Anno 1404 Original Soundtrack

	Album Title: Anno 1404 Original Soundtrack
	Record Label: Ubisoft
	Catalog No.: N/A
	Release Date: June 23, 2010
	Purchase: Download at iTunes

Overview

The enormously successful (at least in Germany) RTS series of Anno titles continued in 2009 with Anno 1404. The basic concept of the game remained the same as in previous titles: depart with your fleet of ships to new lands and colonise them by building new towns on these islands. The main change to the game mechanics came through the option to settle both Occident and Orient, which gave players the chance to control two different peoples, each with their own buildings, units, and requirements. Like its predecessors, the game was both a critical and financial success, and went on to garner five German Developer Awards in 2009, including Best German Game and Best Soundtrack.

For the latter, German sound production company Dynamedion was drafted again after its composers had conceived distinct soundworlds for Anno 1701 and Anno 1701: The Sunken Dragon. The result was one of Dynamedion’s most massive works too: the composing team around lead composer Tilman Sillescu ended up created more than three and a half hours of live orchestral music. To get their hands on this impressive amount of music though, soundtrack collectors had to put up with some annoyances. As with many Dynamedion productions, the score was released on the game’s bonus DVD, albeit only about 100 minutes of it. Worse still, the tracks were all encoded as 160kbs mp3s, and carried only file names, but no tags. In other words, the compositions on the bonus DVD are ordered alphabetically, with no regards to thematic flow or other musical considerations. A good year later, in June 2010, Ubisoft released a 35 minute version of the Anno 1401 soundtrack on iTunes and Amazon that inexplicably retained the alphabetic playing order. This review refers to the 35 minute digital download.

Body

After the pastoral sounds of Anno 1701 and the colourful orchestrations of Anno 1701: The Sunken Dragon, Dynamedion once more tweak the musical formula for an Anno Soundtrack. Firstly, as was to be expected, the composers react to the game’s incorporation of Oriental peoples and fill the soundtrack with appropriately Arabian-sounding compositions, which make up about half of the soundtrack’s running time. But Tilman Sillescu and his team of composers also change the tracks underscoring the European conquerors and settlers. These cues still feature lavish, late-romantic orchestral sounds, but now assign a much greater role to a full choir.

The two different musical world are showcased and brought together on “When Cultures Meet”. The track opens with a memorable, solemn melody for mixed choir, recorded in a very spacious acoustic, which gives the music an indisputably churchly feeling. This melody turns out to be Anno 1401 first main theme, and the second one is introduced after the music breaks into a rhythmically driven second section that highlights the score’s Arabian, more frantic sounds. Driven forward by slightly bland Djembe rhythms, the second main theme is a more repetitive, insisting melodic idea, carried by the violins.

The decision to give the choir a much greater role on the Occidental material was likely made to mirror the game’s mediaeval setting. That being said, the resulting music is certainly imbued with a feeling of seriousness and gravitas, but hardly sounds authentically medieval. Most Occidental pieces, in their late-romantic harmonies and big orchestrations, clearly hark back to more contemporary scoring conventions. On the other hand, one may rightfully argue that if the composers had stuck to what little is know about music of the early 15th century to increase historic authenticity, the resulting soundtrack would have likely alienated more listeners than it could have hoped to attract through such a move. Ultimately, the soundtrack’s overall musical style will hardly irritate anybody; apart from those occasions when the score slips in Baroque elements that seem to have been imported straight from on Anno 1701 and Anno 1701: The Sunken Dragon. These would have fitted perfectly on those soundtracks, but as musical representations of the year 1404, “Grandiose Magnificence” is inappropriate and jarring, since its sounds Baroque stylings far more period specific than the generically romantic compositions that make up the bulk of the Occidental music on Anno 1404.

