Soundtracks

CD Review: MORRICONE: UNCOVERED

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 11/03/2012
MORRICONE: UNCOVERED soundtrack | ©2012 Perseverance Records

Ennio Morricone has always been one of film music’s most intensely lyrical composers. Indefatigably writing one great theme after the other through over five decades and a few hundred scores. Morricone’s soulful, longing melodies have always come across like songs just waiting to happen, a feeling often reinforced by the wordlessly haunting, female vocals of Edda Dell’Orso. But when it’s come to doing an actual songbook based on Il Maestro’s work, Italian chanteuse Romina Arena has done a yeoman job of making Morricone her own, with a number of beautiful tunes that don’t play so much as film music set […]Read On »


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CD Review: LAWLESS soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 11/01/2012
LAWLESS soundtrack | ©2012 Sony Classical

The team of director John Hillcoat and composer-screenwriter Nick Cave have resonated with a raw, innovative energy that’s made such pictures as THE PROPOSITION and THE ROAD anything but the same old outlaw story. The duo’s in-your-face creativity now pays off with triple-proof results for their violently entertaining moonshiner flick LAWLESS. Sure they could have gone for tunes that would have sounded just like the prohibition period. But it’s a contemporary energy that suffuses this song album. Getting off to a bang with the r & b cover of “Fire and Brimstone” by Mark Lanegan, LAWLESS‘ first impresses with a […]Read On »


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CD Review: TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/30/2012
TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE soundtrack | ©2012 Howlin Wolf

Albert Pyun arguably never had it better than when he made his visually splashy directorial debut thirty years ago with THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, a film that energetically personified the wackier excesses of that titular 80′s genre. One element that made SWORD‘s” low budget a virtue was a powerful score by David Whitaker (available on Buysoundtrax), whose rousing music impressed, even when the playing of it didn’t. Flash-forward now to the SORCERER‘s sorta follow-up TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE, which takes on said kingdom with even far fewer shekels. But at the least, let it not be said that […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/29/2012
THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE soundtrack | ©2012 Buysoundtrax

While Craig Safan impressed with his big-budget 80s orchestral scores for THE LAST STARFIGHTER and REMO WILLIAMS, the composer was first at home with a smaller sound that particularly befitted the drive-in speakers of red state America during the 1970s- two cases in point being the south-sploitation cult favorites THE GREAT SMOKEY ROADBLACK and THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE. First up is a 1976 Henry Fonda vehicle whose title road the coattails of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT knock-offs, while the film itself was a far more serious trucker flick about facing one’s final run by smashing into a bunch of […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE FOG: EXPANDED EDITION soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
THE FOG: EXPANDED EDITION soundtrack | ©2012 Silva Screen Records

It was 133 years ago that a ship full of lepers went down off of Spivey point near Antonio Bay, and a seemingly impossible 33 years last when John Houseman told the tale to open what’s arguably John Carpenter’s most atmospheric chiller. Only a few piano chords and a barely perceptible synths accompanied the old salt’s ghost story. But in that simplicity lay a world of fear, even if the re-performed FOG soundtrack that came out in 2000 was perhaps a bit too sonically souped up for its own good. Now at long last, Silva Screen has released the original […]Read On »


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CD Review: ARBITRAGE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/28/2012
ARBITRAGE soundtrack | ©2012 Milan Records

His characters are often under intense pressure, with no easy way out in sight. Not that most of Cliff Martinez’s scores sweat their predicaments out in the traditional sense, preferring to speak volumes for the agitated states of bank robbers (THE UNDERNEATH), drug dealers (TRAFFIC) and the fate-cursed (FIRST SNOW) through the tides and ebbs of pulsing, rock-inspired rhythms and suspenseful, dream like sustains. Now the former Chili Pepper has segued from from the monosyllabic getaway man of DRIVE to the far more talkative, and rich antihero of ARBITRAGE the kind of mogul who prefers to put others in the […]Read On »


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CD Review: SHANE soundtrack (2,000 edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
SHANE soundtrack | ©2012 La La Land Records

After releasing Jerry Goldsmith’s entertaining scores to STAGECOACH and RIO BRAVO, La La Land Records’ wagon train hits a bona fide western classic with “Shane.” Perhaps no film, or score better personified the lone gunfighter in white than this legendary collaboration between filmmaker George Stevens (GIANT) and composer Victor Young (THE QUIET MAN). The musician had plenty of experience on the range with scores like STREET OF LAREDO and RIO GRANDE. And while Stevens had served as he’d ridden it as a director since his time spent in 1935 with ANNIE OAKLEY. Stevens couldn’t have hoped for a more iconic […]Read On »


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CD Review: NORTH BY NORTHWEST soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/27/2012
NORTH BY NORTHWEST soundtrack | ©2012 Intrada Records

Not only would Bernard Herrmann’s rush hour “wild fandango” usher in one of the greatest opening title sequences in movie history, but it would also serve as the gunshot that signaled the far more frantically suspenseful scores, and pictures to come to feature movie stars outracing fireballs. Yet through the years, the innovative impact and black-humored fun of NORTH BY NORTHWEST remains undiminished, always kept alive through the numerous soundtrack releases and re-recordings that have paid tribute to the most entertaining chase in the Herrmann / Hitchcock innoncents-on-the-run cannon. Now Intrada releases what will likely be the last CD word […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE MASTER soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
THE MASTER soundtrack | ©2012 Nonesuch Records

For better and worse, Paul Thomas Anderson is making movies like no one else out there, beautifully done pictures about the ugliness of the human soul. And he’s discovered composers as confrontational as his subject matter, from the ceaselessly surging strings of Jon Brion’s MAGNOLIA to the bizarrely overt percussion of his PUNCH DRUNK LOVE. But nothing resembled the unique milkshake thunderclap of former Radiohead member Johnny Greenwood’s brilliantly experimental approach to THERE WILL BE BLOOD, his at times agonizingly dissonant music capturing the hateful psyche of an oil tycoon. Now Greenwood’s way of playing subtext while outwardly sounding like […]Read On »


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CD Review: BODY HEAT soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/14/2012
BODY HEAT soundtrack | ©2012 Film Score Monthly

Few composers personify all things sex like John Barry. Not just the carnal act, but the romance and burning desire. It’s scoring as skin on skin, pure pleasure made through the jazzily lush fusion of brass and strings. When listening to this composer’s classic Kama Sutra, there’s no chapter that captures this mix of eroticism, emotion and danger with the sensuality of 1981’s BODY HEAT. Lawrence Kasdan made a surprising move from penning the PG likes of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to writing and directing this then temperature-raising R update of classic 40s-style film […]Read On »


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