3 out of 5

Scores -movies, games – are total headphone affairs.  And Songs From the Front sounds good this way, vaguely militaristic strings and brass tunes that totally celebrate America, or something.  But this stuff would pass over me during a game.  Take any heroic theme you can imagine and that’s about half the album.  The other half are probably from battles, punctuating things with machine-gun drums or menacing horns.

How this works, though, is two-fold – one, it’s not James Horner, so you’re not dealing with some eye-rollingly “epic” sounding, the compositions have a nice humble feeling too them, so you can imagine shambling home on the battlefield while this ragged tune tinkles somewhere in the background.  Two – the songs are appropriately paced, ranging from one and half to three minutes, enough time to build a theme to a crescendo and then wind it down.  Modern games have been good for this – film scores of this nature tend to either go on for too long or are edited down to 30 second cues, which, who can get in to that?

Again, if you’re playing the game, this probably won’t catch your ear – except, maybe, Inon Zur’s tracks, as he seemed to draw the “write the battle tunes” tracks, and so those are a bit more pummeling sounding – but if you plug it into your ears, you’ll perhaps be surprised by the subtle variations over the course of the 30 something tracks, and how you’re stirred from a stupor when thematic trills fade in and out.