Lennie Moore - Outcast: Original Soundtrack (1999)

1) Prelude; 2) Daokas; 3) Soldier's Camp; 4) Heaven on Adelpha; 5) World of Marshes; 6) Fatally Wounded; 7) Main Theme; 8) The Ancient Forest World; 9) Watch Out!; 10) Let's Fight!; 11) World of Snow; 12) World of Temples; 13) Main Theme (Reprise); 14) Oriental Spirit; 15) World of Mountains; 16) Orchestra Rehearsal; 17) Ülukai Dance

Sweeping orchestral mountains and valleys, rousing vivid landscapes with extended compositions. A classic soundtrack for a classic game.

 

Key tracks: "Heaven on Adelpha", "World of Snow", "World of Temples"

Outcast is one of those cult classics that by some strange string of fate has ended up becoming something big and meaningful to little old me. It’s always one of the first no-brainer choices when I’m asked to list my all-time favourite games, and its relative obscurity has in some way made it feel even more like it’s something special to me personally. Its grand open-world design, character-driven story beats and epic scale was something very different from my usual video game habits when I encountered it by chance, and its very distinct personality best described as European made it feel incredibly different to anything else that tried to do the same afterwards but always felt they fell short. It’s probably the first game that genuinely drew an emotional reaction out of me when I completed it for the first time. In many ways, it revealed a new aspects to one of my favourite pastimes at the time, and that special magic still remains as I’ve replayed it countless times over the years.

What set Outcast apart from other games at the time is how it presented itself: not just in its graphics with the rather unique voxel-based looks, but in the overall scope of its design. It’s a weird game that dreamt big, and Appeal (the developers) treated it like a special prodigy that could achieve those dreams. A lot of effort and money went into making the game feel that you were in fact witnessing a grand cinematic adventure, and one of the aspects helping to drive that was the soundtrack composed by Lennie Moore and performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Choir. By today’s standards this isn’t a big deal but an actual orchestrated game soundtrack was absolutely not a thing back in 1999. CD quality audio in games hadn't been around for all that long relatively speaking and so most games aiming for the same style of music went with MIDI strings, and games had only recently started to stretch their wings to the new sonic extents that the evolving technology allowed. This was one of the big promotional points around Outcast as well, with a blurb on the game box advertising it as one of the main features and the orchestra getting credited early on in the movie-like opening credits roll. 

 

 
The orchestral score of Outcast doesn't simply rely on having a big, big sound. The greatest thing about Moore's compositions is that the songs get to live and breathe, ebb and flow. Most of the songs on this soundtrack go for around five minutes, often longer, and not a minute is wasted and only rarely looped. Outcast's big worlds meant players would spend a long time in particular areas and so the songs have been constructed with that in mind, with the multi-minute compositions moving between different moods and variations on their key melodies across their length. Moore went to painstaking lengths to give the game a unified feel across its score while making sure all the various areas had their own flair, and his songs are miniature pieces of art on their own rather than simply backing music. They paint worlds with their movements, particularly the songs dedicated to the key regions of the game. Centerpiece songs such as the pastoral arcs of "World of Temples", the deep-seated melancholy of "World of Snow", the middle-eastern flourishes of the sprawling "Oriental Spirit" and the dramatic slow-builds of "World of Mountains" colour their respective areas with a gripping evocative touch, glueing your attention to the world around you from the moment you step foot into a new area with a new arrangement above it. 

I'm normally not a big fan of orchestral scores, and nine times out of ten they're the epitome of soundtracks that are there to exist and fill space rather than bring something special to the overall experience. The twist is that I think this soundtrack ruined all the others for me. This was the first orchestral game soundtrack I remember hearing and it's such a fantastic score that any other game walking in its footsteps felt like a complete letdown musically. It's still in my opinion among the best soundtracks of its kind, not just in games but across mediums e.g. films (where orchestral scores are, by default, more prominent but also usually even more throwaway). Moore took every advantage he could out of the chance to compose something with a large orchestra in tow and I'm not afraid to say that the results are emotionally stirring for me. Heck, "Heaven on Adelpha" in particular is a vividly beautiful song that can honestly get me a little misty-eyed if caught on a tender moment; it's high up among my favourite video game pieces. 

 

Everything about Outcast's music reflects the game in general so well: it's a labour of love, created by people who truly believed in their art and poured their everything into it to ensure that it was something unique and genuinely special. It's a remarkable soundtrack and among my favourites.

 

And if you're wondering what nicks off one point from the score of one of my favourite games of all time, it's the three combat music pieces where the soundtrack's general building blocks are a little ill-fitting and get stretched a bit too thin for their own good. The combat is probably the game's weakest part, and that applies for the music too.

