Review Summary: The coldest part of your house, an empty office complex, the walk to your apartment at night
Akira Yamaoka approached sound tracking the Silent Hill games with the intention of the game's soundtrack being a reflection of its atmosphere. The music isn’t merely applied over the action as much as it is apart of it, often used to reflect the rhythms and tensions of the gameplay itself. From the desolation of the town down to the lurching movements of the monsters within, everything in the game can be found in the music. Despite being so intertwined with the gameplay, when divorced from it’s source,
Silent Hill 2 Original Soundtrack becomes a fantastic ambient album.
Opening with “Theme of Laura”, which sounds like the opening music to some great late 90’s X-Files rip off that got cancelled after one season, is a bit misleading. What the album is really about starts with “White Noiz”. This kicks off a run of three songs that seep from the speakers, filling the room with a thick haze as synth washes pulse through the air like distant glimmers of light. “Ordinary Vanity” disturbs the drift as hollow metal clangs sound ominously from within the gloom.
The fog is broken by the album’s best track, the stunning “Promise (Reprise)”. A small piano figure traces a basic figure while a bell chimes behind it, suddenly a massive amount of space is unleashed from within the mix as a cold synth wafts into the air. It’s the kind of song that makes one zone out immediately, best to not listen while driving.
Just as you’re lulled into peaceful melancholy, the bliss is shattered by “Ashes and Ghosts”, which storms through the blur on pounding drums and frightening metal scrapes.
The album is sequenced along with the game, trip-hop style ambient pieces (“Null Moon”, “Heaven’s Night”) are the exploratory bits, when the town feels simultaneously foreboding and fascinating, begging you to explore its decrepit corners. Heavier tunes filled with ghastly screeching and thundering percussion (“The Darkness That Lurks in Our Mind”, “Silent Heaven”, “Terror in the Fog”) are the claustrophobic encounters with twitching monsters, the walls closing in around you. For anyone who has already survived the game, many of these tracks will give you flashbacks; “Magdalene” especially chills, evoking a loneliness and sadness that I only felt one cold night, clutching a Playstation controller.
When the album ventures into live instrumentation the results are mixed. Some songs, like “Overdose Delusion” and “Promise” are fine, but the grungy “Angel’s Thanatos” is an instant skip. All of the live songs suffer from strange mixing, the bass drum in particular sounds oddly flat.
A sea change is occurring in video games, gamers are yearning to have video games recognized as a legitimate, first rate art form. More and more do I hear
Silent Hill 2 as a key example of the power an interactive medium has and it is an astounding work, one that has not aged one second since it’s release. It’s soundtrack amazes with equal force, a wondrous album on par with
Geogaddi in it’s ability to balance creepy and beautiful. Cue it up on an overcast day and watch the fog roll in.
