The Game: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
This music for a story about suspicious identities and perpetual conspiracies is splendidTwilight Zone-like cocktail music. Listeners need not even see the movie to feel Howard Shore's nightmare, but it helps to visualize a protagonist stuck in an environment where nothing is what it seems. Shore's somber orchestral backgrounds and tenuous piano phrases threaten to form some kind of Tin Pan Alley melody but never do. The outward mood is frosty, but intensity lurks beneath. Imagine the New Age sound in a midlife crisis. This is it! Better yet, this is bad-trip music for well-dressed urban sophisticates. Grace Slick singing "White Rabbit" for the finale reminds you of a world too busy screwing with your mind to feed your head.--Joseph Lanza