Soundtrack Review: NHL 2005
Drop the puck, it's time to go
Previous entries:
NHL 2005 has a bit of nostalgic shine to it now, but at the time it was considered to be a big letdown after NHL 2004. Features were missing or dumbed down, the game played more arcadey, and the major addition was a World Cup of Hockey game mode which was fun but not super deep. I’ve seen some speculation that with the 2004-05 lockout looming EA might have anticipated a dip in sales for that year’s game and invested a bit less attention in the title, which if true might be reflected by the soundtrack. They had no doubt done plenty of cross-pollination in the preceding years, with many games in their lineup sharing artists if not tracks, but NHL 2005 took it to a new level as nine of the 14 tracks here appeared on one or more of Madden, FIFA, NASCAR, or Burnout 3. But as long as the songs are good, that shouldn’t matter, so how does this list hold up 20 years later?
Ash - “Orpheus”
One of the bigger fake-outs that I can think of in an NHL game soundtrack, “Orpheus” revs up as a hard rock tom-slapping rager before suddenly pivoting into a light and sunny indie-pop track. As it progresses it balances the riffs and poppiness pretty effectively, reflecting the Britpop band’s stated desire to incorporate influences from Guns N’ Roses and American heavy rock on their 2004 Meltdown record. I wasn’t familiar with Ash before this game, but that’s probably because I’m Canadian and not British; the Northern Irish band had a ton of success in the UK, racking up 18 songs in the top 40 there (including “Orpheus,” which made it to #13). You might recognize this song from its appearance in Shaun of the Dead. 7/10
Burning Brides - “Heart Full of Black”
As will become very clear in the next few articles, one of my least favourite NHL song archetypes is “generic AC/DC clone.” “Heart Full of Black” appeared on the original Guitar Hero, which sounds about right. It has a few elements that kind of work for me - the tambourine in the chorus, the melody in the pre-chorus - but the rest is replacement level 2000s devil-horns-up-in-a-beer-commercial hard rock. Sometimes I can get on board with this type of music when the band brings a new element to the throwback sound, but that’s not the case here. 5/10
Dropkick Murphys - “Time to Go”
The Dropkick Murphys, as you probably know, are a Celtic punk band from Massachusetts who became famous in part due to the appearance of “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” in 2006’s The Departed. Before that, they were on an indie label and gained attention mostly through their status as a fixture in Boston and handful of raucous rally songs backing the city’s sports teams. One of them is “Time to Go,” which appears as an in-arena track in NHL 2005 and is essentially a rowdy and tipsy Bruins fan rewrite of “The Good Old Hockey Game.” This one I think is better in small doses but it’s got plenty of charm, with local references (“take the Red to the Orange line,” “Rancourt’s ready, it’s time to take to the ice”) elevating the more generic old time hockey rah rah rah lyrics. In an arena, I bet it rips. On Spotify or in a video game, it’s okay. 6/10
Faith No More - “From Out of Nowhere”
One of my favourite aspects about the NHL game soundtracks is that they featured new music instead of arena staples. As audio director Steve Schnur told The Athletic:
“Why did sports need to sound like 1980 when you’re playing a game called NHL 2003? It didn’t make sense to me. So along with the NHL producers at the time, we just made a decision that we were… going to put bands in there that felt and sound like what the future of hockey would sound like.”
This approach is what makes these soundtracks a lot more interesting — not only did they expose young fans to new bands and genres they otherwise would never have heard of, but in retrospect they act as time capsules tracking the progression of rock and alternative music in the 2000s. It’s also one of the reasons I decided to cut this series off at NHL 09, since NHL 10 and NHL 11 include a bunch of cliche’d throwbacks like “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and “The Final Countdown.”
So with all that in mind, what is a Faith No More song from 1989 doing on NHL 2005? I have no idea. It doesn’t seem like there was a big 15th anniversary re-issue, and the only thing I can find linking 2004 to that song is that in that year a Danish electro-metal band named Raunchy covered it. Maybe someone on the EA team just loved that song so much they made a special exception.
Regardless of why it’s here, obviously “From Out of Nowhere” is a great track. It’s pumped up and sounds enormous, Mike Patton’s vocals are always awesome, and other than the huge gated drums it doesn’t sound too dated (as a kid I always just assumed it was a new song anyway). Faith No More had a lot of influence on metal and alternative rock bands in the decade leading up to 2004, and although that influence was waning by the end of the nu-metal wave we’ll hear plenty of it on future Avenged Sevenfold tracks in particular. 8/10
Franz Ferdinand - “Take Me Out”
So let’s just say the obvious - “Take Me Out” is unreal. It’s catchy, it’s varied, it sounds completely fresh despite drawing on older sounds like garage rock and dance-punk. Everyone knows it, most people love it, and it’s the song most people would identify with this game (and like “Oh! Ellin” on NHL 2004 it always seemed to be the song that kicked in when the game loaded up.)
