Orchestra of the Lich King
November 26th, 2008 by Flint
Hello. My name is Flynte and I’m a dwarf hunter. And here’s my trusty bear, Pooh. Say hi Pooh.
Mroaaaawwrr.
Good boy, Pooh. Now, whilst I’ve traveled the humongous and incredibly well populated world of Azeroth for quite a while now and heard many splendorous sounds, it isn’t until now that my observant hunter ears have truly paid attention to the sounds around me. As soon as I stepped onto the icy cold shores of Northrend and began my adventure towards the Lich King as well as the endless amounts of exploration and side-things I can be found more often doing than actually facing the big bads (I leave that to those who are willing to minmax their training for greater good), there were sounds that grabbed me more than any other ever since my very early days as a young adventurer and the nostalgia-filled memories of the sounds in my starting home.
In more coherent words, the music for the new expansion for World of Warcraft is awesome.
The whole theme of the new expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, seems to be making everything grander than ever. The new zones are gigantic, the amount of things to do is immense, the lore hits you in the face and refuses to let go instead of being more of a background thing, storytelling is taken to a whole new level than ever before (a cutscene in my MMO? What?), every single knob seems to have been turned to 11. This includes the music.
I’ve never been a fan of orchestral soundtracks as I find that they’re most often pretty damn generic, especially in films. There are some that have conquered my heart and whilst I cannot say that I am madly in love with the soundtrack to the original World of Warcraft, I do quite like it. There are some downright amazing tunes there but even so, the more I look at things with a clear mind to more I recognise that the songs with the most impact are those that I heard back when I was a newbie to the game: my first zones, my first capital, et al. The music to the areas of the last expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, left me feeling pretty much nothing but background ambience that wasn’t too hard to turn off and replace with other music (though I do acknowledge that the music for Zangarmarsh and the Draenei starting zones work fantastically in creating atmosphere).
Lich King’s soundtrack on the other hand blasts away from point one. The revamped title screen gets a revamped version of the “main theme” of the game which sounds more glorious than ever as it gets a build-up and several parts that implement other themes from the new expansion areas. The music for the new zones are so strong that you feel guilty if you turn off the music and listen to whatever bands you like on the music player of your choice. All the songs have a new atmosphere to them – they sound homely and character-full while exploding in an epic fashion. It really gives the new areas their own personality while retaining a similar musical style throughout the areas. Another striking feature is the increase of instruments: Northrend music is filled to the brim with sounds not found previously in the game, often to an amazing extent.
What’s most incredible is that the soundtrack CD that came as a bonus with the Collector’s Edition of the expansions is a whole different experience to what you will experience in the game. The sound quality is much clearer, the instruments have been re-recorded, the songs do not follow the game versions 100% and have their own proper flows. Even moreso when you realise that the whole album is segued together. It’s a soundtrack album that’s not just a compilation of tunes, it’s made to be listened as an actual album. It’s the versions on the OST that are the definitive versions of the songs.
I’ll attempt to condense the awesome in a few soundclips.
First of all, we have the song to the area called Howling Fjord. For those are not playing the game, Howling Fjord is the other stepping stone to Northrend, a mountaineous valley of equal parts grassy fields and snowy hills with a significant Norse/Viking theme going on throughout. During its miserably short three minutes the song manages to raise the hairs on your back on more than one occasion with its dramatic swoops – all thanks to the amazing, amazing uilleann pipes that blare their notes in the open (think of bagpipes but more cinematic, melodic and grander). It’s… Nordic. And epic.
It took me a long time to decide what our second example would be like until I finally decided not to showcase any of the more dramatic, darker pieces and instead wanted to give you the reason why the zone of Grizzly Hills grew on me so much after the initial meh start (the other reason being the quests that begin to unfold in the zone. Mmmm, werewolves and Cthulhu-copies). The zone’s theme, titled “Totems of the Grizzlemaw”, is a peaceful, pastoral and easygoing string-driven piece that alternates between elegiac and playful, always minimally as often only one or two instruments are audible. As the violins graze around, you can pretty much see the lush and mountainous northern forest filling with wildlife in your eyes. That, or the Shire. I keep getting LotR flashbacks often when I listen to the soundtrack, mainly because LotR is one of those few orchestral soundtracks I love, but the stylistic similarities between the two soundtracks come closest together in the Grizzly Hills theme.
The third clip is a complete break. I first heard this song briefly in one of the Dragon shrines in Dragonblight. Amidst the natural beauty of the shrine and the wanton destruction of the red dragonflight in the hands of the invading undead, I was doing my own business in order to help the flying lizard things. And all of a sudden this tune came on. I literally stopped just to listen. The song, “Garden of Life” (which is pretty much the main song of the Sholazar Basin area but seems to appear in areas of remarkably lush vegetation) doesn’t sound like anything in WoW before. It’s stylistically much more similar to your typical J-RPG music: I in fact thought that someone had accidentally slipped a Final Fantasy soundtrack in the game. Whilst the song takes a darker, more ominous turn during its final minute (possibly in order to segue better into the next track on the album), the first two and a half minutes are filled with pastoral, ethereal beauty. It’s soulsoothing.
I rarely get so excited over soundtracks and I never include soundtracks in my yearly retrospective ponderings, but I think I might consider the soundtrack to Wrath of the Lich King as one of my albums of the year. It does have a habit of sometimes succumbing into background music – after all, it is meant to be background music – but it has the magic of rewarding the listener when he focuses into it. A feat only some soundtracks are capable. I am currently insanely addicted to the game once again and spend a lot of the time I don’t play browsing sites related to the game, but for the first time in the year and a half I’ve played the game, I keep on listening to the music as well.
Howling Fjord
Totems of the Grizzlemaw
Garden of Life
Tags: soundtrack