Music Worth Mentioning - Oct 17th, 2011 to Oct. 23rd, 2011

Music Worth Mentioning – Oct. 17Th, 2011 to Oct. 23rd, 2011


Peel apart the pixels and underneath the edges you might find video game music worth mentioning! The vast majority of us spent this week playing Batman: Arkham City, featuring original music by Nick Arundel and Ron Fish. This is the return of the dynamic duo responsible for the excellent and tastefully underused music of Batman: Arkham Asylum. We can blame Arundel for the lion's share of this new stuff, as Fish is only listed as contributing to three of the nineteen score pieces, however, those three, "A Monument To Your Failure", "It's Not Even Breakfast" and "Bring Her Back To Me" all feature some pretty cool combinations of instruments and sounds – I swear I heard coyotes howling in the background of "Bring Her Back To Me" as the music rose to a frantic crescendo, before the silence came sweeping in like a playboy in a batsuit.

The bat has been portrayed in a variety of ways over the years, and when providing a score for such an iconic character all of these interpretations need to be considered or else you're going to leave certain fans out in the cold. This soundtrack is Batman music at it's best, and it features flavors from all of the classic Batman scores of the past. You'll notice undertones of Danny Elfman's 1989 Batman and Batman Returns themes, as well as some of the sonic stylings of the mid-nineties animated series, held together with some really nice ambience and sweeping strings that reminded me a bit of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's work on The Dark Knight. It all comes together to form something entirely new but completely appropriate, and worthy of the legacy and history of Batman.

This score would be a perfect addition to your "writing music" arsenal if you want to put yourself in a film noir, bleak city, epic adventure kind of mood. You can find it here.

There is an official sister album, Batman: Arkham City – The Album, boasting twelve new tracks of radio music from modern artists. Common consesus is that it's pretty good if you like darker alternative rock. Most listeners come away with a few standout tracks that appeal to their personal taste - I recommend you take a look at the list of contributors (found here) and if you spot any names that you like, it's worth your time to check out the CD (two bands, Blaqk Audio and (crosses), are newer projects that feature the vocalists from AFI and Deftones, respectedly - I was pleasantly surprised when Chino Moreno started moaning at me partway through the album). If you want the excellent twelfth track by "A Place To Bury Strangers", you'll need the Collector's Edition. Lykke Li’s “Get Some,” that song from the Catwoman trailer that got stuck in your head for three days, is conspicuously absent.



Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One is available with music by Michael Bross, who you might have heard in Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, or the Dennis Hopper flick "Black Dahlia" from 1998. More recently he's been involved with Firefall and Novalogic, and as always, his composing is superb and perfectly fitting to the colorful, bombastic world of R+C, although I don't find this music to be something I would listen to when not playing the game. It's exciting, cartoony, and reminds me quite a bit of the Super Mario Galaxy soundtracks, and there's over four hours of original material here to keep you in the mood for colorful mayhem.



Nuclear Dawn is out, featuring music by Alex Pfeffer, the man responsible for a fair number of game and movie scores including Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes flick, Mortal Kombat VS. DC Universe, Crysis 2 and Saw VI. I find this guy bland as all hell. In the particular case of his Nuclear Dawn theme, called an "epic" piece, I don't think he did a single thing that hasn't been done in a million action movie soundtracks before, and the overall experience fell flat. He does have some fans, though, so your milage may vary. If you're into stuff like the Ace Combat: Assault Horizon soundtrack from last week, check out Pfeffer's website and see what else he's done, maybe you'll see something that you've enjoyed in the past. Personally though, when I see Pfeffer attached to a game or a movie, I stop expecting anything original or fun from the music.



Grease Dance, based on the classic musical, and Everybody Dance hit shelves this week for the shimmy-shaker in your house. Everybody Dance comes with 40 tracks on the disc, with a respectable (if unimaginative) collection of dancable numbers. I noticed newer artists like Deadmau5 and LMFAO right beside old standards such as Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" and Fatboy Slim's "Praise You". New content will be available as DLC, but I could find no reference as to when or how much. I wouldn't expect the "three songs a week" approach we got with some of the higher profile rhythm games.



Maybe You Missed It

If you like electronic music of any kind, you want to experience Tomáš Dvořák's wonderful score to the incredibly beautiful indie darling Machinarium. This instrumental electronica is done with such amazingly warm tone, it easily transcends your typical video game music and becomes something entirely worthwhile in it's own right. This soundtrack has played in my house on almost endless repeat for the last two years. It's amazing background music, and if you have a system with a warm subwoofer, the bass notes will make you feel like a tuning fork Dvorak has struck with perfect resonance. This gentleman spent a lot of time carefully constructing the soundwaves for each individual sound in his pieces, and the effort shows in the final experience. Check one out below:



If you buy the game from the official website and not through a service (like Steam), the soundtrack is included – although there are actually over a dozen more tracks in the playable game that were not included. These tracks were left off the official soundtrack for being too ambient in style. The thing is, I love those ambient bits as well, and sleep to them often! You can find the complete extended soundtrack in the bowels of the internet easily enough, or by pulling the sound files from your install folder.

As always, make sure to hit up the incredible video game music and remix streaming radio site rainwave in your search for new and excellent tunes. See you next week!