Is it really an NHL song though? It’s by a Scottish band who never appeared on an NHL game again and have no other association with the sport. It was featured on Madden NFL 2005 as well as Guitar Hero, SingStar, and the original trailer for the PSP. It’s insanely famous outside of hockey, with 896 million streams on Spotify — the most of any song we’ll be talking about here. When I hear it, I don’t think of NHL 2005, which I don’t think is true of any other song I’ll be writing about in this column. That makes me hesitate to rank it among the most iconic NHL songs ever.
Oh well. It’s not like I’m gonna rate it low because of all that. 9/10
The F-Ups - “Lazy Generation”
This one is just brutal. Appearing as the first track on the F-Ups’ only studio album Screw You (these guys weren’t afraid to get really edgy and in-your-face), “Lazy Generation” is a mind-numbingly stupid satirical pop-punk song that bugs the shit out of me. The stop-and-start hook (why?), the obnoxious “hey hey hey”, the knuckle-dragging voice-of-a-generation social commentary… There’s a part where singer Travis Allen screams “let’s go!!” — the universal rock indicator that a kickass new section of a song is about to kick in — and then the band just repeats what they already played. It’s just awful. It sounds like if the cast of American Idiot: The Broadway Musical had to come up with an original song. It sucks. 2/10
Hazen Street - “Fool the World”
Hazen Street was a super-group made up of veterans of various hardcore punk acts I have never heard of, who I guess felt like trying to make some poppier music than usual and touring with Good Charlotte. The group put out one CD, which contains a lot of shouty white guy rapping over instrumentals inspired by acts like New Found Glory and sometimes even Linkin Park. “Fool the World” is an uneven track and as tempted as I was to give this a 1/10 the second the guy rapped the opening line “I’ve been to many places, I’ve seen many faces,” it’s not as bad as its worst sections. Its battle-hardened tough guy message is kind of counteracted by a dopey power pop riff and the verses are terrible, but I dig the chorus — probably because it sounds like it came from a completely different song. 5/10
Jersey - “Saturday Night”
Our long-awaited return to the Greater Toronto Area and the Southern Ontario punk scene brings us to Jersey, a ska band considered by some to be the “Canadian Rancid.” The appropriately named “Saturday Night” comes from their major label debut and final record (how many times have I had to say that in this series?). The CD was called Generation Genocide, but this track is a lot lighter and more cheerful than that name might lead you to expect. It’s about being in a band and having a fun time singing with your friends on a Saturday night, specifically celebrating the punk lifers who put in decades touring and performing, which many of the guys from Jersey are still doing 20 years later (albeit in different groups). The song itself isn’t great and I suspect it was mostly picked as an arena song because the chorus goes “Saturday night Saturday night Saturday night we gotta do it right!” and NHL 2005 is a hockey video game. That said, a lot of people in the comment section of the Youtube video apparently associate the song with beloved Satruday night memories, so I’ll use my platform to echo their requests for Jersey to put the track on streaming services. 5/10
Letter Kills - “Radio Up”
Letter Kills were a screamy emo-pop group from LA who released one album for Island records in 2004 and then dipped. From what I can tell, the label wanted to push this track as the debut single, the band preferred a different, tougher-sounding one, it busted, they quickly got overshadowed by their new labelmate Fall Out Boy, and that was that. Bummer. “Radio Up” has its charms, with sugary melodies and a catchy chorus, but the screaming really adds nothing; I wonder if it actually could have been a hit if they didn’t feel the need to shoehorn in harsh vocals. Compare it to “Radio #2” from NHL 2004 for a pretty good indication of how trends in this kind of music evolved as the 2000s went along. 6/10
Lola Ray - “Automatic Girl”
“Automatic Girl” is a rocker that straddles the line between garage rock revival and pop punk. It’s kind of a mess and the lyrics make no sense whatsoever, but I think it overcomes that on pure energy and loudness. Toned down even just a bit it would completely fall apart, but it’s got a momentum driving through it that hits for whatever reason. Not a classic, but enjoyable. Lola Ray mostly did the pop punk circuit, joining Hazen Street on the road with Good Charlotte and Sum 41, and I can picture this sounding pretty good live. 7/10
The Network - “Roshambo”
