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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... the 2004 limited album if you currently enjoy the inferior bootleg, or if you enjoy Basil Poledouris' sensitive, harmonic style of writing for character themes. Avoid it... if you are expecting a militaristic or bombastic score with ethnic diversity or the very thick, textured themes you hear in more robust Poledouris efforts. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Despite Poledouris' reputation for writing some of the most masculine war music between 1982 an 1990, Amerika should not be confused with that body of work. There are two or three more militaristic cues in the series, often driven by the accompaniment of tapping snares, tingling synth samples, and electric bass, but do not expect the score to have any relation to the robust, bombastic Russian material that would eventually become Poledouris' calling card in The Hunt for Red October. Hints of Poledouris' rhythmic synthetics in the later score would be heard in "Humiliation of Alethea," but not much elsewhere. In fact, Poledouris chose not to provide much of a Soviet influence on the music whatsoever, restraining his slight Russian note progressions for cues such as "U.N.S.S.U." and "The Dance Begins," the latter of which maxing out with a single barrage of timpani after an eloquent, yet ominous string motif. Instead, Poledouris chooses the purely Americana approach for his music, bordering on times between his own heavily dramatic brass-accompanied woodwind themes and the occasional John Barry-like expanse of strings in simplistic performances of theme. The movement of the score is quite slow, with a level of weighty drama that would foreshadow Les Miserables, but without the immense power of bass or resolution of focus. On album, the score meanders through its first third before its gripping material begins to develop (perhaps due to the slow start of the series). With the overall movement of Amerika restrained in pace, cues such as "Ceremony Montage," with one of Poledouris' more inspired string/woodwind rhythms building in momentum to a fully orchestral statement, are the highlights. The sensitivity of the majority of character themes, while rotated nicely through the different sections of the orchestra, doesn't offer a really true or diverse taste of American character... which is an odd miss of the target for Poledouris. Rather than instilling his score with the weight and power of the American spirit as a whole, Poledouris hopes that the smaller, sectional performances of themes create a whole through their common threads of decency and patriotism. Once you've heard Poledouris tackle the sounds of war, rebellion, and peace with greater orchestral depth in subsequent compositions, Amerika's score, despite the obvious strengths inherent in its length, doesn't resonate as well nearly 20 years later. Apart from the film, the music for Amerika has never been commercially released, although it has always been sought after by Poledouris collectors in search of his larger orchestral works. A five-minute suite of music from the series was included on Poledouris' promotional compilations of the 1990's, and has been redistributed on more recent bootlegged copies of that promo. A 44-minute bootleg with good sound quality (but no track names) was leaked sometime in the late 1990's and has been in circulation on the secondary market between die-hard score collectors. In 2003 and 2004, Prometheus Records released several Poledouris scores of the 1980's that had only been released in previous limited editions or never at all. Amerika was one of these scores, offered in August of 2004 as the first of Prometheus' Club series albums in a long time. Despite advance word of Amerika's release an entire year before its release date, the 3,000-copy Amerika album (the 19th of their series) pulled the Prometheus Club series out of a deep coma that had lasted more than a year after the release of John Barry's uncharacteristic The White Buffalo score. A generous and well-balanced product, the 76-minute Prometheus album releases the earlier bootlegs of all responsibility, and should serve as the definite album for Poledouris' score. It's a solid entry in his career, but the thickness and depth of Amerika is not as great as you might remember from the series. If you have limited funds, then Prometheus' recent albums for Poledouris' Flesh + Blood and Cherry 2000 may better meet your expectations. Still, for collectors of the composer, this fine treatment of Amerika should not be easily dismissed.
Score on Bootleg Albums: *** Score on 2004 Prometheus Album: ****
The 2004 Prometheus album contains extensive information about the score and series, and the packaging is hand numbered. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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