Psybadek Soundtrack

Psybadek Soundtrack, Mike Clarke, 1998

Including Psybadek in a list of “The WORST PlayStation Game[s] Ever Made”, as one YouTube reviewer does, is probably pushing things too far. After all, Sony’s console, especially in its later years, attracted plenty of genuinely dreadful shovelware. Still, Psybadek remains a curious failure. This was a game by one of the 32-bit era’s most fashionable and commercially successful developers, Psygnosis, released between such heavy-hitters as the WipeOut, Colony Wars, Destruction Derby, and Formula 1 titles. Yet, according to both contemporary and later reviewers, Psybadek falls flat almost across the board. At the very least, its mixture of racing and platforming suggests that the developers were trying to think outside the box, even if that combination was ultimately poorly realised.

As GameSpot noted in its review, however, there is one area in which Psybadek, unexpectedly, excels: its score. The claim that “the soundtrack is easily one of the best in video games anywhere” may sound like hyperbole, but this is indeed one of the era’s finest electronic game soundtracks, and immeasurably better than one would expect from a game with so little else to recommend it. Thanks are due to veteran composer Mike Clarke, who had been delivering scores for Psygnosis since the early 1990s, including one of the best metal soundtracks ever written for a game, Formula 1.

For the Psybadek soundtrack, Clarke takes a very different, and arguably more imaginative, route. In the score’s first half, he builds each track around a big beat rhythmic framework, then overlays it with retro-styled melodic leads that oscillate between the jazzy and the psychedelic. Perhaps the game’s dunderheaded title accidentally did one useful thing by nudging Clarke towards precisely this kind of fusion. The approach is not without precedent: Propellerheads’ “History Repeating” had already sketched out a similar combination of contemporary beats and suave, Bond-like brass a year earlier.

Even so, it is not a style commonly heard in game music, and Clarke deserves credit for producing an electronic racing score that resists the late-1990s norm for the genre. Because it has no need to underscore a futuristic setting, the Psybadek soundtrack is a far warmer and more melodic proposition than, say, the music of WipeOut or Extreme-G. Instead, it embraces a fuzzy nostalgia. One need only consider the vintage colouring Clarke often gives his instruments, as though they were being played through an old transistor radio. That effect might sound awkward in theory, but he applies it with restraint. Rather than overwhelming the music, his audio engineering lends the modern rhythms a distinctive and colourful edge. It also prepares the listener for touches such as the jazzy trumpet solo in “Track 1”, which fits the cue’s retro undercurrent perfectly.

The soundtrack then revisits this interplay of old and new from several different angles. “Track 2” expands the preceding cue’s strung-out mood through a wild combination of biting vintage keyboard arpeggios, acerbic guitar lines, surf-rock detours, hip-hop rhythms, and jittery sound effects twitching through a multi-coloured haze. It is a deeply heady trip, at times like a woozy dream, yet Clarke never loses control of the music’s flow. Across its nearly seven-minute span, the constituent parts develop organically, just listen to the percussion- and guitar-led build-up towards the end of the middle section, while any sudden shifts feel deliberate, underlining the track’s entertaining unpredictability. “Track 4” is equally enjoyable. Here the contrast is between urban elements, more urgent rhythms and sampled car sounds, and more rural touches such as the harmonica lead. Once again, Clarke makes the unlikely pairing work with complete assurance.

The second half of the Psybadek soundtrack heads off on several tangents, but without any loss of quality. “Track 5” and “Track 7” adhere more closely to the conventions of racing game music from the period through their stronger reliance on techno rhythms. Even here, though, their spacey synth pads drift through the stereo field like translucent gates to the stars, warped by forceful solar winds, enough to recall the trippy atmosphere of the earlier pieces. “Track 6” adopts an almost diametrically opposed strategy. Far more acoustic than electronic, it introduces mariachi trumpets, briskly strummed guitar figures, lavish string writing, and increasingly busy drums to create the score’s most upbeat cue. In the end, it is simply another ingenious way for the soundtrack to indulge its fascination with 1960s music, this time recalling the “acid rock played by orchestra” ethos of Love’s masterpiece Forever Changes.

“Track 8” moves towards a more dramatic register, opening with sampled African chants before segueing into the soundtrack’s heaviest bass line and a bed of hand percussion. Clarke again demonstrates his experimental instincts, pairing these locally marked influences with an anthemic staccato synth melody. Its timbre is markedly colder than the surrounding textures, but the dominant lead and the chanting match one another well in their shared appetite for broad, emphatic gesture. The soundtrack closes fittingly with its most elusive piece. “Track 9” moves from dry guitar riffs and bouncy four-square dance beats to increasingly dense electronic layers, before breaking down into a pounding big beat passage and mutant surf rock. Once more, it is a combination that should not really cohere, yet Clarke pulls it together into a kaleidoscopic whole that never stops surprising, a fitting reflection of the Psybadek soundtrack as a whole.