CD Review: LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/06/2013
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN soundtrack | ©2013 Kritzerland Records

Kritzerland has become the most passionate soundtrack label when it comes to releasing soundtracks from Hollywood’s golden age – the kind of symphonically lush studio system scoring arguably best personified by Alfred Newman. While their magnificent re-mastering of Newman’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY will play to more sentimental tastes, fans who appreciate Newman’s less-utilized, if just as formidable talent for film noir will get their Technicolor kicks out of 1947s LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, in which Gene Tierney, the object of a detective’s obsession in LAURA (whose iconic David Raksin score was just an instant Kritzerland sell-out) gets to […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE SALAMANDER soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/05/2013
THE SALAMANDER soundtrack | ©2013 Prometheus Records

An entertaining, obscure 1981 political thriller that stands as one of the nuttier pictures that Jerry Goldsmith scored is now just as remarkable for becoming one of the best, and boisterously re-performed soundtracks that the legendary composer has gotten. That’s thanks to the always-excellent triple-threat of album producer James Fitzpatrick, conductor Nic Raine and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, who follow up their recent take on Goldsmith’s HOUR OF THE GUN with an album that will completely blow fans away. This musical masterwork accompanied Franco Nero as a hapless Italian police whose investigation into a series of […]Read On »


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CD Review: SPARTACUS WAR OF THE DAMNED soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
SPARTACUS WAR OF THE DAMNED soundtrack | ©2013 Varese Sarabande Records

After scoring Starz’s SPARTACUS series and its spin-offs, Joseph LoDuca reaches the saga’s climax with a masterful, musical blow for freedom that does the saga, and the spirit of its late star Andy Whitfield worthy with WAR OF THE DAMNED. While the composer’s had plenty of experience in the sword-and-sandle arena from his days spent with Hercules and Xena (not to mention a Dark Ages Ash), the amped up violence and sex of this Starz spin has required even more musical muscle, and daring from the composer. Lo Duca’s final battle is impressively epic, pouring on gigantic orchestral themes that […]Read On »


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CD Review: FIRE AND ICE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/04/2013
FIRE AND ICE soundtrack | ©2013 Buysoundtrax Records

Buysoundtrax has been in the habit of refurbishing many beloved genre scores from the 80s, most recently among them Tangerine Dream’s NEAR DARK, Richard Stone’s SUNDOWN and David Whitaker’s THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER. But amidst the decade’s particularly beloved sword and sorcery genre, perhaps no score is as savagely majestic, or unsung as William Kraft’s rippingly symphonic work for 1983s FIRE AND ICE. Ralph Bakshi took his passion for live action-to-animation rotoscoping that he’d begun on WIZARDS to its most wonderfully sexist extremes for this collaboration with Frank Frazetta, a he-man artist who’d turned his visions of barely-clad barbarians […]Read On »


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CD Review: ONLY GOD FORGIVES soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/03/2013
ONLY GOD FORGIVES soundtrack | ©2013 Milan Records

Most times, a composer’s job is to support the emotions of an actor’s performance, not become the performance. But where any other musician might be condemned for overstepping the boundaries of good taste, Cliff Martinez deserves a medal for brilliantly providing just about the only humanity for Nicolas Winding Refn’s lavish exercise in artsy sadism with ONLY GOD FORGIVES. Far more in the realm of the filmmaker’s FEAR X  than his infinitely more accessible DRIVE, Refn’s bitch slap of unending, beyond-explicit revenge is actually more of a fight club for staring. Given endless stretches of unblinking silence in between its […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE LAST OF US soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/02/2013
THE LAST OF US soundtrack | ©2013 Sony Music

When it comes to video game scoring, it’s often the bigger, the better. And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially when the composer is mostly trying to make an impression amidst shattering spaceships, cannon-blasting world wars, dragon-slaying sword battles and zombie holocausts. Though THE LAST OF US deals with the latter, it’s on a far more human scale that’s ennobled a strikingly stripped-down score from Gustavo Santaolalla that just might be the least amount of “music” ever done for the genre. But then, having Naughty Dog hire the Oscar winning composer of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and BABEL to do to a […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE WARRIORS soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/01/2013
THE WARRIORS soundtrack | ©2013 La La Land Records

Walter Hill’s 1979 gang fantasia was far more an exercise in style than exploitation, even high-minded enough to base its noble punks’ journey back to their home turf on Xenophon’s Spartan adventure “Anabasis.” Not that THE WARRIORS‘ ancient source material mattered to legions of fans still enthralled by the movie’s eye-catching vision of such thematically costumed bad-asses like The Baseball Furies. If anything, Hill’s odyssey from Central Park to Coney Island played more like some futuristic urban action movie, its surreal atmosphere propelled by the rocking synth rhythms of Barry DeVorzon in a score that defined the era’s invasion of […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE GAMBLER and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE soundtracks

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 09/30/2013
THE GAMBLER soundtrack | ©2013 Quartet Records

Jerry Fielding was a composer who set a new high bar for tough guy expressionism in film music, taking an uncompromising, and often primally dissonant approach for such seething orchestral blood rites as THE WILD BUNCH, THE OUTFIT and LAWMAN. Now the new releases of THE GAMBLER and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE offer a rich contrast in Fielding intensity, subduing his voice for a modern classicist, and then pouring on the danger for the Master of Disaster. If Gustav Mahler had become a film composer, it’s arguable that his often brooding, string-heavy style might have sounded something like Jerry Fielding’s […]Read On »


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CD Review: DESPICABLE ME 2 and THE SMURFS 2 soundtracks

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 09/29/2013
DESPICABLE ME 2 soundtrack | ©2013 Universal Records

Perhaps there’s just a natural, festive spirit of his country’s carnival celebrations that’s in the musical genes of Brazilian composer Heitor Pereira. Rapidly making a name for himself in family-friendly scoring, Pereira’s work for the likes of CURIOUS GEORGE, BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA and THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD comes across as being just plain “nice” in the most fun, melodic description of that word as possible – especially when dealing with a cartoon supervillain on the mend, or munchkins with playfully bad attitudes for two sequel scores that actually improve on Pereira’s original, bouncy work. Having shown sympathy for Mr. […]Read On »


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CD Review: COMPANY OF HEROES 2 soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
COMPANY OF HEROES 2 soundtrack | ©2013 Sumthing Else Music Works

Imagine if RED DAWN‘s score was on the side of the Russkies, and you’ll get an idea of the powerful Mother Russia patriotism that fill’s Cris Velasco’s exceptional real time strategy game score campaign against the Nazi bastards on the Eastern front in COMPANY OF HEROES 2. You’d be hard pressed to think that Stalin himself didn’t commission this score from the prolific videogame composer whose excelled in the battles of GOD OF WAR 3, DARKSIDERS and WARHAMMER. Velasco’s march-or-die orders inspire a dynamite symphonic performance that salutes the valor of the snow-swept homeland, unleashing powerhouse broadsides of heroic, militaristic […]Read On »


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