Review Summary: Metal Gear Rising's soundtrack is absurdly intense, a fever dream of metal/electronic bliss that perfectly complements the game it's in.
Metal Gear Rising might have been the controversial fist-to-face action counterpart to the Metal Gear Solid series, but it earned itself quite a bit of critical acclaim. Platinum Games’ were notorious for adding a sense of enormous, energized, over-the-top spectacle to their action games (with their critical darlings
Bayonetta and
Vanquish) and
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was no different. It was big, it was ridiculous, it was in-your-face at every possible opportunity. But holy crap, was it awesome.
Jamie Christopherson, best known as the main contributor to the music for the cult film
The Crow: Wicked Prayer, is no stranger to composing the music for video games, though not anything of this variety. While most of his past works run the gambit from medieval fantasy warfare like
The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth or the kid-friendliness of
Surf’s Up,
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a big shift in gears for Christopherson. It’s a massive mix of industrial, metal and drum n’ bass that shamelessly admits its over-the-top nature at every possible moment. Dancing between explosive electronic cluster-bombs and a battle-crying metal aesthetic, the soundtrack to
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is almost delusionally badass, but it’s also some of the most intense game music to ever reach the public’s ears.
The biggest hit (and the possible successor to the “Guile’s Theme Goes With Anything” meme) “Rules of Nature” is an embodiment of enormous smashing rhythms, blasting metal riffs, and one of the hardest hitting entries of a chorus in any metal song in recent memory. It’s the kind of music you’d expect to play while a pro wrestler steps into the ring…while riding a tank and dressed like tweaked-out Robocop. On the less metal side, “The Only Thing I Know For Real” is drenched in adrenaline, a fighting song from start to finish with Gatling-gun pacing from the electric beats, but with a monster guitar solo smack dab in the middle. The electronic influences in “I’m My Own Master Now” are furious in pace and almost suffocating in speed, amped up on drum n’ bass energy (and “nanobots”) with electric guitars in the background for a nice bit of texture. “The Hot Wind Blowing” even brings European DJ
Ferry Corsten and
Armored Saint (and former
Anthrax) vocalist John Bush on board with a groovy, almost dance-able combination of heavy metal riffs and start-stop electronic paces. It’s a real gem on the record.
Other songs simmer down a bit, focusing more on atmosphere for the intense wartime setting of the game. “Red Sun” has a lower, softer vocal style compared to “Rules of Nature” and its battlecry of a chorus-starter. The vocals in “Red Sun” are more brooding and almost angsty, but the guitar solos are still surprisingly technical, offering a solid contrast between the verses and the bridges. “A Stranger I Remain” has a very interesting female vocal performance, one with the elegance of Evanescence, but with much more bite (and a much better quality) and just as much metal and electronic overclocking in its background instrumentalism. “It Has to Be This Way” tends to sound a bit melodramatic with its bombastic string section and exhaustive vocals. It’s a big shift from the amped-up metal of the record’s first half, but definitely stands as one of the better slower tracks on the album.
The songs that stumble usually suffer from a lack of personality compared to the others. “Collective Consciousness” might have siren-esque electronic effects and a brooding vocal performance, but no obvious moment of pure intensity that grabs the listener with a vicegrip and doesn’t let go. The “low key” versions of songs like “Dark Skies” and “A Soul Can’t Be Cut” try to tame some of the songs’ wild natures with less cacophonous effects, but only serve to sound incredibly quiet and subdued. The enormous blitzkriegs of metal and electronics was a picturesque portrayal of Metal Gear Rising’s overarching vibe, so suppressing that animalistic rage makes these versions sound quite inferior to their original mixes.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance’s soundtrack has a lot to chew on. Overall, though, the album doesn’t display its most memorable moments consistently enough. The first half of the initial tracklist is a predator missile on gaming soundtracks; it’s intense, exciting and an all-around pitch-perfect example of how more can actually be better. The second half, however, feels too subdued. Almost everything after “A Soul Can’t Be Cut” (aside from a few instance like “The Hot Wind Blowing”) feels much tamer than the haymaker of “Rules of Nature” or the electronic speedball of “I’m My Own Master Now.” While that might be good in another album,
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a game of constant energy, so that inconsistency sounds all the more noticeable. But even with that in mind, this is a soundtrack that’s shamelessly intense, a strong companion to the game it’s included on. When it comes to making big, epic electro-metal music that perfectly fits the image of a cyborg ninja cutting down giant robots with a sword, the soundtrack to
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a resounding success.
