Black
Reviewed by Justin Bielawa
May 5, 2006

And the hits keep on coming from the Giacchino/Tilton corner! Black is yet another videogame score put out by this overactive composer duo. Giacchino supplies the theme, while Tilton writes the actual score. This worked to great effect in the Lucasarts game Mercenaries, so their assignment on yet another gun-and-run game seemed inevitable.

Ditching the comic book bombast of Mercenaries, Black comes out the door not with a bolt from the starting gate but a slow motion walk. The main theme is a dark, antihero cue with a great deal of maturity and resolve. It's a powerful, uplifting theme and its used several times through out the score, usually to great effect.

The majority of the score is tight as a drum - full of suspense and tension more than outright action. "Treneska Border Crossing" and "Drydock" have a neo-noir feel to them, used for parts where I assume the player is looking around corners for his next target. The majority of this score is, in fact, purely "tension" without much resolve until the end. "Black And Boom" has some heavy drama to it in the very best Goldsmith action-tension and "Ambush" has a slick edge of loss to it. While he may not have the outright weight of his predecessor's sound, Tilton has certainly matured nicely as a composer.

The only pure action cue on the disc is "Bunker Buster" with a seemingly bouncy, driven performance from the Hollywood Studio Symphony. It seems like a cheap tease because the track that follows is a main title reprise, while very excellent in it's own right, seems like the orchestra was finally getting whipped up into seeing some action, so to speak. The "Main Title (Reprise)" is a slow, sombre redux of the title that starts off on a solo horn before the orchestra builds into a slow, sad rendition once, and then a more powerhouse rendition secondly.

Black is a fine, very reserved score - which is an oddity given that one of the game's selling points is that you can blow everything up. Giacchino and Tilton make a good team, though I wonder what the elder of the two composers might have done if he was in place for the whole score.

Black is not available in stores and can only be downloaded from ITunes or Nettwerk Records.

  printer friendly version

Click here to discuss this article in our forum »»