Label: Unknown
Artist: Duncan Krummel
Origin: USA

It’s with some excitement, that I came across this piece of music, which is the soundtrack to the play ‘She Kills Monsters’ by Qui Nguyen. The play is a dramatic comedy, about a girl finding solace in Dungeons & Dragons after the death of her sister, where she enters a world that makes any geeky heart pound a lot faster.

Duncan Krummel has composed a lot of music scores, winning various awards doing so. Quite an achievement, since Krummel is still pursuing his studies, currently at the Royal Conservatoire in Scotland. This score was used for the performance of ‘She Kills Monsters’ at the Bowe Theatre, directed by Rachel Harry.

The soundtrack opens with the typical grandeur of a fantastic story, with big horns, swooping sounds and big arches. It’s no surprise to enter the realm of the story in this manner on the title track. We move onwards with captivating tunes, into the heavy metal shredding of ‘Team of Badasses’, with that pounding, gritty sound of cool…badasses? You can instantly picture it, which is really quite cool and sometimes I hear something like this in my head when my character moves in during a D&D game.

The power of the soundtrack is how it totally makes you see the things happening. On ‘Farrah The Fairy’, the twinkling piano clearly resembles the fluttering of the wings and frantic energy of a fairy. The last songs of the album, leading up to climax ‘Tiamat’, appear to be the deep dungeon part of the story, where you crawl further through danger and risk, onwards to that final boss fight. The epic scale of the music is very befitting the setting and rather enjoyable. I say, check it out!