Overview

I had certain expectations of what the Silent Hill Original Soundtrack would be like before I listened to it. Having played only a small bit of the game itself, I knew what the general tone was and expected a lot of creepiness and ambient music. It was very saddening when I first listened to the album and discovered that most of the ambient tracks were just not that good. Oh, there are some quality pieces on there for sure, and most of the non-ambient stuff is great. But there's just too much there that adds nothing musically interesting.

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Let's start off by looking at what Silent Hill's soundtrack did right. The first track, "Silent Hill", is very cinematic and dramatic. The instrument that opens the track sounds very Eastern, and reminds me of an old Samurai movie. It's fairly grim and serious, but not exactly creepy like you'd expect from the overall tone of the game. Actually, if anything it sounds more like an ending track... after the great evil has been destroyed and the hero is reminiscing on all the sacrifices that were made. The real ending track, "Silent Hill (Otherside)", starts with 4:30 of silence (a hidden bonus track, maybe?) and offers a nice little jazzy tune with some good improvisation. It reminds me a lot of Kill Bill and its reference to old Kung-Fu movies. It isn't bad, but "Silent Hill" would have been so much better to close with.

After the opening it's a long stretch of ambient songs, some good and some bad, until the last 5 tracks. Track 38, "Tears of..." is soft jazz on piano and flute that reminds me a bit of those artsy luxury car commercials (not an insult, it's just what comes to mind). This and the next track, "Killing Time", feature a light vinyl scratching sound in the background as though it's being played on a turntable. You can hear this kind of effect in a lot of the later Silent Hill soundtracks as well. "Killing Time" is a throwback to the opening song, also with that old Samurai movie feel. Next we have a rock ballad, "She", one of my favorite pieces on the album. Very old-school and bluesy rock, and once again reminiscent of the Kill Bill soundtrack. "Esperándote", which follows, is way out of character for the rest of the soundtrack. It's a vocal song in Spanish which sounds like it was taken from an opera. Quite pretty, with a talented singer, excellent instrument choice, and gorgeous piano and violin melodies. It may have been inspired by Parasite Eve's opera-themed pieces.

Silent Hill's bulk is formed from ambient music, which is normally hard to review anyway without just describing weird sound effects. The ambience begins very interesting, and is pretty "out there", even for a style of music that's always far from mainstream. Sadly, though, it just doesn't change much throughout the album. The second and fourth tracks, "All" and "Until Death", set the pattern for the rest — a quiet ominous piece followed by a wild chaotic loud one. Almost all the ambient tracks fall into one of these categories, and it becomes predictable and annoying. For me the loud ones offer slightly more musical meat; if you've ever seen or heard a performance by "Stomp", a band that makes music out noise, you'll get the idea. Track 30, "Die", has some really cool polyrhythms and shows a lot of compositional work crammed into a very short (1 minute) piece. There's other cool loud pieces such as "Ain't Gonna Rain" and "My Heaven". But even these two have their problems... the first is way too repetitive and the second has this annoying boiling kettle sound droning on constantly. There is one softer song that caught my attention: track 10, "Claw Finger". Very melodic for an ambient track, its melody and harmony creep up and down in unusual patterns, giving an audible creepiness.

Summary

The Silent Hill Original Soundtracks is another example of "great idea, poor execution". Yamaoka's decision to use both ambient tracks and conventional melodic ones was great. His decision to bunch all the non-ambient ones together was not, as the ambient pieces were too similar and needed breaks badly. The style of Silent Hill's music is very unique, but unfortunately too many of the tracks just sound the same. Fortunately, Yamaoka returned to compose the music for the rest of the Silent Hill games, and fixed the problems with the first while keeping its good qualities. I'd personally skip this one, and invest in one of the later series soundtracks.

Overview

This was the first soundtrack iforwhich Akira Yamaoka received recognition by fans worldwide. Silent Hill is what many refer to as "The thinking people's Resident Evil", though the music simply doesn't compare. The Resident Evil series' music is usually orchestral with scary, creepy motifs. Silent Hill's music isn't part of the normal game music classification, as it falls into three distinct genres: dark ambient, industrial ambient, and the style mostly used in this soundtrack, experimental noise.

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The way this soundtrack works is that each piece is connected through each other. At times, you'll only hear constant droning in the background, as if a machine is running. At other times, you'll hear sounds that seem to be coming from your worst nightmares. Most of them are less than a minute long, but each piece serves its own purpose to constantly keep you on guard as you listen. Some pieces are prone to disturb the listener, if only slightly, as you try forming disturbing imagery from what you hear.

The vocal piece "Esperándote sounds obviously out of place and completely disrupts the overall scary feel of the soundtrack. Rika Muranaka tends to put themes that are completely the opposite of what the game is into it. Anyone recall Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's awful "I Am the Wind"? That song was badly composed, had absolutely nothing to do with vampire slaying and whatnot, and is one of the biggest VGM vocal flops out there. Thankfully for "Esperándote, it's actually a decent song. The Argentinan singer gives it a foreign feel, and it has a really sweet use of bandoneon, violins, and piano. But, it still has nothing to do with Silent Hill.