If you’ve never heard of the Network but think this song sounds pretty familiar, there’s a reason for it. This project was a chance for a pre-American Idiot Green Day to try out some new ideas without the commercial pressure associated with actually recording and releasing a record under their main banner. They did some half-hearted attempts to deny that the Network was their side project, but evidently stopped short of making the vocals not sound exactly like Billie Joe Armstrong. On some of Money Money 2020’s tracks, they try out a throwback new wave sound and fiddle with electronics, but “Roshambo” stands out from the rest of the album by pretty much being a Green Day song with a drum machine on it. Fans of American Idiot will recognize it as being basically a mix between “Letterbomb” and “Give Me Novacaine,” and while the production is gussied up with some extra effects (like the filtered raspy moaning vocal track in the background which is actually kind of annoying once you notice it) it’s a pretty simple and repetitive track that could’ve been a decent Green Day b-side. 7/10
Papa Roach - “Not Listening”
Our returning champions in the Roaches dive further into the butt rock realm on “Not Listening.” This really is what modern rock radio sounded like in the mid-2000s, with vaguely defiant and motivational lyrics over a WWE-ready riff. I can’t stand the verses but I mess with it a lot more when it gets heavy, like in the chorus and especially the bridge and screamed outro. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s good, but I’m willing to bet it sounded better than a lot of what was played next to it on the air.
Am I crazy, or is the hook literally lifted from the “losing my sight losing my mind wish somebody would tell me I’m fine” part of their biggest hit “Last Resort?” 5/10
Sugarcult - “Memory”
In this series we’ve seen a lot of pop songs that are technically competently put together but fall flat because they just don’t have a strong enough hook to stick the landing. What makes “Memory” a great song is that it has two of them; the run time is essentially composed of two choruses that alternate four times with a cursory guitar solo stuffed in. No, it’s not exactly the deepest track of all time, and if you can’t handle the way he says “memoraaaay” you’re in for a miserable four minutes, but it’s one of the most iconic and beloved survivors of the emo-pop genre for a reason. 8/10
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - “Karmageddon”
Finally, the obligatory Scandinavian track comes from Sweden’s The Soundtrack of Our Lives (often ill-advisedly abbreviated to TSOOL). They were an indie group heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones and other 60s and 70s acts and in the early 2000s after an endorsement from Oasis they found some success and attention overseas (especially in the UK), as one of those “9/10 in NME and 3/10 in Pitchfork” kind of bands. That’s probably why they were chosen for the FIFA 2005 soundtrack, and I bet the whole Sweden thing made them a natural fit to chuck onto the NHL game as a bonus. From the song title you’d assume that “Karmageddon” was a heavy hard rock song, but while it’s got a bit of a riffy stomp to it the main vibe here is summery Stones worship. For whatever reason the pieces just don’t really fit together super well for me; the instrumental and vocals kind of seem at odds with one another and the result is a track that’s too light and major key to be a big rocker but too busy to work as a breezy pop track. 6/10
There’s just something that doesn’t quite work about this soundtrack for me, and I’m having trouble putting my finger on it. Maybe it’s that 2004 was a bit of a transitional year in the genres of music the NHL games usually draw from, with pop-punk moving from a more skate-punk and power-pop influence towards more a more emo-pop sound, rock veering more heavily towards 1970s guitar hero nostalgia, and nu-metal totally swallowed up by butt rock. Or maybe it’s that so many of these songs were taken from other EA Sports titles, resulting in a list of mostly decent tracks that just don’t have that hockey feel, for me at least.
Onto the superlatives…
Most Valuable Player: “From Out of Nowhere”
Yes, “Take Me Out” is the chalk pick, but the driving heaviness of “From Out of Nowhere” screams hockey more than the bouncy dance-punk of Franz Ferdinand.
Aleksander Barkov Award: “Automatic Girl”
Similarly, the off-the-rails “OK Go on Warped Tour” energy of Lola Ray’s contribution gets them the most underrated spot.
Healthy Scratch: “Lazy Generation”
Camp Rock ass
We’ve had great response to the community polls, so please feel free to rate these songs yourself:
Rate the NHL 2005 Songs
Here are the community ratings for NHL 2004:
Next week, he who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the paaain of BEEING a MAyne ouuughuh
Between NHL 2004 and like NHL 17 or something like that, I think this was the only one I didn't own... boy was I not missing out on this soundtrack.
re: last week’s community poll results: bowling for soup would strike brand new down, no sparing.