Knockout City Soundtrack

Knockout City Soundtrack, The Soundlings, 2021

Just about every sport imaginable has found its way into at least one video game, well, perhaps not synchronised swimming yet. Even so, some sports have clearly proved more attractive to developers than others. Dodgeball is one of the rarer examples. Perhaps that is down to its apparent simplicity and relative lack of tactical depth. Then again, those same qualities also make it highly adaptable, easy to transpose into new settings and alternative gameplay structures. Case in point: Velan Studios’ Knockout City, in which teams of players pursue one another through the titular futuristic city, attempting to eliminate opponents by pelting them with a ball. When asked why dodgeball became the game’s central mechanic, Velan Studios CEO Karthik Bala described it simply as an “intuitive” sport whose basic idea everybody immediately understands.

In other words, Knockout City never aspired to be anything other than a straightforward, joyous game that is easy to pick up. Its soundtrack naturally had to reflect that same openness and accessibility, though in the event it does considerably more than that. For the game’s visual design, Velan Studios opted for a futuristic take on the 1950s and, as a result, “didn’t want to only focus on one aspect of music”. There was another good reason for such variety: the soundtrack is organised around different in-game radio stations, each associated with a distinct fictional artist. Once the developers decided to fund live players, they brought in The Soundlings, Sonny Rey and Matt Naylor, to score the game. Although the duo had already accumulated an impressively broad portfolio of film and television work in a relatively short time, this would be their first video game soundtrack.

According to interviews, The Soundlings relished the chance to write for a game that demanded such a stylistically varied score. Asked by the developers to create a range of musical idioms, they drew on influences spanning the 1940s to the 1970s, with Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop serving as one of their touchstones for this kind of kaleidoscopic approach. Making full use of their seasoned session players, The Soundlings decided to bind the score’s various strands together by ensuring that every fictional band in the world of Knockout City featured “some form of brass and horns”.

Summing up their own work, The Soundlings described the soundtrack as “explosive, energetic […] but [it] also has a depth to it.” That turns out to be entirely accurate. This score is riotous fun, overflowing with energy while concocting genre combinations one rarely hears anywhere else. The compositions waste no time, packing an enormous number of ideas into their two-minute runtimes. Restless almost to the point of giddiness, the music bristles with the jittery joy of discovery, while its jazzy brass foundation ties it neatly to the game’s retro-styled world. That the frequently head-spinning array of influences usually resolves into coherent tracks is a minor miracle; only the Alley Katz material occasionally feels genuinely cluttered.

The Command Play cues that open the album indicate the rollercoaster ride ahead without quite throwing the listener in at the deep end. “Beat Feet ‘n’ Bounce” begins with surf-rock guitars before giving way to breakbeats, matched in intensity by urgent, exuberant brass fanfares, while the ringing guitar leads add a dash of psychedelia. As throughout the Knockout City soundtrack, the melodic hooks are brief and sharply defined, anchoring the surrounding whirlwind of colour. “Boogie Street Brawl” initially presents itself as a relatively straightforward big-band jazz number. Yet the distorted bass line running underneath subtly prepares the way for a sudden but entirely convincing descent into modern electronica, complete with chiptune-like arpeggios and an electronically manipulated trumpet solo. “Fire Fingers” returns to a more rock-oriented sound, its fleet piano writing offering a fitting nod to 1950s rock’n’roll.

The other fictional bands in the world of Knockout City adopt a similar principle, using jazz and luxuriant brass writing as the basis for further stylistic experiments. Rick and the Humans provides what is probably the soundtrack’s purest jazz material. “Effective Dissonance” strides along on energising call-and-response figures and extended brass soli. “Planet Hop” sets the pulse racing with its catchy swing jazz, while “We Bang Loud” folds in a mood organ to evoke the timeless cool of 1960s spy thrillers. The Scratched Bass Band moves into neighbouring territory, with funk rhythms and R&B beats arriving as natural extensions of the score’s palette. What makes these tracks stand out is the excellent beatboxing, which gives “Kick It Fresh” and especially “Get Outta Dodge” a manic propulsion. “Get Outta Dodge” in particular ranks among the soundtrack’s highlights, its frantic beatboxing perfectly matched by rowdy saxophone soli.

Johnny and the Breakers pushes this freewheeling genre-blending a little further still. Brass riffs continue to power much of “Dueling Dolphins”, but its galloping acoustic and electronic rhythms end up supporting guitar figures lifted straight out of a Morricone western. Those mariachi inflections return in “Devil’s Cove”, where they somehow fuse seamlessly with skittish surf guitars, intricate breakbeats, a sci-fi synth ostinato and stabbing organ chords.

Yet the soundtrack’s true peaks of magnificently controlled lunacy arrive in the Hologramatix cues. All of them begin from the rapid-fire language of bop, only to veer into entirely unexpected constellations as the composers splice in a host of electronic sounds with dazzling virtuosity. “Drop the Bop” even throws buzzing rock guitars into the mix, while “Don’t Stop the Bop” takes bop’s intricate rhythms and translates them into electric beats. The star of the show, however, is “Doo Wop the Bop”. There is every chance that no previous game soundtrack has attempted to graft electronically processed doo-wop harmonies onto bop’s abrupt rhythmic turns while surrounding them with a dizzying collage of cut-up, stuttering electronica. It is the pièce de résistance of a score that is as joyous as it is fearlessly inventive.