Buy it... if the maturity of Michael Giacchino's own distinct style is what you had considered lacking in the previous "Medal of Honor" scores.

Avoid it... if you really have no confidence in the quality of any score for a video game, because by this entry in the series, Giacchino's "Medal of Honor" music could compete favorably with any major film score.

Giacchino

Medal of Honor: Frontline: (Michael Giacchino) By the time "Medal of Honor: Frontline" hit the gaming market in 2002, the "Medal of Honor" concept had strongly established itself as a premiere war game in the industry over the previous three years. With its origins resting with Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg, the series of games firmly extended the expectation that large orchestral music was not only a normal feature of these historical war games, but also expanding into a variety of other genres as well. After being recognized and awarded for his work on "Medal of Honor: Underground" the previous year, composer Michael Giacchino was also becoming an established force in the music industry, with offers beginning to come in for a wider variety of scoring projects (though mostly in television). Commissioned to write music for both "Medal of Honor: Frontline" and "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault," the latter only requiring five new cues of material (and thus received no major album release on its own), Giacchino was on the verge of partially leaving this era of his career behind, moving on to the show "Alias" and, within a few years, feature film scores that would yield an Academy Award nomination and a win. "Medal of Honor: Frontline," in the meantime, thrust the Allies back into the series of games with the daring, if not disastrous Operation Market Garden, during which the Allies air-dropped troops along the German "West Wall" to capture a handful of strategic bridges on the Rhine River. For the return of the Allies from the first game, Giacchino was originally asked to contribute roughly an hour of music for this third installment. By the end of the successful scoring and recording endeavor, however, the composer had written and recorded nearly 75 minutes of material. Giacchino decided not to significantly alter the foundation of the "Medal of Honor" thematic equation to any great extent, choosing the revisit several of the key themes from the first game (many of which were absent from the second game due to its different set of characters and more intimate storyline). Interestingly, the thematic material for the primary American character (Lt. Patterson) would be restructured in an effort, as Giacchino would call it, to represent how the character had matured in the time that had passed since the battles and adventures of the first game. Not surprisingly, this growth of that character's theme mirrors the maturation of Giacchino's own work for the entire series, too. Enthusiasts of the video game series recognized, as did the film music fans who had already embraced his work, that "Medal of Honor: Frontline" is the most well developed, mature score that Giacchino had provided to the series at the time.

Gone in "Medal of Honor: Frontline" is the optimistic bombast that accompanied the gung-ho spirit of the first "Medal of Honor" score. Some listeners who enjoyed Giacchino's obvious stylistic similarities to John Williams' music of the 1980's were disappointed by this fact, but the transformation which had taken Giacchino's style further from that enthusiastic start also led him down the necessary path to creating his own style. Indeed, the title theme for the Allies is back, as is the Nazi theme and an adaptation of the major character theme, but they are not presented with the same heroic vigor during most of "Medal of Honor: Frontline." Only in the final mission on the album, "The Horton's Nest," does a hint of that ballsy American patriotism begin to shine once again. On the other hand, "Medal of Honor: Frontline" isn't as subtle and understated as much of "Medal of Honor: Underground" was, and when Giacchino does provide moments of suspense in this score, he raises the bar by utilizing a varied chorus to accentuate the horrors of the situation. The voices also work to brighten the beauties of location (especially in a solo boy's tone), with cues such as "After the Drop" and "Arnhem" offering harmonious, though bittersweet passages that exceed the quality of Giacchino's other music for the series. This score has a more powerful effect on the listener, and yet, even in its magnificent consistency, it lacks the ambitious grip that made the first "Medal of Honor" score so enticing on album. Thus, despite being a superior composition and recording, "Medal of Honor: Frontline" is about equal to the original in terms of album enjoyment, and slightly better than the previous entry. Recorded in a Seattle cathedral, the score enjoys a more acoustically dynamic sound, a 180-degree difference from the composer's later, extremely dry processing. Part of this impression is likely due to the location, though Giacchino's use of the chorus, chimes, bells, and anvil also add welcomed depth. The initial CD album was not available through the same limited online venues as the previous two; it was only to be purchased through EA Games' online gaming store for an inexpensive $10. It went out of print and escalated to three times that value by 2011, when La-La Land Records assembled all of the existing "Medal of Honor" game soundtracks by all of its three composers at the time and released them in one massive, 8-CD set. That impressive collection, aside from remastering the sound and making all of the scores available again as part of a 2,000-copy pressing for $60, presents additional material from the later entries. The contents for "Medal of Honor: Frontline" on the set's third CD are identical to those of the original product. Beware of a hideous, drink-induced, hidden source track at the end of both presentations. Overall, "Medal of Honor: Frontline" confirmed what many had suspected since 1999: Giacchino was ready for the major motion picture scoring assignments soon to come. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Michael Giacchino reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.37 (in 21 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23 (in 12,367 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.