In any case, while the orchestral palette is still the same as on Anno 1701, that soundtrack’s idyllic imagery is now replaced by impressions of grandeur and occasionally overwhelming scale. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on “Monumental Cathedral”. Its towering sounds alternatively set a male choir against brass fanfares and a female choir against sustained organ chords and later opposite ostinato violins and woodwind figures, which are subtly mixed under the already thick textures to drive the piece forward. A truly awe-inspiring composition, “Monumental Cathedral” is the best example of the impressive results that the score’s choir-heavy approach can yield.

Another set of compositions that predictably benefit from the forceful sounds of a full choir are the battle tracks. As with the other Anno albums, there’s not a lot of action music to be found here, but once the orchestra and choir gear up for battle, the listener’s sound system will get a good workout. “Thousand Feet March” is less varied and more rhythmically focused than previous Anno action tracks, but the utterly powerful sounds of the full choir effortlessly keep these compositions floating. After Anno 1701‘s downright bewildering sound mix, which relegated the choir to a mere textural addition, Anno 1404’s vastly superior choral recording is bound to leave an impression on the listener. The same even goes for a shorter crisis track such as “Calm Before The Storm”.

Thankfully though, the composers don’t employ the choir only for illustrations of power and urgency, but put the vocal elements at hand to more varied use. On “Moneycounters”, the choir accompanies light string figures and a rhythmically pronounced melody. This musical mix presages similar compositions on Dynamedion’s The Settlers: Paths to a Kingdom, although “Moneycounters”, despite a nice transition to majestic brass fanfares at the halfway mark, remains more monotonous than the cues on that The Settlers soundtrack. On “Ora Et Labora”, the choir, together with a descending, swelling two-note violin figure, adds a melancholy edge to the upbeat, light orchestral material. This juxtaposition of atmospheres intelligently contrasts the typically busy ‘working bee’ music so prominently found on The Settlers soundtracks with a reminder how hard 15th century working life actually was.

But although the choral elements are generally deployed with skill, sometimes they clog up a track’s textures and generate an obnoxiously bombastic sound. “The Outpost”, with its driving string ostinati and simple choral melodies, doubled by the brass, is a tad too reminiscent of Gladiator and other Remote Control scores and stretches its predictable, derivative musical material too thin.

While the Arabian elements are mostly kept at bay from the European sounds (and vice versa), they don’t disrupt the album flow once they emerge. Better composed than the rather hackneyed ethnic material on Anno 1701, the Oriental compositions on Anno 1404 add a broad canvas of colours to the soundtrack. Generally, these pieces are just as richly orchestrated as their Western pendants, but they’re usually scored for smaller ensembles, which contrasts nicely with the heavier Occidental cues. Instead of focusing on the long, lyrical melody lines of the late-romantic orchestral pieces, the melodic material on the Arabian tracks is more fragmented and consists of shorter, often repetitive phrases. This characteristic underscores the rhythmic focus of these compositions, and as per se for Dynamedion soundtracks when percussive instruments are highlighted, these are layered in rich and intriguing rhythms.

Particularly “Our Honoured Guests” possesses an infectious, toe-tapping energy, due to its catchy hand percussion rhythms, melodies carried by either ethnic woodwinds or the saz (a plucked Turkish string instrument), and a string section that performs those generically Oriental-sounding chord progressions. The smaller ensemble proves to be the perfect outlet for such an agitated composition. “Golden Shores” trades in “Our Honoured Guests” bustle for slower tempi and plodding rhythms to depict a vast, foreign location, while still retaining the colourful woodwind and saz leads, and even throws in some chromatic solo violin chords for good measure. And “Oriental Mysteries” does its name justice through the perfectly realised inclusion of vocal elements: enticing female solo wails that fortunately never slip into tired Hollywood-score cliché.

