January 30, 2010

  • Review: Dark Void (McCreary)

    It was perhaps the larger budget of the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica that allowed score fans to hear what Bear McCreary could do when given a chance to explore beyond synths and samples.  It was a season musically to sit up and pay notice and to revisit the scores the composer had created for the prior seasons.  His music for The Terminator—The Sarah Connor Chronicles continues to be among some of the best action music on television.  So the opportunity to see what would happen in the realm of video gaming when McCreary was asked to score Dark Void has great promise. 

     

    McCreary notes in his commentary on the score that his goal was to create two different sound worlds for the cultures represented in the game.  The “Survivors” music is comprised of sounds from “found objects” and has a folklike quality.  Instrumentation includes various ethnic flutes and pan pipes, and an electric violin that creates a warm quality but also manages to seem otherworldly.  The music for the “Watchers” focuses on more angular and dissonant writing with clashing chords and digitally altered acoustic instruments.  These two opposing musical forces play out against a broad and detailed orchestral canvas that lends the music a cinematic quality.

     

    Dark Void is scored for a standard Hollywood orchestra and these are some of the best players in LA both in the orchestra and as soloists.  McCreary also notes that he went out of his way to avoid sampled and synth sounds.  The results are fantastic with an energy that only live performers can bring to real music.  The opening theme features heavy drumming and a propulsive main theme that soon merges into the opening “Prologue and Main Title.”  The warm theme that opens this disc is cast for flutes against strings and is quite beautiful.  But there is a darker mechanistic side to the worlds of the game and McCreary will explore that as well as the score progresses.  The dissonances pile up and there is a completely different energy that seems almost mechanical.  In one opening musical sequence, he has presented both cultural entities.  The action scoring throughout is superb.  The first of these, “Village Attack,” incorporates insistent drumming, creating an almost tribal feel to the music, while the rest of the orchestra hints at thematic material in between syncopated rhythmic “hits.”  There is enough shift between the drumming sequences and purely orchestral tracks, shored up by excellent thematic writing, that makes the listening experience enjoyable to this score on its own merits.

     

    What works best in this score though is the way McCreary presents, develops, and incorporates important thematic threads.  These ideas evolve as the disc, and game play out.  “Archon” has its own thematic idea which will recur in the score.  It is reminiscent of Heavy Metal both in its employment of electric guitars (becoming most prominent in “Defending the Ark”) and the use of an Ondes martenot, played by Cynthia Millar.  According to the composer, the intent was to pay homage to Elmer Bernstein’s exploration of science fiction/fantasy universes like that in Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters.  Though this score is far from those in many ways.  There are some moments though (like “Void Requiem”) that are distant cousins to the former score with its Ondes martenot line against dissonance and rich orchestration.

     

    What Dark Void does have is plenty of engaging and almost swashbuckling thematic writing and scoring that works very well on its own.  It is the first great video game score out of the gate this year; and at nearly 80 minutes manages to hold your attention to the very end as things continue to gain in intensity.  Highly recommended to fans of the composer, or action scores with science fiction/fantasy storylines.