Red Dead Redemption Original Soundtrack (OST)

Marketers, take note! The ultimate factor in convincing my husband and I to pre-order Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption, as opposed to waiting a year or two for the price to cut in half as is our usual game-buying habit, was not the free DLC or the map poster, but the free inclusion of the game's soundtrack with all pre-ordered copies. Soundtracks are expensive, game soundtracks especially so, and we figured we couldn't go too wrong gambling on a Western soundtrack - a relatively new genre, they're hard to screw up, and many a forgettable or outright crappy cowboy flick has been elevated by its solid musical score. And I can rarely get enough of the soundtrack from LucasArts' old PC game, Outlaws.

Red Dead Redemption is a solid game, memorable, intriguing, and fun, but its soundtrack is exceptional, a great listen even when separated from its in-game context. Composers Bill Elm and Woody Jackson have brought the Western musical genre into the present, doing two notable things most Western soundtrack composers don't: heavily incorporating both contemporary musical influences and musical influences from the time period their story takes place in. The end result is a lesson in what fusion should sound like. Elm and Jackson's skills have even created a handful of acid jazz-fueled tracks that would sound at home on Lalo Schiffrin's score for Bullitt, or even on The A-Team - but don't sound out of place here, on an album for a Wild West video game released in 2010. Mexican influences are also clear and present, which is swell seeing as how the game's second act plays out south of the border. The only place this album hiccups a bit is on its final track, a vocal number called "Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie", whose lyrics and tone disagree with the game's conclusion and led me to believe that it would be soaked in hopelessness and despair, when its bittersweet ending was actually quite the opposite (much to my relief, though it was still quite emotionally draining).

The closing track's relation to the game's story aside, Red Dead Redemption (OST) is a basically perfect record. For music lovers, soundtrack afficionados, and anyone who likes a good Western, this is something well worth looking up regardless of whether or not you'd play the game.