything more than act as background noise even when I’ve got it jacked right into my ears.