Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you are an absolute James Horner completist, and wish to seek out the hopelessly elusive album for half an hour of rhythmic, flute-bouncing jungle funk. Avoid it... if Horner's early, electronically experimental works serve more as curiosities for you rather than necessities. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Vibes: (James Horner) There are only two groups of people in the world who would have any reason to even want to remember the 1988 movie Vibes: Cyndi Lauper fans and James Horner fans. The film was, for some reason, backed by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment production company, with a horrendous script from two of the co-writers of Howard's Splash who were attempting, probably, to take advantage of the resurfacing popular interest in parapsychology and the supernatural (spearheaded by the wildly successful Ghostbusters). The premise of the film involves two psychicly gifted characters, one a hair-stylist played by Lauper and the other a museum expert played by Jeff Goldlbum. They are conned into seeking adventure in Ecuador, thinking that they'd be helping someone find a lost child when indeed their psychic powers would be needed on a perilous mission to find a mystic pyramid and unlock its powers. Along the same idea as Romancing the Stone, the two city folk in a jungle environment manage to hook up by the end of the film, a predictable but truly frightful event. For Lauper, the film would be her big screen debut, and for director Ken Kwapis, Vibes followed his own debut with the Sesame Street film Follow That Bird in 1985. Needless to say, the recipe was perfect for disaster. The summer 1988 release floundered and has long since been forgotten, with Lauper's career stalling and Kwapis sent back to the dark corners of television directing. The only notable aspect of the film that remains is the score by then upstart composer James Horner. Already nominated for Academy Awards for his work on An American Tail and Aliens, the composer had completed work on the most lengthy and ambitious score of his career, Willow (an enduring orchestral classic), the same year. The era of electronically ambient Horner music was waning. For Horner collectors, 1988 marked the trailing years of the composer's heavy reliance on synthesizers as the sole instrumental spectrum on his lesser scores; many of his lower-budget efforts in the years to come would feature at least some moderately-sized orchestra. Even though it is based seemingly entirely in the electronic realm, Vibes does have more character than Horner's more drab synthetic efforts of the era, such as The Name of the Rose. While it was reported at the time that Horner employed a traditional string and brass section for some of the more supernaturally scary cues, it's difficult to hear their presence in the final work. What does stand out from the synthetics are the use of a few select woodwinds, including a pan flute and Japanese sakauhachi flute (largely introduced in Horner's music that year). A significant array of percussive sounds, some strikingly electronic and some rattling with a little more authenticity, brings a vivid soundscape to the score during its jungle sequences. These elements are all placed over a rhythmic and early loop-based structure, often utilizing lengthy, repetitious, non-thematic performances to carry a score heavy on ambience and short on character theme or romance. That said, Horner's Vibes does shine at its best when his thematic material for the score is carried by the flutes. Over the banjos, guitars, clapping sounds, whimsical high range woodwinds, wood blocks, bird calls, mid-range drums, and a vast collection of rapping and tapping instruments, these flutes perform hopelessly chipper themes. Unfortunately, their exotic fun is restricted to the first half of the film, during which the characters first arrive in the Andes ("Andes Arrival" and "The Journey Begins"), and the score becomes much darker, atonal, and harshly electronic in the other half. This sinister half culminates in "Silvia's Vision," with heavy, off-key electronic droning accompanied by simple minor key alternations by synthetic brass and string, along with the disturbing sounds of dismembered voices. Despite the score's high points, Horner seems to allow it to die miserably at the end, with no resolution of ideas in the "End Title" and a choice made not to score the film's romantic moments at all. He seems to have gotten hung up on the artistically rich atmosphere of the location, for in the final cue --as he does throughout the entire piece-- Horner wanders from motif to motif, rhythm to rhythm, leaving the only connecting thread in the form of the score's inherent unique instrumentation. Overall, Vibes remains decades later as one of James Horner's more bizarre works, exhibiting very few of the usual commonalities that typically connect his other scores. Along those same lines, Vibes is also a score that fans of the composer can use very effectively in combating arguments about the composer's relative lack of originality. Nothing in the world of modern film scores sounds remotely like Vibes (though Thomas Newman might be the type to try), and Horner collectors specifically will be startled by the stark differences between this and the concurrently scored Willow. On album, the awkward and disjointed score exists in short length, but stands as one of the most collectible CDs in the history of films scores. Standing as the fourth entry in the Varèse Sarabande label's first set of Club releases around 1990, the pressing of Vibes was limited to an astonishingly low 1,000 copies. That low pressing number was even surprising at the time, given that Horner had just stunned audiences with Glory and was sailing to the forefront of the industry. The album sold out, as expected, and has sold for as much as $400 on the secondary market even after the profileration of the score in bootleg form (which features only the identical musical content and, usually, the same copied packaging as well). The Lauper song from the film, "Hole in My Heart," understandably does not appear on the album. Despite the score's two thematically enticing cues, the entire score requires a mood of significant funk to enjoy from start to finish, and for most collectors it will reveal itself as a curiosity rather than a necessity. ** Track Listings:
Total Time: 35:40
All artwork and sound clips from Vibes are Copyright © 1990, Varèse Sarabande. 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 9/24/96, updated 3/9/05. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 1996-2005, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
