Buy it... if you seek a 180-degree turn from horror master Christopher Young, despite this score's rather anonymous extension of light drama techniques employed across the industry.

Avoid it... if you expect any part of this otherwise innocuous score, outside of one bonus track concluding the album, to really step forward and engage you.

Young

Love Happens: (Christopher Young) The 2009 romantic drama Love Happens would have been a completely anonymous entry in its genre, even despite a lawsuit from screenwriters claiming its story was stolen, if not for a case of product placement so overwhelmingly sickening that it took an already poor film and made it laughable. The title of this film may as well have been "Qwest Happens," its story shot in Seattle and taking advantage of every reference to the regional telecom company possible. There wasn't much else in first time director Brandon Camp's production worth mentioning. Jennifer Aniston's star power caused the safe date movie to please studio executives with moderate profits, but little about Love Happens appealed to critics or audiences. Its plot tries to take the issue of immense personal loss and give it a glossy coat of paint to push the romantic elements. Aniston's usual affable character falls for Aaron Eckhart's decent guy, the latter a self-help book author successfully pushing his product while ironically incapable of dealing with the death of his own wife. The script's alternation between cheesy genre cliches and stabs at addressing the serious undertones of Eckhart's demons diminished the effectiveness of both and turned Love Happens into a tedious bore for most. Taking a much deserved break from his passion for scoring dark dramas and horror films was composer Christopher Young, whose career has occasionally included light dramas but rarely one so stereotypically packaged as Love Happens. The year of 2009 was a time of outstanding achievement for Young, whose output included both the magnificent horror opus Drag Me to Hell and the impressive drama Creation, among other work ranging from decent to overachieving. By comparison to these other assignments, Love Happens yields a breath of fresh air from Young, though while it is good to hear the composer continue to prove his talents outside of his creepy comfort zone, there's only so much reinvention of the music for romantic drama and comedy genre that can be done for a film like this. As such, while certainly different from the composer's norm for the late 2000's and, more importantly, effective for its context, Love Happens isn't a particularly memorable score. It's the kind of music that is interchangeable with that of several other composers' approach to the same general topic, so don't expect to hear a plethora of trademarks from Young's career.

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The style of Young's music for Love Happens is best described as an extension of Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira's recent acoustic guitar and string-based urban dramas with a touch of Thomas Newman sensibilities thrown into the equation. The former is perhaps no surprise given that Young contributed music to the Zimmer and company rush-job Something's Gotta Give in 2003. The latter comparison manifests itself in the form of a marimba, which is the only real instrumental color in Love Happens to augment the string section, pianos, acoustic guitar, and contemporary percussion. Individual cues do branch out with electronic enhancements, but for the most part, Young has kept the situation as innocuous as possible. A charming melody of easy harmonics and anonymous character is established early and emphasized several times before coming to a natural climax in the concluding cue. Few moments of torment await you in the presentation of this score on album, faint shades of more recognizable Young dissonance from synthesizers punctuating a troubling passage in "Mind Noise." Otherwise, the score alternates between pleasant piano solos, nebulous string backing, and the kind of quietly plucked guitar performances you might hear in an intimate urban restaurant setting. Occasional pizzazz is welcome, though perhaps too predictable, from the light woodblock tapping effects to Hammond organ and electric bass contributions. The tone of these performances is repetitive and generic enough in structure to demand fade outs in a few cues. One such cue is the score's highlight; placed at the end of the "bonus tracks" section of the album, "Fast Toward the Eye (of Lorelei)" adds airy female vocal effects and accelerated string and electric bass movement to the score's thematic material to finally assert a more ambitious personality. The album seems to compensate for its arguably over-extended 67-minute length by presenting about twenty minutes of material in this addendum. While it is understandable to emphasize the flow and warmth of the narrative in the previous tracks, these bonus cues do contain the majority of the score's extroverted music and may have helped maintain listener interest had they been shuffled into the rest of the product. On the whole, however, this score meets all of your expectations without really having a chance to exceed them. Only the final track on the album merits inclusion on a compilation of the genre's most engaging music. The rest of the score is commonplace, though it is, at the very least, refreshing to hear from the pen of the horror master. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Christopher Young reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.3 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.99 (in 7,951 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.