Rating: 9/10

Kent - Hagnesta Hill (1999)

1) Kungen är död; 2) Revolt III; 3) Musik non stop; 4) Kevlarsjäl; 5) Ett tidsfördriv att dö for; 6) Stoppa mig Juni (Lilla ego); 7) En himmelsk drog; 8) Stanna hos mig; 9) Cowboys; 10) Beskyddaren; 11) Berg & dalvana; 12) Insekter; 13) Visslaren

There's a good album there somewhere, underneath all the padding, layers and extraneous minutes....

Key tracks: "Musik non stop", "Stoppa mig Juni (Lilla ego)", "Berg & dalvana”

Hagnesta Hill follows Kent’s climb to the top. The preceding Isola made them huge in their native Sweden and in the surrounding countries, immediately turning them from small town hopefuls on a steady rise to one of the country’s top artists. How bands handle this kind of ascent to fame and, more concretely, the follow-up album is always a question mark, and you often find that the acts start upscaling their efforts to make a self-consciously Big Album to match that big success they're enjoying. 

Hagnesta Hill is a Big Album, in more ways than one. Its thirteen tracks rack up a sizeable 60-odd minute length, and most of those songs veer around the 5-7 minute territory. They’re all immaculately polished in their production and layered with studio magic and additional instruments, with pristinely modern, electronic elements slipping into the stylish guitar sound (in 1999 this was still novel and verging on trendy). It's bold, grand and loud. It’s the kind of record that happens when bands unlock an infinite budget and endless high-end studio time, and somewhere in the back of their minds they’re fully aware that they might lose all of that just as fast.

What separates Hagnesta Hill from other albums of its degree is that Kent aren't just trying to repeat Isola's success. Instead, they're actively making moves towards new sounds and using this big breakthrough as means to an end to hone their new ideas. After three albums of effectively polishing the same building blocks until they became sturdy and great, Hagnesta Hill is Kent’s first real piece of evolution: they had already started to play around with more programmed elements and a slicker sound on parts of Isola, and those initial seeds are now starting to grow. While still characterised by their guitars, Kent are making a point about not being defined by them and Hagnesta Hill starts exploring other ways to lead a song. It sees the band heading both towards wider artistic oceans with atmospheric textures and contemplative valleys of sound (the haunted piano of "Ett tidsfördriv att dö for", the ambient ballad "Cowboys"), as well as flirting with unashamed pop hooks with the bass groove and disco beat of “Musik non stop” and the sharp drum processing of “En himmelsk drog”. The electronically laced later half of their career is quietly being foreshadowed here, even if in the core Kent at this stage are still more in tune with their precious 90s rock bands. They're still testing things around more than leaping right into the unknown, and so Hagnesta Hill is a clear transitional record for the band. Those face challenges on their own already - and then Kent go and drown all that progress underneath everything else they've stuffed on the record.

Hagnesta Hill is a record that's altogether too much in every way, and it suffers for it. There's no reason any of its songs should be as long as they are, with even the best cuts deserving a good minute's worth of shaving, and when all piled together the album itself feels like a never-ending marathon. Thirteen tracks doesn't sound like much and there are plenty of almost breezy hour-long records, but Hagnesta Hill feels twice as long not just because of how much the songs meander, but also because Kent haven't actually got all that much to say with them - and so it's like they're piling everything else onto the songs to distract from that. There's little here that feels as inspired as even the most middle-of-the-road cuts of Isola and something like the six-minute plodding dreaminess of "Cowboys" is straight up padding, no matter how important and atmospheric it tries to sound. At worst the band straight-up repeat themselves: the dramatic arena guitar walls of "Kevlarsjäl" are something we've already heard from Kent ten times over, and the closing "Visslaren" is such a retread of Isola's iconic "747" (right down to the 7:47 length) that Kent aren't even trying to hide it. But you can't repeat the same lightning strike twice with the same force, and while the primitive "me like big music" part of my brain can get my foot tapping to its rock-out finale, it's obvious why "Visslaren" gets forgotten when people talk about Kent's bombastic album closers. Even if the horns in the first half are genuinely rather beautiful and their buried reappearance towards the end is inspired.

 

You generally need to dig deeper into Hagnesta Hill's production layers to find the great things. It has its legitimately great cuts: "Musik non stop" is one of Kent's most classic and timeless hits, "Stoppa mig Juni" is that perfect moment where the album's excess is put into great use as the long length and studio heaviness support a brightly gorgeous song (with some more of those wonderful, plaintive horns), and "Berg & dalvana" represents the band's shift forward, with a propulsive and stylish rock cut that comes across as the most accomplished example of what Kent were going for with the project. The few lively rockers like "Kungen är död" and "Revolt III" crunch nicely, and Joakim Berg has now effectively perfected his vocal mannerisms and sinks a ton of charisma into every piece of music he fronts even when the songs can't live up to it. All these strengths give Hagnesta Hill some weight: it's not an album you can outright dismiss. But, so much of it just goes on and on, and at its flimsiest it practically plods in place for five minutes while Berg empathetically pleads for a solid hook to walk by. I am normally all for records that utilise studio as an instrument and I don't treat production polish as a bad word, but even I think that Hagnesta Hill is honestly overproduced and at times simply overthought.