As with the Occidental pieces, the composers vary their instrumental palette sufficiently to keep things interesting, but there’s still the occasional slip up in quality. “Sands of Dreams”, relies too much on those Lawrence of Arabia-style string chord progressions that are certainly adequately scenic, but by now they sound rather clichéd. “Monumental Mosque” tries to evoke religious grandeur through the musical means of the smaller, Oriental ensemble and fares quite well, due also to the inclusion of sufi vocals. But the long-winded melodic idea for the strings is a failed attempt to adapt the trademark Arabian sound to this kind of free-flowing, lyrical melody line, and the track ends up being too slight to carry the its own running time.

All in all then, Anno 1404 is another strong showcase of Dynamedion’s expertise with orchestral game soundtracks. Unfortunately though, this quality is hardly presented adequately on this digital score release. As mentioned above, this album passes on the chance to improve the bonus DVD’s haphazard album sequencing, and just sticks with the alphabetic playing order already present on the bonus DVD: the first track is “Behold the Sultan”, the second cue is “Bow to the King” etc. This practice is simply unacceptable on a commercial stand-alone album release and an insulting display of laziness on the part of the album producers.

This approach to album sequencing, together with the not always convincing choice of compositions pulled from the more complete bonus DVD release, results in an uneven listening experience. The album opens with three short, stylistically disparate cues, before segueing into the luxurious Oriental vibes of “Golden Sands”, only to continue with the aforementioned jarring Baroque interlude “Grandiose Magnificence”. And then there’s the more dissonant orchestral material on “Infestation” and “The Black Death”, all with the replete eerie string and choir glissandi and constantly pounding timpani. In and of itself, these cues are competent, if hardly breathtaking. But the fact that they creep up on the listener right after a lively Baroque piece or an atmospheric, lush Arabian-styled composition is simply irritating. Lastly, it’s difficult to understand why the album producers decided to fill the limited album running time with the variations of “Moneycounters” and “When Cultures Meet”. Both variations stick very close to the originals, to the degree that “When Cultures Meet (Variation)” is simply a carbon copy of “When Cultures Meet”, minus the Arabian march section. Given that there were far more interesting variations of single tracks on the Anno 1404 Collector’s Edition Soundtrack, the inclusion of “Moneycounters (Variation)” and “When Cultures Meet (Varation)” is a simply a missed opportunity.

Summary

Dynamedion’s composers once more redefine the sound of the Anno universe, and the results are almost thoroughly convincing on this perfectly recorded score album. Tilman Sillescu and his team successfully tackled the massive challenge ahead of them and deliver a soundtrack that brings both Occident and Orient to life in vivid colours and rich orchestrations. Compositionally, Anno 1404 surpasses Anno 1701, without quite reaching the heights of Anno 1701: The Sunken Dragon, but nonetheless possessing an epic scope that is quite rare for an RTS game soundtrack.

All these admirable qualities are undermined however through the sub-standard album presentation. Even leaving aside for a moment the issue of the album’s disappointingly short running time, the fact that the tracks on the album are ordered simply according to with what letter they start is infuriating. This shocking lack of editorial care on a commercial soundtrack release badly hurts the album’s flow, which is too often interrupted by clusters of short tracks, and some stylistically jarring cues that despite their inherent musical qualities should have been left off the album. Furthermore, this score release leaves out a number of highlights from the Anno 1404 Collector’s Edition Soundtrack and instead includes a number of unremarkable variations of other tracks on the playlist. Releasing a commercial digital download of a score that was previously only available as part of a game’s limited edition is a tremendously recommendable practice. But if carried out with as much lack of care as on display here, it’s impossible to praise the result. Spent your money instead on Ubisoft’s other recent digital score release of The Settlers: Paths to a Kingdom, which demonstrates how such a release should be handled.

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Simon Elchlepp. Last modified on January 22, 2016.

About the Author

Simon Elchlepp A former German film student now living in Melbourne, Australia and working at the University of Melbourne's Architecture faculty - and a passionate music lover with an eclectic taste. Specialising in Western game music, I'm here to dig out the best scores Western video games have produced in the last thirty years.

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