September 18, 2007

  • Catching Up

    It's been a busy couple of weeks around here.  I started teaching a Music Appreciation course which takes up a bit more time on the front end.  Plus it's been a crazy September all around here.

    I just picked up a host of Varese Sarabande releases this past week and only now have begun listening to them!  So consider these pocket reviews for now.

    GHOST RIDER was one of those "you have to be kidding me" type movies.  If I was 25 years younger I am sure I would have headed off to check this out and loved it.  Who knows, it might even be one of those late-night rentals some day for me.  Perhaps feeling the void of Chris Young's Spiderman 3 score, I decided to pick up his score for this Nicholas Cage superhero endeavor.  The score turns out to be a a great action adventure score complete with big orchestral moments, some crazy Morricone like scoring (almost like an updated Spaghetti Western sound), and big choral chants.  The ample CD does not wear out its welcome at all.  Young has a couple of tracks that  provide an ease to the intense action music that feature some beautiful melodic writing.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  The one thing that did strike me about the release is the way it is sequenced.  A lot of recent soundtrack discs just seem to end oddly, or feature lots of short disjunct cues that have signs of fine compositional writing but which just can't sustain an album.  Ghost Rider has long tracks of shaped music, sometimes incorporating smaller cues, but which all seem to make musical sense. 

    It might have been an overbudget bloated failure, but John Debney's score for Evan Almighty is actually cast in those Copland-esque vistas with some nice solo piano writing.  The one annoying thing is a segment of vocalises taken more out of soul, or gospel music, that sneak into a couple of tracks.  But as is usual with Debney's music, there is a lot of tunefulness to engage the ear and some larger sequences that work well on their own as music.  The one distraction is how much of this sounds like cribbing from Copland's Our Town. 

    I've waited all summer to finally hear Marco Beltrami's action score for Live Free or Die Hard.  I have been a fan of the composer's for quite some time and it was good to see what he would do with a big action film.  There are times in this score that one thinks of Goldsmith, but the melodic contours are all Beltrami and they get a lot more time to work their way out than in some of his more recent works.  But for the most part this is a big orchestral action score with awesome cross rhythms that make for a powerful listen.

    Still on the play pile is Ottman's score The Invasion.  So more on that later.

    Finally, a non-Varese release...Hans Zimmer's score for The Simpson's Movie.  I cannot believe that I am enjoying this disc so much.  I am not a big Zimmer fan by any means, but lately he has really been turning out some interesting music.  This score works so well in the film taking elements that sound like Elfman and giving them an even bigger over-the-top treatment.  There are some gentle thematic moments for balance and some pop-music type underscore tracks to follow the antics on screen--they work perfectly in the film.  The only real irritation is that the track titles are not necessarily for the scenes they accompany in the film.  The seriously choral arrangement of "Spider Pig" is wonderfully hilarious in its own way.  How they sang that with out laughing is beyond me.  One of the two fine comedy scores so far this year (the other being Shapiro's for Blades of Glory).

    We'll see what the rest of the week holds. 

    By the way, Intrada has been releasing some David Newman music of late, they just announced a release of Throw Mamma from the Train.  It's a limited release of 1500 copies.  It will be interesting to see how fast these move.  This is the one Newman that just can't seem to get the big break of his other relatives.