Hagnesta Hill still managed to achieve what Big Albums are meant to achieve, and it kept Kent's momentum going. On the positive side, Kent learned from their mistakes and swung back onto the race track soon thereafter. On the downside, Hagnesta Hill itself isn’t much of a winner. For someone growing up in the Nordics at the time it feels like an integral part of the cultural zeitgeist and I remember vividly just how widespread its presence was. I keep forgetting about the actual music though, and so it's more a representative of Kent's place in the world at the time rather than something that I'd remember as an actual piece of work. Hagnesta Hill is an alright record, but it's gotten so buried underneath the band's ambitions that it's ended up as one of their least memorable works outside of its context.

Rating: 6/10

Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile (1999)

Disc 1: 1) Somewhat Damaged; 2) The Day the World Went Away; 3) The Frail; 4) The Wretched; 5) We're in This Together; 6) The Fragile; 7) Just Like You Imagined; 8) Even Deeper; 9) Pilgrimage; 10) No, You Don't; 11) La Mer; 12) The Great Below
Disc 2: 1) The Way Out Is Through; 2) Into the Void; 3) Where Is Everybody?; 4) The Mark Has Been Made; 5) Please; 6) Starfuckers, Inc.; 7) Complication; 8) I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally; 9) The Big Come Down; 10) Underneath It All; 11) Ripe (With Decay)

Two hours of angst and intensity, and none of it's reaching me. It's a blog about everything I own, but not everything gets a fair cop...

 

Key tracks: "La Mer", "Starfuckers Inc"

I have a great deal of respect for Trent Reznor for always going his own way and making a remarkable music career out of it, but that respect hasn't really translated to a deeper appreciation for Nine Inch Nails. I like it when Reznor moves a little closer towards his own understanding of what makes a catchy hit; I got close with "The Hand That Feeds" when it was an airplay hit during my first summer job, "Hurt" was good even before Johnny Cash made it his own, "Discipline" is unironically my favourite NIN track, etc. There is absolutely none of that on The Fragile. What it is instead is an ambitious double album ode to depression, paranoia and turmoil, stretched over segueing soundscapes, harsh interludes and headphone-savouring production moments; woven together into a sonical experience intended to be immersed into as a whole. Based on my experience it's the furthest Reznor has sunk into his own production, the ambient albums perhaps excluded, and has the kind of a neon-lettered sign saying "magnum opus" hanging over it that you'd expect from a hefty double album. It's a daunting record both in its mood and its sound design.

It's obvious that The Fragile is nowhere close to where Nine Inch Nails blip on my radar, call me basic if you will. I don't want to call it dull or even uninteresting - there's a lot going on and you can really feel the intent coming through the album. Reznor's on a mission and on a personally important journey, and you can hear that for someone out there, The Fragile will mean absolutely everything. I can easily draw parallels between it and double albums of similar ambition and ilk that do work for me, not in sound but in the ambition and fearless artistic endeavour of it all. The difference is that none of it sticks to me. Sometimes Trent murmurs, sometimes he screams, sometimes he says nothing at all, but very few of them register beyond that. The instrumentals are actually some of the better parts of the album, "La Mer" above all, as they go all-in on the heftiness of the album's atmosphere and turn it into a score of sorts. The noisier parts mostly just repeat one another, though "Starfuckers Inc" sticks mainly because it's a well-needed jolt of something raw and concrete among the extended soundscapes, even if it's title-repeating chorus flirts with being overwhelmingly corny no matter how enraged Trent sounds. For most parts though, even in its more distinguishable parts, The Fragile comes and goes without a reaction and certainly two discs of this is way too much of it.

I try to have it so that every album I own has something to it that makes it an established entity in my collection and which gives me a spark to talk about it - some have developed personal stories behind them, others have a contextual place by being part of a wider discography picture, some are just too good to not own. The Fragile is there by happenstance. Some time back one of my great friends and a fellow music geek donated me a huge box of an incredibly varied selection CDs following a spring cleaning sweep he had done through his shelves. After going through everything in that big cardboard box some CDs were donated forward to other friends of mine who might enjoy them more, some of them were traded for others, and a good number found a new home in my own collection. The Fragile is one of the ones that I kept, but mainly because the digipak packaging was showing rather heavy signs of wear and as a frequent connoisseur of used music myself, I didn't feel like I could sell that forward with any integrity. As a result I've been coming back to it occasionally but no matter how many times I hear it, despite its purposed intensity, it mostly just gets lost in the background with zero reaction.

