Bully

I\'m a fairly bourgeois video gamer. I\'ll borrow a system from a friend to play a Halo or a Zelda and that\'s about it. But even then I\'d heard about the Bully video game. A game where you play a prep school bully terrorizing school officials, cheat in class and other misdemeanor nonsense sounds like the type of anti-social guilty pleasure that sends parents groups in an uproar. Rockstar Games (of Grand Theft Auto fame) courts controversy as much as other people breath air but they do it with style, and they always give their games rockin\' soundtracks.

"Bully Main Theme" is a Nino Rota inspired piece, but it tells you nothing about what the album is going to truly be. The very next track ("Here\'s to You Miss Philips"), is late 1960\'s psychedelic track. But then the very next track ("Punishment") sounds like something right out of a Dario Argento flick. Two tracks later ("Comic Klepto") the composer nails the tone of early 80\'s drum machine funk. And one track after that, he gets Isaac Hayes right ("Chase Prefects").So many times in the score, right when you don\'t think the composer can do a new style, SLAM! He drops another one on the table. Then another. And another. Did you ever imagine what Suspiria would have sounded like if Henry Mancini joined in Goblin\'s righteous rockin\'? In "Welcome to Bullworth", you\'ll find out.

Who is this guy?! This Shawn Lee fellow has been lurking around the fringes of the LA/London music scene developing his own fusion of... well, anything cool written between 1965 and 2000. He has been building up a steady but loyal cache of fans (that I have just now officially joined). Various sectors of the game demanded different styles. The Vendetta section ("Vendetta Nerds"," Vendetta Greasers", "Defender of the Castle") demands a New Wave tone, so Lee dons his Devo/Adam Ant hat. Then further along, he attacks mid-90\'s Electronica just as easily in Prodigyinspired tracks ("Russell in the Hole") and even some rockabilly ("Fighting Johnny Vincent").

Despite the range of music, only four people play music on the album. Shawn himself handles the lion\'s share of the instruments himself (excluding a trombone, trumpet, flute and sax). There is a confidence to his genre styling that reminds one of David Holmes. So it is no surprise to learn that he will be contributing to Ocean\'s 13. And any man that can reference both Bill Conti and Barry De Vorzon in the same track ("Beach Rumble") must be respected.

This is the coolest original game soundtrack I\'ve come across in a long time. I highly recommend it to anyone with a taste for eclectic pop fusion whether you play the game or not.