Even with companions, in the world of Kentucky Route Zero, Conway is decidedly on an isolated path, lyrical implications or not. Looking at the two seemingly opposing sides of the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack - the grand, voiceless swells of cuts like “Ghosts in the Static,” and the hymns of those like “You’ve Got to Walk” - are they so different? When the latter proclaims, “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/You’ve got to walk it by yourself,” the loaded iconography conjures up the same feelings as its instrumental predecessor. Humans have spent millennia on the God question and a conclusion doesn’t seem much closer than when we started. Peering into Kentucky Route Zero’s void consistently conjures more inquiries than answers. “What Would You Give” serves up country-fried questions on eternity as The Bedquilt Ramblers vocalist Emily Cross asks, “Oh, if today God should call you away/What would you give in exchange for your soul?” Later in the soundtrack, “This World Is Not My Home” finds The Bedquilt Ramblers crying out, “If heaven’s not my home, oh Lord, what should I do?” and I’m not sure if there’s any logical response to any of the Ramblers’ questions. Throughout the tracklist, the fictional folk band playing real folk traditionals gives the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack a sense of place that’s otherwise lost to a logic-defying plane. Emotions are fluid and will inevitably, at times, settle into the unsettling. These inflections throughout Kentucky Route Zero make for an intense reminder that this world isn’t just an idyllic daydream, but an exploration of all aspects of the psyche. Other cuts like “Angel Wings” personify the gray cloud of a mental lethargy that drags down both the body and mind, while “The Arrival” has a harsh resonance to its mystifying atmospherics. Enter the sonic foil of spectacles like “Xanadu” where hair-raising synths invite a sensation of overwhelming, inescapable dread. There’s also drama, depressive tendencies, and sprinklings of tension in Kentucky Route Zero’s soundtrack.
Much of the work here is simultaneously celestial and subtly personal, existing in an everlasting duality of as above, so below. Songs like “5 Dogwood Drive” make for ambient daydreams, unearthing undercurrents of pure catharsis, while others like “To Love a Red Moon” are nostalgic for a moment beyond memory. It offers boundless potential that’s echoed on tracks like “Julian” where ethereal keys are held tight, unrelenting in their acceleration toward eternity. Album opener “The Stars Drop Away” is a dewy, delicate meditation with an otherworldly cadence. At times intimate and at other times sweeping in scope, Babbitt encapsulates the moments of inward-facing reflection alongside the drama of protagonist Conway’s journey. The instrumental intonations of composer Ben Babbitt are truly stunning throughout Kentucky Route Zero. There are no demarcated boundaries between regional tradition and art toying with the edges of existence in this collection of songs. But that anchor quickly dissipates into the ether as ambient noise makes way for down-south praise with the iconography of God in heaven, all before morphing back into subdued sonic fractals. The immense soundtrack unfolds according to the game’s five acts, in the order in which each episode debuted, and therefore has a sense of traditional structure. Signposts fade away and we’re all left with sweeping gestures and abstractions of emotions and visceral noise, and oh, is the noise grand.
There’s a rhythm and a logic to the acclaimed game, but it doesn’t quite adhere to our spacetime continuum as our collective reality is refracted through prisms to the point of only faint recognition. Kentucky Route Zero’s wispy daydreams flicker with black and white fragments echoed through time.
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