The Story Told Through Mass Effect's Clubs - Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of this glorious journey through the dirt and grime that manifests in one of gaming’s greatest creations: Mass Effect’s club scene. If you’re coming into this thinking “Wait, there’s a Part 1 to this mess!?” be sure to follow the link here to check out the sights and sounds of Mass Effect 1’s various clubs.
For Part 2, we are heading to the Terminus Systems—the areas outside of council space, where credits, glory, or death await those bravest or most stupid in the galaxy. Mass Effect 2 sees Commander Shepard and their ragtag group of day-savers taking on the mysterious “Collectors” to find out why they have been targeting human colonies. Mass Effect 2 is an upgrade in nearly every capacity to the original game, from the engaging loyalty missions, amazing combat and enemies that don’t shout “ENEMIES EVERYWHERE” every few seconds. This upgrade can also be found within the games clubs, which benefit from Mass Effect 2’s graphical and audio upgrades. The game can be effectively broken down into three clubs, with one of them being one of the best clubs in all of video game history.
The Citadel: Dark Star Lounge
The events of Mass Effect 1 meant that we are not able to visit Flux or Chora’s Den when we make our trips to The Citadel. The club we are able to frequent is the rather upmarket Dark Star Lounge. The music here sits in a rather unique space compared to some of the other tracks in Mass Effect, in that it wasn’t written for Mass Effect at all.
For the eagle-eared listener, they might recognise the high tempo track from EA’s breakout sports game SSX 3. Thankfully, the track itself fits perfectly within the sonic canon of the series, so this acts more as a gentle easter egg than a dramatic shift in tone. The first thing that is immediately apparent when we enter Dark Star is just how much more aural space there is being used here. Whereas the tracks from Mass Effect 1, though effective, could essentially be broken down into two or three digital instruments, here we are immediately greeted with a much more layered and nuanced experience. We have this dark and ominous drone rumbling underneath a traditional hard-beat; however, the digital drum kit has a heavy dollop of reverb added to cut away at some of the attack. A simple synth melody is present alongside a series of sustained chords which add a delicious viscosity to the whole track.
This track paints an image of denial that is felt throughout the very space station the club finds itself in. Unlike the much more ambient dance track of Flux or the smut of Chora’s Den, Dark Star Lounge has an ominous mood thanks to the multitude of drones underpinning the frenetic hard beat. The people of The Citadel are going to Dark Star not to dance but to forget the horrors of what happened there 2 years prior. This denial is felt strongly within the track, one that floods the psyche of any patron the moment they step through the doors.
Illium: Eternity
Much like Noveria in Mass Effect 1, Illium is a place of trade and business. Unlike Noveria, the brutalist utopia set on an ice rock, Illium is a gorgeous metropolis of giant skyscrapers, bright lights, and lax laws on psychoactive drugs. There is an almost cyberpunk feeling to Nos Astra, the Asari world’s capital city, with its crisp and clean architecture sitting against a landscape of synthetic lights and murder. These themes are all felt in the area's club, Eternity.
Eternity is not a place you are going to dance, it is a meeting place for under the counter deals, plotting nefarious schemes, talking seductively to a lover or enjoying the pleasures of the flesh (as one entertaining group of multi-species stags are). The music here then serves a unique purpose. It can’t be cocktail music as that would kill all of Eternity’s moody cyberpunk-ness, nor can it be rip-roaring dance music. It has to strike the balance just right, and it does that with an elegant musical solution: digital minimalism.
Once again, the game’s audio improvements are laid bare in this track. This track utilises drones to give the piece a consistent tonal floor. Unlike Dark Star, where the hard beat drives the rhythm but is equalised to sit in the background, the beat here is front and centre, barrelling through the drone like a freight train. It’s pure attack at its finest and paired with the almost meditative drone, it creates a mesmerizing atmosphere. The beat is broad and sparse, happy to miss key beats within a bar to afford space for the sci-fi bleeps and bloops one would expect from a futuristic space station. The intensity picks up in the middle section, with the kit loosening its edge in place of a more consistent beat pattern whilst the counterpoint melodies from various synth instruments dance in between mechanical stabs.
