Theme of Laura is a simple and casual tune, which is fitting for a simple and casual Silent Hill 2 intro. Compared to Silent Hill from the first game's soundtrack, it seems more peaceful, even lulling. The energy is there, but it is a different kind of energy - gentle and romantic. It doesn't tell a tragic story, it tells a tragic love story. The undisputable highlight of this song is the very last note - a peculiar variation of E-minor chord which fades slowly, opening the door, preparing us for the second Silent Hill experience.
Ah, the unforgettable bathroom scene... White Noiz is what Silent Hill 2 is all about. A dream. Not in a warm bed with our heads resting gently on soft pillows, but in a moist, chilly fog with our minds floating over the pavements, seeing the eerie shapes, not recognizing them. The following tracks play with that concept, each of them altering our eyesight in a slightly different way. They take us to different places: the town, the forest, the lake, but still everything is foggy, out of reach.
One might say, that Silent Hill 2 OST is a much more peaceful soundtrack than the predecessor, featuring much softer, melodic sounds instead of rusty metallic screams. However, it's hard to feel peace while listening to it. It is as if peace never really existed. The mastery of the soundtrack, as I see it, is the ability to erase all of our emotions and replace them with its own, unfamiliar ones. It's hard to feel peaceful during A World of Madness or even Forest, just as it is hard to feel very fightened during Ashes and Ghost. This track has a sense of negative aura, we feel violent things happening around, yet it's not a fear that something may happen to you. It's like a rough river with you, a rag-doll, in the middle. Finally, when the river turns into the deep and dark ocean with giant black shapes moving in the deep (the second part of Ashes and Ghost) you feel empty, a breathless mannequin with the blank expression on your artificial face, seeing the things, unable to do or feel anything.
Some tracks, like Promise (Reprise), Null Moon, Heaven's Night, return generously give us back our souls, and return life to our bodies. They are very much like songs, only sung by a person using telepathy instead of mouth. Sometimes the fog wraps us up again (The Day of Night, Psionic Fairytale), sometimes negative visions appear (The Darkness That Lurks Tn Our Mind, Block Mind, Noone Love You), sometimes a little voice in darkness tries to tell us some great, sad story, but it doesn't know how (Magdalene).
The unfamiliar emotions which the soundtrack gives us in exchange for our own are perfectly visible in track 25. The thing which we might expect to be a grand finale, Betrayal, isn't a great finale at all. Although powerful (sometimes I hear Maria screaming somewhere behind the chains), it's nowhere near as nightmarish as My Heaven and quickly gets devoured by an strange white noise, called Black Fairy.
Theme of Laura (Reprise) introduces us to Overdose Delusion, in my opinion the most powerful actual song of the Silent Hill 2 OST. There are a couple of them throughout the soundtrack most of which serve as outro tunes for different endings. It might as well serve as the credit-roll for the whole experience, but this time we don't just see the credits, we see what we've experienced, the song perfectly summarizes it for us in an understandable language of melody. The actual game outro does the same thing, showing us cutscenes from the game, through the noise and blur. And once again, there's one more message you need to hear, before you wake up from the dream.
Promise is everything. It is love, it is sorrow, it is pain, it is a tragedy, it is hope, it is beauty. And again the perfect Asus2 chord at the end seems to be the most powerful one. Only this time, the dream ends and we are left with a picture of the late Mary Sunderland smiling at us, fading into blackness...
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