Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Soundtrack

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Soundtrack, Mikael Karlsson, 2010

Battlefield: Bad Company’s soundtrack turned heads because of the involvement of classical composer Mikael Karlsson. A successful writer of modern, at times avant-garde, classical music, with an impressive body of orchestral works, ballets, and operas to his name, Karlsson seemed an unusual choice to score a first-person shooter. The link between him and the Battlefield franchise was Stefan Strandberg, sound director at DICE. Friends during their student years in Stockholm, the two reconnected after Karlsson moved to New York, and one of his demo tapes ended up in Strandberg’s hands.

Ultimately, however, the Battlefield: Bad Company score album proved underwhelming. Its compositions were usually too brief to develop with real meaning. Moreover, the music was nowhere near as adventurous or refreshing as the influences Karlsson and Strandberg cited in interviews – Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, Bartók – might have suggested.

The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 soundtrack, though stylistically more conventional than its predecessor, is a considerable improvement. If one ignores a few shorter tracks that feel like filler, the album’s real substance lies in four substantial orchestral cues. Together, they run for only a little over fifteen minutes, yet they rank among the best-developed orchestral compositions in Western game music. “The Secret Revealed” and “The Ancient Weapon” in particular feel less like soundtrack material than like compact concert works. Karlsson’s background in classical music is consistently apparent in his intelligent command of orchestral forces and dynamics. It helps, too, that, as Karlsson himself noted, “BC2 has a much more developed, cinematic story line than BC1.”

Proceedings begin with the robust “The Storm (Main Theme)”. Its opening gestures – a resilient, solemn trumpet solo over somewhat generic driving string ostinati and percussion – have long since become clichés of the FPS genre. But Karlsson establishes his credentials early. His trumpet melody is broader and less predictable than those offered by most of his competitors in this field. Countless game and film scores have tried to combine traditional orchestral sweep with the rhythm-driven language of modern action music, usually with underwhelming results. “The Storm (Main Theme)” is one of the rare pieces that gets the balance right. It never sacrifices carefully shaped dynamics and orchestration for the relentless forward surge this kind of cue demands. The track’s heroism never feels cheap, nor does it rely on the tired, simplistic major-key progressions that so many action scores fall back on.

One of the soundtrack’s more surprising qualities is that “The Storm (Main Theme)” is the only cue to indulge in obvious militaristic bravado. The remaining three substantial tracks take far subtler routes.

“Snowy Mountains” occupies the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from “The Storm (Main Theme)”. It is a far more abstract composition, though still an immediately accessible one because of its striking atmosphere. Karlsson builds the piece on layers of plodding, resonant string ostinati whose steady motoric progress suggests the relentless need to press on through white, barren terrain. At the same time, rhythmic nuances and additions such as busy string pizzicati keep the cue tense and just unpredictable enough. Massive French horn blasts reinforce the track’s starkness, while measured woodwind lines provide moments of relief.

If “The Storm (Main Theme)” serves as the album’s barnstorming opener and “Snowy Mountains” evokes a specific locale, the remaining two major cues carry most of the soundtrack’s cinematic drama – and do so with remarkable maturity and restraint. Both “The Secret Revealed” and “The Ancient Weapon” surprise with their hushed, nocturnal atmosphere.

“The Secret Revealed” shifts decisively away from the swagger of “The Storm (Main Theme)”, opening instead with a rolling four-note motif passed between piano and flute. The motif’s refusal to resolve harmonically establishes the cue’s agitated, mysterious mood from the outset. A sense of foreboding emanates from a high violin drone and deep, ruminative string murmurs. The melodic material is deliberately fragmented, yet developed with enough intelligence to bind the composition together. Written with classical restraint and making judicious use of chamber-sized forces, the tension “The Secret Revealed” so carefully accumulates ultimately erupts in a towering brass transformation of the four-note motif, suitably awe-inspiring to justify the track’s title.

“The Ancient Weapon” explores similar emotional ground, but with a more melodramatic flair. Karlsson writes a solo violin part that ranks among the most fully developed instrumental soli in Western game music. By turns delicate, passionate, trembling, intimate, and always superbly performed, the mesmerising violin line is set against pounding percussion and hammering piano chords. Once again, compositional subtlety gives rise to emotional ambiguity and intrigue. The solo line refuses to provide a continuous, comforting melody or any clear-cut emotional release. Instead, it offers a constant state of fascination and allure. Karlsson’s background in modern classical music again comes to the fore, here allowed to generate far more multifaceted results than it had in Battlefield: Bad Company. In the end, “The Ancient Weapon” closes on the album’s most ambiguous, cliffhanging gesture, receding back into darkness. It is a fitting invitation to return to this highly unusual first-person shooter score.