Don’t worry, I’m not going to post the text reversed, or upside down, or anything... Still, there’s going to be some weirdness today, as we get to deal with one of the strangest games ever. Chances are, you’ve never even heard of Killer7, since the game was a moderate commercial success and spawned as many positive reviews as negative ones. Overall, people who know it either hate it or love it and I just happen to worship it with all my heart and soul. If you want to know why, play the game first and see for yourself.
Mixed reception or no mixed reception, no one at Capcom seemed to have doubts about the game’s quality (even Shinji Mikami actively promoted the title) which is reflected in the game’s OST, as it was released in not one, but two (2) CDs. They just said, “To hell with the higher costs, if somebody wants to listen to Killer7 music, he’s going to get it – all of it.” A fine approach, if you ask me, especially in this day and time, when everybody sells stripped down samples and collections (I’ll talk about it someday).
The soundtrack was created by Masafumi Takada – at the time when Killer7 was released I didn’t know much about that guy’s work, today he’s a little more popular because of the Umbrella Chronicles OST and No More Heroes OST. I’d really like to listen to them, especially the latter but, who knows, maybe in Europe they censored the fucking soundtrack as well...
Killer7 OST features a wide variety of different music, but nearly all of it has the distinctive sense of flatness. I like to call it an artificial soul: it’s like watching a small maintenance robot covered in white plastic going about its business, doing something with its little robotic arms, perceiving the world with its single black camera lens. We don’t understand what it does, or why it does it, but we know there is some purpose behind it and we just watch it, fascinated by its senseless, mechanic precision. It may be Russian Roulette, Sceneman, or At Parting. In any case, this music follows its own rules, features its own anything but standard melody patterns.
Yet, there are tracks which take the “artificial soul” much further and elevate the experience from watching a small robot into observing huge stars and planets suspended in the space above us. It’s still not particularly clear and understandable, but the impact is much more profound. Multiple Personality may be a good example, maybe Stoned, Angel’s Despair, even Where Angels Play (it sounds like a disco version of Silent Hill 2’s White Noiz). You get the picture? This is just like looking at the game itself – the cell-shading gives you only bare bones of what is around you, including only those object that matter and are of some use, even if it looks and feels unnatural.
Let’s talk about some of the signature tracks. I guess the one that most of you familiar with the game will recognize at one would be Blackburn – the tune playing at the official website. It does not summarize the feel of the game in any way, offering a kind of peaceful variation instead. Like putting your smoking guns and bloody knifes away for a minute, just to have a refreshing cup of coffee. Even in spite of it though, it doesn’t let us forget that we are still in the crazy world of Killer7: every now and again the piano slips through the bars of casual melody-leading rules and goes flying in the air like a little bird; even the female voice with a noticeable Japanese accent (their “ooh” is very different than an English one – the tongue is higher) doesn’t sound very “everydayish”.
The track that does convey the Killer7 feel is probably Succession, featured on most of the trailers. Fast pace, electric drums, barely discernible melody, weird sounds not really cooperating with the rest. In the game itself, this is a tune for a boss battle and many other enemy-encounter-tracks sound somewhat similar.
Okay, maybe just a bunch of some more standing-out tracks – by “standing-out” I mean just a little different than the rest, like peaks on the same one diagram. My personal favorite is Election Plot. Great heavy beat with an echo, intimidating melody (if it can be called a melody) sung by something resembling dirty pipes. One more thing that I love about it is that the tune accompanies us in a creepy school at night (corridors bathed in moonlight and everything...) and the portions of this track change, or expand, as we move from one area to another – great thinking! Multiple Personality follows a similar path, I absolutely adore the violins occasionally popping up...
Back to the Light begins like a nice, soft-rock song and never actually gets there; Postgasse – a great, uncertain, sad love theme; Rave On which always reminds me of my old Amiga; Residence with its accordion and singing birds; Tecks Mecks with its peculiar guitars; Ministry of Education with its pipe organs :-D; Taxidermy; Elegant Petal and Reenact, the powerful ending theme.
By the way, I forgot to mention the humor. Killer7 is filled with obvious or less obvious quirky, wicked jokes, which leave me crippled every time I play the game and are indeed one of the reason I love it so much. The soundtrack, being a collection of music tracks, has considerably less opportunities of throwing in humor, but still there are things like Reunion ending the first CD, Heroic Verse, or Heroic Deeds (the Handsome Men theme, thank God with no vocals); Electronical Parade which remind you about some of the funniest parts.
For me, the level of soundtrack quality equals how deeply immersed I feel while listening to it. The best OSTs take away all of the senses: the touch, the vision, most of all - the hearing, trap the mind in the world they create and don’t let go until the music ends. And for me, Killer7 OST is not that kind of soundtrack. I found it hard to listen to the two CDs back to back, like I love to do with other OSTs. The immersion just doesn’t hold. Yet, the power lies somewhere else. Killer7 music does not introduce its own complete reality – it warps the existing one. The artificiality of purely electric sounds and the peculiar rules the track relentlessly follow may not take you into a trance but will induce a strange, unsettling mood, like you’ve never been in your body or in this world before. If you give it a chance... ;-)
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