Pitchfork

All: How ashamed are you? Me: If I were I carrying a ladder, I'd look like a fire engine. If I placed a leaf on my head, a child might polish me and place me on his teacher's desk. A salivating man with a boiling pot of water, a pair of tongs, a stick of butter, and a plastic bib is circling me menacingly right now. If you get my drift.

Video games still aren't quite cool, but the arrival of Amon Tobin's noirish, cinematic soundtrack for the third installment in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell video game series, Chaos Theory, proves that they're at least getting cooler. It also illuminates how far video games have come since my mom picked me up from school brandishing The Legend of Zelda and just blew my mind ("Sweet heaven, it's gold. Not gray-- gold!").

As video games become more like interactive films, the ante is upped for their soundtracks as well. The canned, wobbly synth melodies that once cheerily bounced our 8-bit, pixilated heroes through their 2-D side-scrollers no longer suffice, and while this is the first video game soundtrack by a respected underground musician that I can recall, I seriously doubt it will be the last.

Scoring a video game presents a different set of problems than scoring a film. The latter's structure is fixed, but the former's is variable. Splinter Cell is an espionage game with numerous environments, some revolving around tension and stealth, others around hectic chases and high-octane shootouts. The music needs to follow suit, and flow seamlessly from one mood to the next.

Tobin handles this problem by making all the songs sound...well, rather similar. He takes full advantage of this opportunity to be as over the top as he wants to be, and his soundtrack is busy, dark, percussive, and abrasive. There are "running" songs ("CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA") and "sneaking" songs ("chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga"). There are lots of sonar blips, modem crackles, alarms, and detonations. There are howling digital winds and fluttery textural embellishments (imagine the horror movie staple: "Ooh Ooh ooh ooh...Ah Ah ah ah..."). While the tracks complexly evolve in Tobin's usual fashion, they generally begin with cacophonous, atmospheric noise to which lean, fleet polyrhythms are subsequently applied.

The Chaos Theory soundtrack is James Bond panache meets dystopian nightmare. Sure, it's no Supermodified, but Supermodified wasn't created to be endlessly looped behind onscreen spy ops. This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.