Rating: 4/10

Ultra Bra - Kalifornia (1999)

1) Kalifornian ruosteiset kukkulat; 2) Jäätelöauto; 3) Hei kuule Suomi; 4) Sokeana hetkenä; 5) Ilmiöitä; 6) He kääntävät tyynynsä; 7) Jos haluatte; 8) Kirjoituksia; 9) Tylsää, tylsää; 10) Kun vaihtuu vuosituhat; 11) Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä; 12) Helsinki-Vantaa; 13) Musta, niljaisten lehtien kaupunki

A victory lap of sorts: a band playing to their strengths after taking over the country with the last album. More of what you loved, even if not as consistent or striking.

Key tracks: "Hei kuule Suomi", "Kirjoituksia", "Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä"

Most of Kalifornia is vividly familiar to anyone who lived in Finland in the 90s. This was Ultra Bra’s imperial phase, where all the success and exposure from the first two albums paved way for cultural omnipresence, where even album tracks could get heavy airplay exposure. The video for “Kirjoituksia” seemingly never stopped playing on TV’s music programs, the unsuccessful Eurovision candidate “Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä” became a national treasure almost as quickly as it appeared (and no one even remembers which song ultimately was sent in its place to the competition), “Jäätelöauto” is the sound of now-nostalgic summers. Kalifornia is as much an encapsulation of a specific point in time as it is a music album, and there’s no escaping that legacy.

Defining the era is ultimately what defines Kalifornia itself because musically it’s a very comfortable release, in lieu of a better word. It’s the most archetypal representation of Ultra Bra’s music - the other albums show more visible development one way or another, but Kalifornia is the plateau moment of the band’s style. Taking its musical cue from the past key moments and stretching it across an entire album, it bears the very sort of sound you associate with the band the most, for better or worse: it’s exactly what you’d expect from the band but lacks the more interesting (or unique) traits the other albums have. It’s a little bit bigger, maybe: Ultra Bra never shied away from grand arrangements (can’t really help it when you’re a 12-piece band featuring four vocalists and three horn players among others) but Kaliforniaespecially loves its woodwinds and strings. But that too exemplifies how at this stage Ultra Bra were the biggest band in the country, so Kalifornia has the sound to match it - and in a roundabout way, it manages to make their cultural placement at the time the album’s defining sound characteristic. It’s Ultra Bra playing Ultra Bra hit songs right after they had become a national phenomenon playing songs exactly like these: a reprise rather than a sequel.

The thing is, you can hardly fault a band from playing to their strengths and if it’s Ultra Bra that you want then Kalifornia does the job really well. The tracklist flicks through the band’s multiple guises and rarely actually misses: only “Tylsää, tylsää” feels like filler that the album could have been stronger without (that its so aptly named “Boring, Boring” is the best thing about it). Six singles were released from the album and every single one of them merited it - “Hei kuule Suomi”, “Jäätelöauto”, “Sokeana hetkenä”, “Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä”, “Kirjoituksia” and “Ilmiöitä” are all basically varying degrees of brilliant and together form a microcosm of the band’s range of sounds from anthemic to moody, from community-gathering pop choruses to showcasing their strength as a(n occasional) rock group. “Kirjoituksia” in particular is one of their very best: a dry, groove-laden rocker driven by a raw organ riff and flourished by so many of the band’s famous vocal harmonies, and despite the years it has never stopped being exciting and downright thrilling. A number of album tracks could also just as well be a part of the pantheon - I’m particularly drawn to the triumphant “Kalifornian ruosteiset kukkulat” and the beautifully apocalyptic, atmospheric late album hidden gem “Kun vaihtuu vuosituhat”.

But it’s not a big exaggeration to say that Kalifornia doesn’t feel as important in the band’s story as it by all accounts should be, based on all the big songs in its tracklist. It’s arguably the album that most people have the fondest memories of, but it simultaneously feels like their least mentioned, and from a personal perspective there’s definitely a grain of truth in thinking that it comes across almost too typically Ultra Bra. The various facets of the band’s personality come across better on the other albums and if I’m looking for just the core distillation, their actually quite excellent best of compilation feels more compelling. And yet, that’s not really the album’s fault given how good it is, with what half the album being classics of some degree and most of the other half happily standing nearby. On the other hand though, if you want a time capsule to late 90s Finland, few albums come close to this - the sheer amount of cultural weight on this album’s shoulders is incredible, and the fact that an orchestral big band pop album like this could dominate the country is one of the things I love about the Finnish pop culture acceptance of absolutely anything. So, context included, Kalifornia is probably not the very best of Ultra Bra, but out of all the four albums it’s definitely the most Ultra Bra -esque.

Rating: 7/10