Kelly Bailey - Half-Life 2 (2004)

Kelly Bailey, the Senior Game Designer of Sound and Music for Valve, returns to provide a soundtrack that in many ways expands and trumps the score he created for the original Half-Life. The music is bold, with creepy atmospheric moments giving way to weird electronica and intense beat-driven high energy assaults. Kelly Bailey is, for my money, the best in the video game business. So it's a shame, in a way, that he works for Valve and only produces music for their, honestly, infrequent releases.

The only official release this soundtrack has seen was as an extra in the limited Gold Edition of Half-Life 2. As a bonus, some tracks from the original Half-Life were mixed in toward the end, but with different track names. The Wikipedia page for Half-Life 2 fills in all the details for this soundtrack release. Specifically, tracks 1, 29-33, 35-40 and 43 appear on the original PC CD-ROM of Half-Life. The only error I've found is that it states that "Black Mesa Inbound" is a remixed version of "Vague Voices," but a careful comparison of the two tracks to my ears shows that they are identical. The Wikipedia page also lists bonus tracks not on the CD. In my search to put together a complete soundtrack compilation, I eventually found those eight tracks (plus eight more!) on Soulseek.

In putting this together, I assumed that most people interested in this soundtrack already have the first. If not, you can grab it by checking out my post for it here. Because of this, I've deleted the thirteen duplicate tracks from the original Half-Life. I've retained the three remixed tracks and added sixteen bonus tracks ripped direct from the game. I love that the soundtrack starts with "Hazardous Environments," a distinctive track that fans of the game instantly recognize as the theme that plays when the main character Dr. Gordon Freeman puts on the power suit. One of the extra game rip tracks is a "Short Version" of this track, so I've placed this first so that this compilation opens on the same note. The CD ripped tracks are 256kbps. The game ripped bonus tracks are 128kbps. Based on the sound quality, my guess would be that these were ripped direct, having been originally encoded this way for the game and were not transcoded. Many of these extra tracks are short ambient bits, but any material by Kelly Bailey, no matter the length, is worthwhile and deserves inclusion.

Check out the original trailer for Half-Life 2, which doesn't show off the range of the score, but does a nice job showcasing the incredible gameplay:



Kelly Bailey - Half-Life 2 (2004)
1. Hazardous Environments (Short Version) (0:34)
2. CP Violation (1:43)
3. The Innsbruck Experiment (1:05)
4. Brane Scan (1:38)
5. Dark Energy (1:30)
6. Requiem for Ravenholm (0:31)
7. Pulse Phase (1:07)
8. Ravenholm Reprise (0:50)
9. Probably Not a Problem (1:24)
10. Calabi-Yau Model (1:44)
11. Slow Light (0:42)
12. Apprehension and Evasion (2:14)
13. Hunter Down (0:13)
14. Our Resurrected Teleport (1:09)
15. Miscount Detected (0:46)
16. Headhumper (0:06)
17. Triage at Dawn (0:43)
18. Combine Harvester (1:23)
19. Lab Practicum (2:52)
20. Nova Prospekt (1:55)
21. Broken Symmetry (1:01)
22. LG Orbifold (2:50)
23. Kaon (1:09)
24. You're Not Supposed to Be Here (2:39)
25. Suppression Field (0:53)
26. Hard Fought (1:13)
27. Particle Ghost (1:38)
28. Shadows Fore and Aft (1:23)
29. Tracking Device (1:01)
30. Triple Entanglement (1:30)
31. Biozeminade Fragment (0:29)
32. Entanglement (0:39)
33. Highway 17 (0:59)
34. A Red Letter Day (0:29)
35. Sand Traps (0:34)
36. CP Violation (Remix) (2:19)
37. Trainstation (Part 1) (1:30)
38. Trainstation (Part 2) (1:11)
39. Radio (0:39)
40. Pulse Phase (Alternative Version) (0:45)
41. Hard Fought (Short Version 1) (0:44)
42. Suspense Loop (0:11)
43. Stinger (0:23)
44. Hard Fought (Short Version 2) (0:44)
45. Intro Stinger (0:12)
46. Combat Stinger (0:10)

83.68MB RAR archive
MP3: 30x Constant bitrate (256kbps) w/LAME 3.93
16x Constant bitrate (128kbps)

DOWNLOAD
Password: p-l-m.blogspot.com