Additional Music for Kane and Lynch

«Heat», a crime thriller/action film released in the mid 1990s, continues to heat the imagination of moviemakers and game developers. Cinema schools and universities use «Heat» as a best example of the action movie. This film is constantly quoted and everybody tries to emulate or beat it. From times to times some studio appears that attempts if not to do an unofficial film-to-game adaptation then at least to do a remake of that famous shootout with police. Ten years after the film premiere the Danes from IO Interactive who never practiced an obvious imitation before, found themselves in a difficult financial circumstances and that’s why they had to produce something very cheap but effective and efficient.



The choice fell on Michael Mann’s movie; they didn’t have the permission for film-to-game adaptation, but strongly wanted to show off. Balancing on the edge of problems with copyright holders, IO Interactive still made a great progress in imitating in comparison with others (they borrowed from a masterpiece film all the slightest details up to the color of coats and brands of guns, they took the appearance and temper of the supporting character in «Heat» for one of the main heroes of their game action and twisted the story around greed and revenge in the same way), but they didn’t take into consideration the fact that the whole game couldn’t be based on exploiting the only one immortal movie scene, and so the players got bored. Music by Elliot Goldenthal, a movie composer, in its turn became a basis for a concept of the game soundtrack, but due to financial limitations IO Interactive simply could not replay it properly and were not able to hire a whole string ensemble accompanying to a so-called “guitar” orchestra. However unlike a trite gameplay and cardboard scenery, which were impossible to conceal, IO Interactive found a decent way of the music score salvation and to help Jesper Kyd, their irreplaceable composer, they sent two his compatriots – Peter Peter and Peter Kyed (aka lots of other names, solo and joint projects).

Peter number one, a guitar player with a great experience, was at the forefront of the oldest and respected Danish rock-band Sort Sol. Peter number two pursued a musical career mostly as an electronic composer and sound designer. In 1996 when Peter Peter left the band because of disagreements with other Sort Sol participants, a young unknown director Nicolas Winding Refn working then on his first feature film, that is a crime drama «Pusher» (later it played a crucial role in lives of all involved) invited the musician as a movie composer (Peter Kyed also joined in); so this is how their long cooperation began. «Pusher» wasn’t a commercial success but became a sort of a cult movie in Europe and in 10 years it emerged as a whole trilogy and attracted much attention.



Now it’s clear that both composers got into Kane & Lynch: Dead Men not by chance and that they should have dragged the music style from the movie, but the only valuable thing they did for «Pusher» was an opening hard-rock main theme, which later siphoned off into titles of sequels and its trailers. Well, this composition is quite enough to adjust the whole concept of the game soundtrack. Such maneuvers resulted in an average between noisy, psychedelic work by Goldenthal and aggressive and driving music written by “Pushers. Unlike Jesper Kyd (for those who missed our main review of the soundtrack I remind you that they’ve performed all guitar parts for his tracks and also wrote several solo compositions), the guys from «Pusher» managed to do what everybody had been waiting from them – to release a modest 6-track digital EP with their music.



An extended version of the informal main theme of «Kane & Lynch» is an opening track in the release. It’s a reconsidered melody of «Pusher», which sounded in the very first game trailer and evidently put the main theme by Jesper Kyd Kane’s Family Portrait into shade by the effect it produces on players. Primitive and rough, with thunderous bassdrum and looped guitar solo, as if from 90s it served as a bridge between old and new, cinema and interactive art, domestic seamy side and brutality by director Refn and outrageous game heroes by IO Interactive. The rest tracks in EP as well as in the soundtracks to «Pusher» trilogy are here mostly as a kinda bonus. These are a variation of the theme, a hammering composition Traitor One, to the strains of which a heavy-duty dump truck tried to raze Kane to the ground, and a dark, liquid ambient Traitor Two reminding the track sounding when a Yugoslavian narcodealer Milo was carving corpses in a dining hall of his caff in the third «Pusher».

By one and the same attributes of any serious game by IO Interactive, scenes in nightclubs (with the appropriate dance music), by the degree of violence happening on the dance floors it has already long been possible to make the diagnosis for the developers. In Kane & Lynch: Dead Men dance tracks are in charge of guest stars (not for the first time by the way, cause guest performers got several dance tracks also in Hitman: Blood Money) and Peter Peter and Peter Kyed knock themselves out with their Kill Club One and Kill Club Two, furious guitar and cruel beats after which you immediately believe that this is the music that was played during the heyday of rave culture. If these guys are invited to a sequel again, then, perhaps, it will be one of the best game sequels ever.