Waterworld

by Dean Evans

* Waterworld is a very bad licensed game for the SNES. But take a look of this soundtrack. It's actually beautiful. Dean Evans is seriously the best composer of the SNES era besides David Wise.

* The soundtrack ranges from dark and atmospheric, pretty and ethereal, and groovy. This is mainly done with the instrumentation and vibes of the chords. A low and echoing flute is used on a lot of the tracks makes it sound sort of unsettling in a way. Plus the ambient chords, which I believe to be minor sell the feeling a lot here.

* The pretty tracks tends to use more major chords, making it sound a lot more pretty and ethereal. They also use the 7th of the chords to add more richness to the sound. Reverb on the pads and strings are also used to make it sound very spacey and open. Evans also uses softer percussion to make it sound more peaceful but still have a bit of a groove, same with the moving bass.

* Then the way the groovy tracks are done is the very alive bass and stronger percussion. Evans even adds vibrato and portamento to the bass to make it sound very alive and even realistic, despite it being a crushed up 8 bit PCM sample.

* The one exception would be Atoll, it's very rock influenced with a hard guitar that sounds very threatening. It's a strange, feels out of left field, but in a good way.

* My only issue is that a couple tracks are pretty boring and drag on too long. And a more minor criticism is that the soundtrack is made to loop most of the tracks once, I just skipped these loops, but it can ruin your enjoyment of the album if you decide to not skip them because it will just get repetitive so I just wanted to mention that.