CD: Castlevania – Lords of Shadow 2 (2014)
Score: Excellent
Label: Mercyrusteam / Sumthing Else
Released: February 25, 2014
Tracks / Album Length: 19 tracks / (68:29)
Composer: Oscar Araujo
Special Notes: Includes colour booklet.
Review:
For the follow-up to Konami’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010), esteemed composer Oscar Araujo augmented the video game’s sound with a richer inclusion of electronics, often deepening the heavy string chords in epic melodic build-ups like “Dying for a Drop of Blood” with some chorals, or pulsing bass hits.
The score’s sonic design does evoke a little bit of the Remote Control sound – Hans Zimmer’s brand which produced aggressive, doom-laden action scores for games like Crysis 2 (2011) – but Araujo’s not into bombast; the epic and slow-burning passages designed to heighten heroism, loss, and daunting tasks are as potent as his prior works, and he invigorates cues with some marvelous nuances, including disjointed brass notes (“The Toy Maker”), muscular brass and a hugely addictive ostinato (“Hunter and Prey”), or flanging synths in the chromatic “Chaotic Battle.”
Polished orchestrations make Araujo’s harmonics and churning action rhythms sweep across each other in seamless waves, and the score’s engineering is especially rich on CD, with resonating bass tones never smothering the fine details of voices, downward arching notes on brass, or the gradual layering of instruments in any heavily constructed crescendo.
More important, the score has a fairly steady drive, with changing moods and motifs to ensure the album is never repetitive, nor dominated by one sound, and the album offers a musical resolution in winding down the tension to a lovely, gloomy, sweeping theme recap with piano and heavy strings in “Carmilla’s Spell.”
A 31-track album is also available exclusively from Sumthing Else.
© 2014 Mark R. Hasan
Additional Links:
Composer on IMDB — Composer Filmography — Soundtrack Album
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