The Truth Returns

Last month, La La Land Records released a limited edition, 4-disc soundtrack of music from The X-Files. It's over five hours of music, spanning 40 episodes throughout the entire 9-year run of the series. I decided to pick up a copy.

The X-Files is a good candidate for a "cherry picked" selection of soundtrack music like this. Much of the music that composer Mark Snow wrote for the series is eerie and atmospheric material -- sometimes soft, sometimes dissonant, sometimes amorphous. It all worked great within the context of the episodes themselves; not all of it would be great on your MP3 player, divorced from that context.

In that respect, this set was exactly what I was hoping for. There are just a handful of those quieter, moody tracks to remind you of the overall feeling of The X-Files. But mostly, the soundtrack delivers action cues of different intensities, rhythms, and instrumentations. Were you to listen to the CDs from beginning to end, you might be bored in spots -- but who does that anymore? The overall effect is a good one.

That said, there's another aspect to the music selection here that I'm not so sure about. Over 15 years ago, during the series' actual run, another single-disc soundtrack was released, subtitled "The Truth and the Light." Until now, it had been the only place (I knew of) that music from the score had been made available. And while the track selections there were excellent, their arrangement was not. All the music was arranged into an endless suite, one track fading into the next. And sprinkled over all of it like an over-seasoned dinner, audio clips of dialogue from episodes intruded on the music. It was distracting at some times, and outright annoying at others. (And not all of the dialogue was matched up to the episodes from which the music was taken.)

Nearly every music cue from that original soundtrack appears here on the new 4-disc set. (In fact, it might be every cue, though I haven't meticulously checked.) On the one hand, I'm happy to have all this material at last, without the unwanted dialogue samples. But from another point of view, I already had all this music, and didn't exactly need it again. They could have released a CD's worth of "all new" material; there was certainly enough in 200 episodes of television to choose from.

But again, it's a good set overall. I'd rate this release a B. If you're a soundtrack fan like me, you'll probably want to grab a copy while it's available. You can order directly from the publisher, or try hunting through some other avenue.