Buy it... if you are any fan of the concept whatsoever and are lucky enough to stumble across a reasonably priced copy of the rare, discontinued album.

Avoid it... if the stylish exploration of almost every musical genre known to man is too disjointed in its 75-minute presentation on album to function as a coherent listening experience.

Frank

The Mole: (David Michael Frank) One of the longer-running reality show concepts of the 2000's has been "The Mole," produced originally for four seasons early in the decade before being resurrected in 2008 for another round. It's essentially a game show in which contestants have to solve mysteries in order to win cash, though the producers insert a mole into the cast each year to try to spoil those endeavors. The third and fourth seasons turned into cheap celebrity versions of the concept, though upon the original debut of "The Mole" on ABC in 2001 (with CNN darling Anderson Cooper as the host), there was actually a strong reception for it. Composing the music for all of the seasons of the show (through 2008) is David Michael Frank, whose career in this decade has literally been dominated by it. Upon his initial burst of activity, he entered a year in 2001 that was an odyssey of greatness for television music, with the compositional work for the small screen putting the majority of big screen scores to shame. In the case of "The Mole," the show's producers who bought the rights to edit and rebroadcast the European show in America had a tough task when it came to the finished product's pre-existing score. The original Belgian creators of "The Mole" didn't feel constrained by the usual royalty payments on American film music, so they had inserted pieces from major film scores into nearly every episode of the show. Music by Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, Bernard Herrmann, James Horner, Trevor Rabin, and John Barry was commonly heard in the show, and since such use would be flagrantly illegal in the United States (unless the producers wanted to pay astronomical royalties to the composers and the unions), the Americans had to dump the borrowed scores. Conjuring a fresh new full season of large-scale scores for a reality television show is no easy job, but Frank accepted the challenge.

The producers wanted scores with more meat than typical reality shows of the era, requesting dramatic and distinct episodic music with lush themes and large orchestrations. Frank not only succeeded within the time frame of the assignment, but his music for the show was a primary reason for its fantastic American success. Because there are such a vast variety of settings for the premise (often romantic in locale), Frank's job of setting a consistent sound of mystery and intrigue was a difficult task. There is some evidence that Frank or the producers may have been guided by what essentially had become temp-tracked material already in the edit, but the composer does very well at avoiding the major pitfalls of imitating that material. He began with a melding of recognizable styles from James Bond music and Mission: Impossible and wrote a snazzy title theme that was so popular that it alone warranted a release of the score on album. Because the show was theatrically more intelligent than the run of the mill "Survivor" kind of arrangement, Frank successfully utilized 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. To accompany the physical and mental challenges of the contestants, Frank's music is often on edge, gritty with a streak of sneakiness. The scope is largely orchestral, though Frank also employs a perfect balance of acoustic and synthetic elements to propel some of the modern, urban settings and the American angle on the concept. On occasion, Frank produces a stunningly expansive and melodic burst of orchestral sound, with a momentous choral cue ("Floating") as the highlight. He also lets loose with several waltzes, children's genre tinkering, all out electric guitar busting, and tango-inspired dance cues.

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The remarkable aspect of all of these collections of styles and constructs is that Frank manages to compose and conduct each one of them with equally impressive attention to detail, making nearly every part of this score an engaging listening experience. Frank does, in very clever ways, interpolate the film music originally used by the Belgians. There are suggestions of Elfman's children's scores, Horner's The Mask of Zorro, Rabin's Armageddon, Zimmer's The Rock, Carpenter's Halloween, and Barry's The Specialist, among others, but really only veteran film music collectors will notice these similarities. There is even some clunky Thomas Newman keyboarding seemingly influencing a few tracks, but each referenced element stands well enough on its own rearranged merits to serve. The most crucial aspect of the score in terms of its listenability on album is the fact that Frank rotates between ethnic and instrumental genres from track to track without doing it so rapidly as to cause the album to be a totally disjointed listening experience. Almost every motif and theme is fleshed out for an enjoyable three-minute track on the album, likely to allow for easier placement by the editors of the show. There are a few cues in which the silliness of their tone detracts from the whole, 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 have functioned as a superb promotional tool for Frank, who had already written fantasy music for everything from the small screen to the very big IMAX screens. Undoubtedly, this series of music should be of a quality to convince anyone of his talents. Unfortunately, the album was completely discontinued by Varèse Sarabande and is frightfully difficult to find on the secondary market. If you find a used copy for a reasonable price, don't hesitate to indulge in this stylish extravaganza. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download