For anyone who's played through Silent Hill and didn't like it, then this is obviously not a good idea to check it out as it may bring back awful memories from the sickeningly freaky atmosphere of the game. For curious people who've never played the game, you might want to play the game first before checking out the soundtrack as it'll make much more sense.

Summary

All in all, this soundtrack is reccomended to those who enjoy creepy ambience and unconventional game music. It's also a perfect way to discover the genius of Akira Yamaoka. If you love this, then feel free to help yourself to Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, and Shin Contra, other soundtracks that Yamaoka had a major part in creating.

Overview

1999's Silent Hill was created as Konami's answer to Resident Evil. The story centered on a writer who crashed near the eponymous town, and his subsequent search for her. Along the way he gets involved with a cult that had helped to shape the town's history. All of this is, of course, standard horror fare, but the treatment focused less on shock or gore and more on psychological atmosphere. The design of the town, covered in fog, helped to create the game's world, but arguably more important to the game's effect were the sound effects and score created by Akira Yamaoka, then a little-known composer at Konami with few lead credits to his name.

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Yamaoka, who volunteered himself for the job, handled both score and sound, and at times, the line between the two is blurred. Only a few of the tracks on the soundtrack have anything resembling a melody, and only a few more have clear harmonic structure. Many of them comprise only percussion or sound effects utilized percussively, as in industrial music. On album, many of the tracks are run together, and there is no doubt that the listening experience is carefully constructed from start to finish.

The soundtrack opens with "Silent Hill," the music played over the opening FMV sequence, and it is one of the few melodic tracks on the album. Opening with a mandolin tremelo over electric guitar arpeggios, it combines elements of Morriconne with the 60s Bond scores by Barry, throwing them onto a trip-hop beat. The guitars are played with "wet" reverb, and the whole thing is recorded with a distinctively lo-fi, grainy sound that persists throughout much of the album. It's a distinctive opening, and indicative in several ways of the direction the series' music would take in later installments.

Following this introduction, "All" opens the main section of the album, the in-game ambient pieces. There is a slowly building soundscape, beginning with an echoing scraping sound, which repeats, as a clashing sound grows closer, like an approaching menace. Then it fades away into "The Wait," a 9 second track comprising four brief synth chords, the last of which is quickly interrupted by "Until Death," a pounding 7/4 ostinato pattern overlayed with elements in other meters. This usage of polymeter to signal chaos or confusion continues throughout the album, in "Devil's Lyric," the second half of "For All," "Killed by Death," "Half Day," and so on.

Interrupting a quieter ambient piece with a full volume chaotic texture is a frequently employed strategy here to give the appearance of a continuous album, but not the only one. Often, a sound that is prominent in one track continues into the next one, like the roaring in "Killed by Death" and "Don't Cry" or the unnerving screeching in "Not Tomorrow 2" and "My Heaven". This latter is probably the most ear-splitting part of the entire album, and although it is startling or frightening, even apart from the game, its microtonal meandering is unbearable for long.

Although some of the soundtrack is entirely atmospheric noise or sound design, a good number of the middle tracks have at least some harmonic content, such as the echoing synth chords that resemble detuned chimes in "Claw Finger" or the voice effects on "The Bitter Season", although these are used as part of a texture rather than as goal-directed progressions. The dense organ chords of "For All" are not very dissimilar from the clanging percussion of "Until Death". But this only helps them to fit in with the rest of the album, as one realizes once the minimalist guitar and synth patterns of "Not Tomorrow 1" make their sudden appearance.

The next truly melodic track after the opening, though, is "Tears Of...", which follows "My Heaven" as an antidote to its poison. Its blending of electric guitar and vibraphone with a trip-hop beat is indicative of the developed style of Yamaoka's later scores for the series. Its intentionally lo-fi recording style extends into the next track, "Killing Time", where the recording's distortion and warping clash with the heavy reverb on every instrument. The bonus track, "Silent Hill (Otherside)" (which begins at 4:44), is also recorded in this way.

The main portion of the soundtrack concludes with "She", a 70s rock influenced piece, replete with improvisational interjections from the lead guitar. It comes to a sudden close before fading in and then out again on a few arpeggiated guitar chords. On the original soundtrack release, this was followed by Rika Muranaka's song "Esperandote", but this is left off of the release in the Silent Hill Sounds Box and the digital iTunes release. The Spanish-language song, with its accordion and violin solos, has absolutely nothing in common with the rest of the soundtrack, and although the reason for its omission may be an issue pertaining to copyright, as some have assumed, the score is undeniably more consistent without it.

Summary

Silent Hill's score may not be as immediately appealing as its successors', but it contains, in embryonic form, many of the elements that would come to define Yamaoka's work for the series as a whole. The rock and trip-hop influences in the few melodic tracks would be revisited in later installments, and Yamaoka's deft manipulation of sounds both synthetic and sampled in the ambient tracks would be put to ever more varied use later on. Despite the ambient tracks' lack of melody and harmony in a traditional sense, there is something appealing about the album, and certainly something frightening, like a musical claustrophobia.