Skyrim Soundtrack

Well, it finally arrived! I got my Skyrim soundtrack in the mail yesterday, and it's been on repeat in my car ever since. I'll provide a review of the soundtrack in an upcoming post when I review Skyrim as a whole, but I had a few observations about it I wanted to share.


Last night, I was driving home from a friend's house. It was cold and dark, and the snow was coming down heavy and thick. The road was covered in snow with patches of ice sticking through here and there. The night was black and white, save the golden glow of the street lights. The Skyrim soundtrack was blasting through the speakers, and it was at this point that I realized just how perfectly Jeremy Soule captured the lonely, cold, desolate feeling of Skyrim in his music. Here I was on the cold and lonely journey home, and the music was the perfect accompaniment. Granted, my adventures are hardly as epic as the ones my Argonian rogue is having in game (in fact, "epic" wouldn't be a word I'd generally use to describe any part of my life), the chilly music really fit the atmosphere of the drive home.

I keep hitting the spacebar twice at the end of my sentences, expecting it to insert a period like it does on my iPhone. Damn Apple and their convenience features!

I didn't realize until I was listening to this soundtrack how much I'd come to expect a bit of electronic in my soundtracks. Everything from Transformers to Halo and Mass Effect nowadays has some measure of electronic sound layered into the classical music. Skyrim is different in that this music is pure classical. There is some production work (such as the layering of the choral parts to make it seem like a larger group of people sang them), but by and large, the 3 discs of actual soundtrack material are straight up classical music, and I'll admit to being rather thrilled with the prospect and the results.

There is a staggering amount of material on the discs. Almost 3 hours if individual tracks on the first three discs, and then the fourth disc contains a 45 minute "atmosphere" collection. I haven't listened to this yet, but if it's anywhere near as good as the first 3 CDs' worth of content, I will love it.

This is the first time I've ever used the CD player in my car. At the moment, I'm so completely enthralled with the purity of the music experience, that I have not converted the music to my iPhone yet, for fear of sound degradation. As such, I've put the CDs into my car's CD player, and have been listening to the music that way. It's not often that I eschew my iPhone in favor of CDs. In fact, I don't think that's happened since... well since I got my first iPod back in 2003 or so. Scary.

That's all I got for the time being. I'm going back to Skyrim now; my Argonian looks like he wants to kill some more dragons.