Overview

Winifred Philips provided music for this year's SimAnimals and has several film-related video game scores to her credit. SimAnimals was a wonderful score and had moments of lyricism recalling Elmer Bernstein. Phillips' latest score, for Spore Hero, has already been receiving many accolades and is now up in an Original Score category from the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. It is only the latest in a series of many notices that have noticed her fine melodic content, perfect orchestral colors, and command of narrative underscoring. Wii players will have a chance to enjoy her music for this latest game from Electronic Arts. The score is available as a digital download featuring over an hour of music.

Body

The main theme for the game has a definite jungle feel with little filigrees of harps and thematic statements with clarinet. There is also a whistle-like flute sound that lends a little ethnic-coloring. "Home World" features some worldless choral ideas and a real magical quality — something which is a quality of the score as a whole — with plenty of little semi-comedic ideas and asymmetrical rhythm patterns.

"Haven," and later "Sporexplore", find us in a style reminiscent of a light Disney jungle adventure with everything good that one can imagine in the innovative scoring and delightful melodic ideas. The jungle feel permeates the score and is often explored with pizzicato string sounds and a great variety of instrumental colors. There is a rather light touch to all the musical bell sounds that sort of flit about in parts of the score as well.

Menacing music, though rarely of the terribly frightening kind, appears first in "Sporaging" where a perfect sense of mystery and a little magic appears. There are some fine action moments too in "Monster Mayhem," "Beast Brawl," and "Evolvable," which add just a little more brass to ratchet up the excitement and help create musical variety to the score as it plays out. And things get really menacing in the appropriately titled "Nemesis" which spills over into the creepy "Critters". All heck breaks out in "Spore War" and we get a nice rounding off the score with a return to the main theme in a longer final statement on its own.

Summary

Most of the tracks are substantial musical tone poems with enough variety to work well on their own and no doubt make Spore Hero an overall entrancing experience. Many a smile will also cross your face as you hear the exuberance and often hilarious sounds that follow you along this intriguing journey.