The Music of Command and Conquer

I fully knew what to expect when I bought this CD. Well actually, I didn't buy it, as it doesn't seem to be available for retail sale. A friend of mine had bought a Command & Conquer collectors pack, in which the soundtrack came free. After much begging, I was able to buy the CD from him, and I'm very glad I did.

The first thing most people will notice (unless they have the PSX version of C&C) is the addition of even more vocals to many of the tracks. At first these seem intrusive, but believe me, once you know the tunes with the voices, they sound naked without them.

So what style is this album? It's really hard to say, it covers so many genres. Many of the tunes have an industrial sound to them, but there's also a lot of orchestral and rock tracks. That's not all of course, there are several other styles that just show up once, like in "Rain in the Night", which is a tune that reminds me very heavily of Cats with its slinky, sneaky sound.

The inclusion of the "Covert Operation" tracks was a nice surprise, but the fact that very few of the CovertOps tracks match the quality of the regular C&C tracks makes me think it was a bad idea to sacrifice some of the C&C tracks to fit the CovertOps ones on.

I was disappointed to find that "Demolition" and "March to Doom" were missing, as they have always been favourites of mine. There are also others missing, "Fight Win Prevail" being one that springs to mind. But as it stands, the compilation given to you on the CD is very generous.

Another thing I should mention (for those of you looking for your favourite tunes on the CD) is that many of the tunes have different names than they did in the PC jukebox. Some of them are fairly subtle ("Just Do It" is "Just Do It Up"), but others are quite different ("Mechnical Man" is "Target" and "Warfare" is "Full Stop").

All in all, this is a brilliant CD, and I think that Westwood really made a mistake when they didn't release it commercially.