Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales Soundtrack

Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales Soundtrack, Yury Poteyenko, 2005

It would be easy to assume that, with their quartet of pirate games, Russian developer Akella was simply riding on the coat-tails of a certain Hollywood franchise and its initially enormous success. But Sea Dogs appeared in 2000, three years before Johnny Depp made pirates fashionable again. One might then suspect that the title of its sequel, Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales, was chosen to get as close as possible to Pirates of the Caribbean without inviting copyright trouble.

Then again, Akella had already published the official Pirates of the Caribbean game a few years earlier. In other words, this was simply a studio that genuinely liked pirate games. What was more problematic was its tendency to revisit the same potentially attractive mixture of action, RPG, and trading mechanics across title after title without refining it enough or fully fixing the obvious flaws. The result was a run of intriguing but uneven games that, with more polish, might have approached greatness.

One area where Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales unquestionably improved on its predecessor Sea Dogs was the soundtrack. That is not to say that Yury Poteyenko’s earlier score was deficient in itself. Poteyenko, then on his way to becoming one of Russia’s most in-demand film composers through the success of Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and Day Watch, had written a solidly symphonic work that already ranked among the better early live-orchestral game soundtracks. Where things fell apart was in the album recording and mix. In trying to create a rich concert-hall ambience, Sea Dogs ended up with an unpleasantly hollow orchestral sound that lacked real presence, compounded by awkward instrument balances whenever solo lines dominated.

Performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and with new personnel on mixing duties, the Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales soundtrack finally achieves the classically inflected grandeur its predecessor had been aiming for. What strikes one immediately is just how unabashedly massive Poteyenko’s score sounds. In terms of pirate-score forebears, it is certainly closer to Korngold than to Zimmer. Yet while its brassy splendour recalls the pirate films of the 1930s and 1940s, Poteyenko generally moves at slower, weightier tempi. This is music that feels imposing rather than swashbuckling.

Under his care, the pirate trade becomes a noble and romantic enterprise. Poteyenko displays his gift for monumental orchestration in an opening trio of cues that raise the curtain in spectacular fashion. “Hymn of Corsairs (Main Theme)” revives one of the secondary themes from Sea Dogs, a steadfast and proud melody, and promotes it to the status of principal theme here. Over the course of the track, Poteyenko shows how expertly he can build a cue through patience rather than restless activity, sticking largely to the same material while varying its intricately layered, brass-heavy orchestration just enough to keep the piece moving with deliberate purpose. By the time the cue reaches its climax, its brass calls have the force of an imperial Roman fanfare, and that is before the male choir joins in.

“Caribbean Archipelago” and “Morning Breeze” trade in similarly ceremonial splendour, but temper their brass-driven magnificence with slow string passages of extraordinary beauty. “Morning Breeze” in particular offers another irresistible build-up, culminating in a gigantic horn statement of the main theme that turns the break of day into an awe-inspiring spectacle of nature.

It is not only through sheer orchestral mass, then, that the soundtrack attains a degree of gravitas few game scores can match. Its effect is also a direct result of how Poteyenko shapes his cues. He tends to build them around relatively limited material, often preferring repeated restatements of a melody sturdy enough to withstand such treatment.

What is remarkable are two things. First, Poteyenko’s patience: his willingness to give melodies all the time they need to cast their spell, never rushing development. Second, his ability to vary the orchestral clothing of those melodies so that the music rarely becomes tiresome. On the contrary, the pieces develop a rare gravitational pull. In the quieter tracks, that can border on the hypnotic; in the more massive cues, it contributes decisively to their monolithic character. It helps, of course, that Poteyenko’s orchestrations are so strikingly beautiful that the music can luxuriate in them at length. The result is game music with an elegance, lustre, and emotional weight genuinely reminiscent of classical symphonic writing.

Poteyenko sustains this sense of gravitas in the quieter stretches of Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales as well, while also offering some respite from the surrounding bombast. The town themes “Island Colony” and “Town Life” reveal the score’s more playful side, both opening with light-footed solo woodwind melodies as charming and lyrical as one could wish for. Once again, Poteyenko develops this material at a leisurely pace, patiently varying the initial statements until the mood is ready to turn from idyllic to ceremonial with brass fanfares that again evoke Golden Age Hollywood.

Even more impressive in their unadorned beauty are “Quiet Bay” and “Moon Way”. Working with something closer to chamber-sized forces, Poteyenko writes a sequence of ravishing woodwind and violin solos. His fondness for repetition is most exposed in these serene cues, where very little distracts from the melodies themselves. But when the material is this exquisite and this moving, the stillness and steady calm register simply as bliss suspended outside time, a small world of enraptured beauty. Admirably, both tracks also remain thematically connected to the rest of the score: “Quiet Bay” presents the main theme on flute against wordless choir, while “Moon Way” brings it back as a gentle woodwind call.

Not everything on the soundtrack works equally well, however. As in Sea Dogs, the action music lags behind the rest of the material. Poteyenko’s generally languid tempi become a liability in battle cues that ought to generate excitement. Instead, their plodding rhythms, lack of memorable melodic material, and general absence of direction or convincing development make them comparatively dreary. Here the brassy bombast no longer feels majestic, but hollow and overbearing.

Thankfully, all of that is easy to forget once the score arrives at “Boundless Ocean”, which gives the album the gloriously melodic ending it deserves. Built around the soundtrack’s most moving theme, the cue moves effortlessly from introspection to hair-raising monumentality, looking back proudly at past adventures while also gazing optimistically beyond the horizon. It is not a long journey; there are perhaps forty minutes of truly strong material here. But it is an awe-inspiring trip, as if one had crossed the world’s grandest seas from one edge of the earth to the other.