The Mole: (David Michael Frank) The year 2001 has been an odyssey of
greatness for television scores, with the compositional work for the small
screen putting the majority of big screen scores to shame. In the case of The
Mole, the producers who bought the rights to edit and broadcast the European
show in America had a tough task when it came to the show's pre-existing score.
The originial Belgian creators of The Mole weren't constrained by the
royalties on American film music, so they had inserted pieces from major film
scores into nearly every episode of the show. Music by Zimmer, Elfman, Herrmann,
Horner, Rabin, and Barry were commonly heard in the show, and since such use
would be flagrantly illegal in the United States (unless they wanted to pay
astronomical royalties to the composers and the unions), the American producers
had to dump the borrowed scores. Coming up with a full season of large-scale
scores for a reality TV show is no easy job, but composer David Michael Frank
accepted the challenge. The producers wanted scores with more meat than the
typical reality television shows, requesting dramatic episodic scores with lush
themes and large orchestrations. Frank not only succeeded within the time frame
of the job, but his music for the show helped catapult it to its fantastic
American success.
The soundtrack for the show was made very difficult from the beginning. Because
there are such a vast variety of settings for the show, often romantic in
locale, Frank's job of setting a consistent sound of mystery and intrigue was
made more difficult. He began with a melding of James Bond and Mission:
Impossible and wrote a snazzy title theme that is so popular that it alone
warranted a release of the score on album. Because the show is theatrically more
intelligent than the run of the mill Survivor kind of arrangement, Frank
successfully uses the full power of the City of Prague Orchestra to perform
several intensely exotic and action-packed themes. His title theme is
continuously referenced as well, especially in the end-of-episode scenes of
revelation. With one member of the team planted as a mole, sabotaging the
efforts of team's physical and mental challenges, Frank's music is often on
edge, gritty with an streak of sneakiness. The music is largely orchestral,
however Frank also employs a perfect balance of accoustical and synthetic
elements to propel some of the modern, urban settings and the American tilt on
the show. On occasion, Frank produces a stunningly large and melodic burst of
orchestral sound, with a momentous choral cue as the highlight in the
twenty-second track. He also lets loose with several waltzes, children's
tinkering, all out electric guitar busting, and tangoing dance cues. The
remarkable aspect of all of these collections of tempos and themes is that Frank
manages to compose and conduct each one of them with equally impressive
attention to detail, making nearly every part/setting of this score a joy.
Frank does, in very clever ways, interpolate the film music originally used by
the Belgians. There are sometimes obvious imitations of Elfman's children's
scores, Horner's Mask of Zorro, Rabin's Armageddon, Zimmer's
The Rock, Carpenter's Halloween, and Barry's The
Specialist. There was even some clunky Thomas Newman keyboarding seemingly
influencing a few tracks. But each one stands well enough on its own. The most
impressive and final observation about the score you'll make from the album is
the fact that Frank rotates between the ethnic and instrumental changes from
track to track without doing it so rapidly as to cause the album to be a jumpy
listening experience. Each motif and theme is fleshed out for an enjoyable three
minute track on the album. There are a few cues where the silliness of them
makes them more difficult to enjoy than the rest, but these few tracks aside,
Frank's work is highly commendable. With so many musical genres well written and
performed for The Mole, this lengthy album should function as a superb
promotional tool for Frank, who has already written fantasy music for everything
from the small screen to the very big screen (IMAX), and this series score
should be enough to convince anyone of his talents. He impressed the show's
producers and fans well enough that he has been invited back to score the second
seaon of the show: The Mole 2: The Next Betrayal. In the meantime, this
one and only (so far) album of music from the show is selling well and pleasing
film music and television fans alike. ****