The piece, titled “To Hide, To Seek”, is a fascinating listen outside of the game, as within the game, it manages to drift effortlessly into the back of your consciousness. For a piece packed with so much, it perfectly cushions the mood that Eternity is trying to foster. A location where some of the most tenacious, cunning, and brilliant financial minds in the galaxy silently alter the balances of power.
Omega: Afterlife
Omega, the mercenary-controlled space station in the fringes of space, is a key base for Commander Shepard throughout the course of Mass Effect 2, and it’s home to one of the best clubs in all of video game history: Afterlife. This eezo-rich asteroid, suffocating from smog and drenched in red neon lights, is by far Mass Effect’s most grimey, crime-fuelled and truly authentic location. It’s in its dirtiness, its imperfections, and its disregard for lives that don’t serve its purpose that Mass Effect’s universe feels truly alive. In Afterlife’s multiple floors, each aspect of the space station's euphoric corruption can be felt plain as day.
After cutting past the line outside and walking along a long, straight corridor, you are immediately smacked in the face with an almighty wall of sound. The architecture should be somewhat familiar to players of the first game. It’s immediately reminiscent of Chora’s Den with a circular bar in the centre, dancers of all races, and off-shoot areas to the sides. The seediness, the shadiness, and the electricity in the air can be immediately felt. On this floor, you don’t know whether you’re going to fall in love, have the time of your life, or wind up dead. It’s not only the architecture that would be familiar to sharp-eared listeners, as once again BioWare have delved into EA’s vaults to pick a peach of a track, originally used in Need For Speed: High Stakes.
The wall of sound that we walk through as we enter Afterlife’s top floor is surprisingly chill once the initial ringing has worn off. The complexity of composition is the first obvious trait from this track. Everywhere you listen there is a counter melody, a rhythmic passage of synthetic tones or a modulated chord sequence all carried through by a rather laid back beat. This is very reminiscent of the 90s club scene, not the acid rave mania whose influence can be felt in Flux, but the kind of music found at the very best underground clubs.
This music isn’t here to bring about the apex of your night, merely to keep the party rumbling for as long as possible. It is a smart choice for this section of Afterlife. This is the part of the club where Aria T’Loak conducts her business, where mercs recruit hapless cannon fodder for missions, and the people of Omega enjoy themselves.
The lower floor of Afterlife is where the party really kicks up a notch. We move away from the more atmospheric pieces to a piece of music that demands all of your attention. This track is pure, uncut techno forced straight into your brain. The tempo is frenetic throughout, with the kit almost violently hammering the hard beat through the centre of a highly distorted bass line. Phat, juicy pads are layered underneath, much like many of the other club tracks here, but unlike those tracks where the pads acted more like drones to give the overall piece a tonal centre, these pads are distorted, fuzzy and really, really loud. It doesn’t stop there as the synth melody then kicks in, shouting over the top of everything else that is happening. This synth is once again heavily distorted, loud, and full of attack. There are some moments of calm, with the kit dropping to mark the beat and the pads giving way for an ominous choral passage. Soon, however, everything kicks back in again, and we are once again faced with this powerful, unstoppable beat.
When you enter this portion of the club, you’re here for one thing only—to dance. There is no way a conversation would ever be audible down here, other than in one of the off-shoot rooms scattered within this section. You are down here to take questionably sourced psychedelics and dance till your feet bleed. This small section of Afterlife is the whole of Omega, and the whole of Mass Effect 2, distilled. It’s frenetic, edge of your seat, life or death music, and it’s electrifying.
MICHAEL LEOPOLD WEBER
Michael is a freelance journalist currently living in West Japan. Though he has a degree in music from The University Of London, he still often plays out of time (shouting "it's close enough for jazz" whilst it happens). When he isn't obsessing over II-V-I's, Michael can be found digesting a whole range of video games from farming sims to FPSs. He also loves tea a little bit too much.
