The Music of L.A. Noire – A New Stage in Video Game Music Refinement

I first realized what potential video game music has of shaping young listeners’ taste in music when a friend urged me to listen to a song he’d heard in Bioshock 2. The song was, to my surprise, Annette Hanshaw’s “Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home”. An unusual choice, I mistakenly and condescendingly thought. I was to be proven wrong when, during the rediscovery of my own passion for video games, I would come to play “L.A. Noire”, the recently released game developed by Team Bondi in conjunction with Rockstar Games.

There are quite a few things that I particularly enjoyed about the music of L.A. Noire, the first of which is the variety: it had 40s film-noir inspired original orchestral pieces composed by Andrew Hale and Simon Hale (with additional music by Woody Jackson), music of the time (diegetic, played on the radio within the game) which included the Andrews Sisters, Tex Williams, Billie Holiday and Louis Jordan, and original vocal recordings composed and recorded by Stephen Coates and his band The Real Tuesday Weld with vocalist Claudia Brucken.

Both the lavish orchestral pieces and the jazzy vocal recordings (it’s worth a mention that it’s a bit original for a video game to feature especially-composed vocal tracks) later released as a soundtrack album (L.A. Noire Official Soundtrack) and are marvelous listen for any retrophile. The sometimes-playful-always-sultry vocal recordings are my personal favourites, the voice of Claudia Brucken being appropriately reminiscent of 40s starlets and Stephen Coates’s lyrics always leaving you with an ironic, maybe a bit bitter, smile.

I feel like I need to mention that there was also a second official soundtrack album released – Verve Records And Rockstar Games Present L.A. Noire Remixed. This one is a bit pointless and seems like a bit of a cash-in. It consists of 6 songs that aren’t even in the original game, remixes of songs from the era, present in the game in their original form. Although I’m generally a fan of the Verve Remixed series, this particular album leaves me thoroughly unimpressed.

In the end, what I want to say is that as unusual as it may seem for some music fans to buy a game soundtrack, this album (L.A. Noire Official Soundtrack) truly deserves a listen. And maybe buying game soundtracks should become a habit. Why not? This is better than any film soundtrack I’ve heard in ages. I mean look at the disrespectfully uncreative music choices in director Zack Snyder’s stuff: in films like Watchmen and Sucker Punch he uses ridiculously well-known music that almost offends me with its obviousness! Sometimes it seems like the art of movie soundtracks is slipping away while the art of game soundtracks is blossoming into something quite unexpected. Maybe it’s not entirely new, maybe it’s not entirely original, but it’s certainly more refined that most things that are out there.

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