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Review: 'Finck, Robin & Wordclock'
'NOCT O.S.T.'   

-  Album: 'NOCT O.S.T.'
-  Genre: 'Soundtrack' -  Release Date: '22nd October 2015'

Our Rating:
Now, I’ve never really got into gaming – not in the way people do gaming now. Call it the generation gap, or perhaps it’s just how my head works. I used to love playing Mariocart on the N64 and lost many days to various PC games in the 90s, but the nature – and style – of gaming has changed dramatically over the last 15 to 20 years. So I’ll admit that I struggle with the idea of a game having a soundtrack beyond bleepy bloopy music that plays in the background while you’re doing whatever it is that you the game involves. So, I’m out of touch with gaming and the community, and so beyond being what the blurb describes as a ‘horror survival game’, I haven’t the faintest idea about NOCT. I apologise.

But I’m more than au fait with soundtracks as a thing more broadly, I’ve been a fan of Nine Inch Nails since before many of their ans were even born (yes, I remember a world before ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ and blew the speakers at several parties during my college years with ‘Broken’), and I’m certainly well-adjusted to dark ambient music, which this album, the work of Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck and musician Wordclock (Pedro Pimentel) subscribes to the style of – more or less.

So I’m less concerned that it’s the first time Finck has worked on a game soundtrack and the first time the publisher Devolver have teamed up with such a massive artist, and more concerned with the music itself.

As for the game… well, apparently, it sees ‘Earth as a ruined wasteland engulfed in perpetual darkness. Older than any recorded texts, an ancient evil has descended upon the world without warning, consuming the population and leaving only despair behind in its wake. The unfortunate survivors of this purge now struggle to overcome the horrific terrors of the Nocturnal.’

So, the question isn’t ‘how does this hold up against NIN’s output?’, but how well does the soundtrack convey this? With sparse, echo-heavy guitars strung out over long, low, rumbling swirls of dark, nebulous noise that create a sense of unease, it’s a work which is atmospheric, unsettling, but also feels quite sedate. In the main, the sense of horror is decidedly muted, the overriding sensation being one of expansive vistas, albeit bleak, barren ones, devoid of human life.

The sombre piano of ‘NeXT’ gives way to the ponderous, spectral post-rock of ‘JUNO’, but it’s the obliterative wall of noise that is ‘TCAS’ which really grabs the listener’s soul and fills it with abject terror. Deep atmospherics dominate the album, although the 13-minute closer, ‘NuSTAR’ ends with a redemptive and vaguely hopeful-sounding piano, it’s a dark work that succeeds on its own merits.
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Finck, Robin & Wordclock - NOCT O.S.T.