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While working tirelessly tonight on other projects, by chance I happened to switch audio players back from Foobar2000 to iTunes. Why do I use both? Simple; I use Foobar for my main "traditional" music library, while iTunes manages my meager video game and movie soundtrack library. While that is all beside the point of this article, I felt it was an excellent starting point because needless to say, I leave Foobar running much more often than iTunes, and oftentimes I'll find myself rediscovering a soundtrack that I haven't listened to in months, or sometimes years. And that was the case tonight with the Halo 2 soundtracks, the first of which I have summarized my thoughts on, after the jump.

Released alongside Halo 2's launch, Volume One was the first of a pair of soundtrack albums for Halo 2. Containing selected tracks from the game, as well as "music inspired by the game," Volume One isn't the complete score, which, for casual fans probably doesn't matter, but for the diehards is simply unacceptable.

Despite not being a complete offering of Halo 2's soundtrack, Volume One does contain a good deal of tracks from the game. Starting off with the "Mjolnir Mix" of the Halo theme, an epic remix of the classic theme featuring Steve Vai lending his guitar talents, the album wastes no time jumping right into some of the most anthemic tracks in the game. In fact, bombastic tracks such as "The Last Spartan" and "Earth City" comprise the majority of the album, showcasing impressive symphonic arrangements taken from some of the game's most intense battles and cutscenes.

Included with these selected tracks are a handful of "inspired by Halo" tracks from contributing artists such as Breaking Benjamin, Hoobastank, Nile Rodgers and Incubus. While Breaking Benjamin's contribution, "Blow Me Away" could be heard in-game (the only time I ever muted my TV playing a Halo game), and Nile Rodger's track "Never Surrender" does have some Halo voice clips shoehorned into it's confusing array of techno beats, none of these contributing "musicians" save Incubus have any place on a Halo soundtrack, whose contributions sound largely out-of-place and (especially in Hoobastank and Breaking Benjamin's case) amount to nothing more than mediocre piles of pop-rock noise.

I say "save Incubus," however, as their contribution, the sweeping 4-part "The Odyssey," is a lovely and much-appreciated surprise: A mind bending prog-rock jam that takes up a staggering 27 minutes on the CD. While largely unfitting for the single-player campaign, it does lend itself well as backing noise for long multiplayer battles. (It is exactly what I left my playlist on when spending my sophomore year in high school in 2-3 hour long CTF battles in Halo PC online.)

However, the lean towards loud and bombastic cuts from the game peppered with the alt-rock "inspired by" tracks comes at the cost of where Halo soundtracks typically shine best: The dark and brooding ambient pieces, represented by a handful of tracks that are all under 2 minutes. "Ancient Machine," clocking in at 1:39 is the only particularly "dark" track, which is kinda odd considering the game provides a particularly bleak outlook for your survival, as well as the survival of your species, in the face of alien hordes and extra-terrestrial parasites that turn people into zombies. "Remembrance," "High Charity" and "Orbit of Glass" round out the ambiance, collectively having less time on the CD combined than Breaking Benjamin and Hoobastank did.

I can give credit to Volume One for isolating various parts of the game's score into what essentially amount to a CD of singles, which for the casual fan is just fine. However, die-hard fans will ultimately find Volume One an overall disappointment for its incomplete and skewed offerings of the Halo 2 score.

6	Easily accessible versions of selections from the Halo 2 score. Incubus' "The Odyssey" makes this worth buying alone.
	Incomplete. Fans of ambiance will be disappointed. Breaking Benjamin and Hoobastank have no place here.

- Buy Halo 2 OST, Volume One on Amazon.com