When Halo 2 was released, it was accompanied by a soundtrack. Unfortunately, it wasn't the soundtrack fans had been hoping for: instead of one featuring the music from the game, it instead pulled the old "music from and inspired by the game" trick. While a few game tracks could be found on it, including "Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix" and "Ghosts of Reach", it was also loaded with tracks by Breaking Benjamin, Incubus, and Hoobastank.

It was tolerable. The game-specific tracks were great, and a few of the "inspired by" tracks grew on you over time, but it wasn't the soundtrack we wanted.

Volume 2 is that soundtrack.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

Maybe it's having just listened to hours upon hours of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but I truly enjoyed the 300 soundtrack's martial mix of choral singing, Mediterrean/Middle Eastern-inspired music and a touch of hard rock explosiveness.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

My first impression as the music starts playing -- and I'm immediately confronted with notes I haven't heard since watching The Two Towers-- is that the difference between this and the regular soundtrack is like the difference between reading the books and watching the movies.

The movies give you a beautiful experience … but the books give you depth. And that's what the complete series CDs give you as well -- every note played on screen, evoking every musical sense that you felt. No short cuts, no abridgments, just Howard Shore's beautiful music.

John Williams' original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone soundtrack was a whimsical, wondrous album with a hook that was instantly as memorable as anything he'd done for Star Wars or Jaws. The Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire soundtrack retains elements of Williams' themes, but its musical evolution is nowhere near as impressive as the film it scores.

Superman Returns is the archetypal superhero soundtrack, expertly incorporating the full spectrum of full-color emotions -- heroics, passion, dread, wonder, inspiration -- while paying homage to John Williams' original tracks.

The Chronicles of Narnia soundtrack has me torn. On the one hand, I've now got another fantasy-themed soundtrack that I can use in my role-playing game sessions. On the other, my geek music collection now includes a song by Alanis Morissette.

I mean no offense to the women geeks out there, for whom this is probably a good thing, it's just that I've never really liked Alanis' music all that much -- its just too depressing, too angsty for my taste (but hey, I still regularly listen to Huey Lewis). Fortunately her track on this album -- "Wunderkin" -- is fits the soundtrack quite well, and has less angst-per-beat than most of her other music.

The Firefly soundtrack doesn't have the same cinematic, awe-inspiring musical grandeur of the score for a Star Wars or Star Trek film. Instead, it yields the familiar sensations all too common in Firefly ... the sense of coming home, and the sense of something great once held, then lost.

The songs are as rich and textured as the series that spawned them. It's got the western twangs you'd expect, mixed in with the mystical Oriental strings, and occasionally torn by horrific riffs reflecting horrors confronted and bested. Or run screaming from.