MP3: Assassin’s Creed Unity – Dead Kings (2015
Score: Excellent
Label: Ubisoft / iTunes
Released: January 13, 2015
Tracks / Album Length: 12 tracks / 23 mins.
Composer: Cris Velasco
Special Notes: n/a
Review:
Switching gears from more percussive electronic fusion scores, the latest album from the Assassin’s Creed Unity video game franchise features a more intimate work by Cris Velasco, featuring a smaller all-orchestra design with somewhat stealthy homages to Bernard Herrmann.
Written to evoke mounting suspicion and mystical experiences, Velasco’s approach skips any formal intro or build-up and just cuts to the dramatic meat with lengthy, beautifully constructed pieces that unfold like glimpses of suspicious goings on as seen from the corner of a dank tunnel or from behind a veiled doorway in a Medieval castle.
“The Marquis” features a chamber-styled string orchestra with heavy vibrato evoking a bit of Herrmann’s more subdued yet eerie pieces from Psycho (1960), and in select cues Velasco not only applies bass clarinets (a Herrmann signature and portent of ominous events), but allows their reedy tones to unfurl and tickle the listener with their warm yet unnerving sounds.
The score’s more kinetic cues tend to support hasty, brisk action rather than heavy leaps and bounds, hence the emphasis on circular rhythms and up-front figures performed by a handful of strings. Any percussion is organic-based (light drums in “Outpost” with lovely hurdy-gurdy), and is enriched with backbeats on wooden blocks.
Subtle voices appear in “Basilica,” and return in full for the (brief) closing track “HiddenTemple” as a choir, more mournful than triumphant, delivers lovely harmonics with support from strings. While the wrap-up may be a little too fast in an already brief album, Dead Kings is a great little work that demonstrates the mood and emotions a composer can wring from a modest orchestra, emphasizing the colours of a mere handful of instruments over a massive orchestral-synth production.
© 2015 Mark R. Hasan
Additional Links:
Editor’s Blog — Composer on IMDB — Composer Filmography
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