Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you are a fan of vintage, Irwin Allen-style disaster epics and own several of Goldsmith's strong action scores of the 1970's and 1980's. Avoid it... if you prefer digitally crisp recording quality and are inclined to gravitate towards Goldsmith's arguably more interesting 1980's style of integrating synthesizers into an orchestra for topics such as this. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The Swarm: (Jerry Goldsmith) The highly publicized film The Swarm ushered in the end of director and producer Irwin Allen's fantastic voyage through the ranks of Hollywood's disaster film renaissance in the 1970's. Unlike the previous hits of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, audiences and critics gave a resounding sigh of impatience with the genre by the time The Swarm hit theatres in 1978, despite a similarly loaded cast of actors. The plots of these films were getting more bizarre and the special effects weren't holding up in the Star Wars and Close Encounters generation that represented the beginning of another age in Hollywood. The concept of a massive attack by killer African bees in the United States was simply one that couldn't be executed well on screen without relying too heavily on seeing blurry shots of people running around trying to avoid them, and time has not been as kind to this entry as it has been to Allen's others. The director's career would fizzle from that point on, banished to the realm of television, but the composer of the music for The Swarm was red hot at the time and was primed to get even better. Jerry Goldsmith was already a composer considered at the height of his profession in the late 1970's, fresh off of his Academy Award win for The Omen. He took over a genre that had been marked with memorable scores by John Williams, including The Towering Inferno, which is still considered by the majority of critics today to be the best disaster score of the 1970's. Goldsmith rose to the challenge of tackling The Swarm and produced what was one of the few bright spots for the entire production. The score is a large-scale thematic and creative endeavor for the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, with all the bells and whistles required for an Allen film (but curiously minus the trademark pop song that had always garnered Oscar consideration). A well-rounded work, Goldsmith's effort includes a major disaster theme, a love sub-theme, and a motif usually on the high strings and brass that imitates the buzzing noise required to foreshadow and announce the arrival of the killer bees invading Texas. The title theme, ironically, begins with nearly the identical three note progression that opens Williams' primary fanfare for The Poseidon Adventure (but then branches into its own). The love theme is sufficient in its high range string delicacy, almost reminiscent of the romance affairs of twenty years prior, but not as compelling, perhaps, as what Williams presented in the other scores. The key to Goldsmith's success with this score is his brilliant method of wavering the brass, woodwinds, and strings in a bee-like buzz. So precise is the sound that the waffling of those instruments creates that it might cause you to hear bees swarming in the room with you. Goldsmith also varies the intensity of this orchestral sound effect in order to elevate or slip into the subconscious the danger posed by the oncoming swarm. In some cases, this reduces the effect down to a single woodwind underneath a romantic string interlude. The only downside to the effect is the dry sound that the lack of resonance causes, which diminishes the sonic size of the swarm to an extent. That, however, is a recording quality issue; the overall sound quality is on par with other scores of the time. When hearing the complete recording, there will be fifteen to twenty minutes in the 72-minute experience that barely register in volume and are thus not of much interest (the filler material in the work isn't particularly strong). Easily the most interesting aspect of The Swarm is the fact that Goldsmith saves a singular theme for the "End Title," an exuberant, driving piece of chopping strings and pounding timpani that actually, in its horn movements, reminds of Rudy, Hoosiers and other later Goldsmith scores that rely on rolling momentum for their appeal. This is the most common representative from the score on re-recorded compilations. At the time of the film's debut, the score was released on a 40-minute LP record and was received coolly by the public. Just like the film, the music was soon forgotten, and this was partly the reason why the score never experienced a commercial release on CD. Two widely circulated bootlegged versions of the score existed for many years on the secondary market, but neither was attractive enough to warrant serious attention. With the other major Irwin Allen films' scores already released by Film Score Monthly, the 2002 release of The Swarm on a legitimate album by Prometheus (which was experienced in pressing several other Goldsmith scores of that era) completed the availability of these strong scores on CD. Like the two FSM ones mentioned above, this product was limited to a pressing of 3,000 copies and eventually joined its predecessors as a moderate collectible when it sold out from soundtrack specialty outlets. Technically, it is a step beyond The Poseidon Adventure, but thematically and dynamically, it is a step behind The Towering Inferno. On its own, The Swarm is a worthy entry by Goldsmith in the genre. **** Track Listings:
Total Time: 72:36
All artwork and sound clips from The Swarm are Copyright © 2003, Prometheus Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 2/4/03, updated 3/20/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2003-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
