> Any comments?
>Signs (James Newton Howard): This score is a very pleasant surprise of this >year for me.

For me too . But I was kinda excpecting something like that from JNH. He is a master

>It's not another horror score with an unstable, kick-ass creeping stuff all >the time. Such tracks as "First Crop Circles" and "The Hand of Fate II" >provide a light, almost uplifting feeling, though still they sound like >silence before a thunder.

They're reminding me very much the music from Waterworld's "Swimming" track. This hypnotic, elegant mood

>That's because Howard uses mostly C major tonality, "flowingly peaceful" piano >and rich but calm strings performing continuously altering harmonies, thus he >achieves a very colorful effect.

And also this violin motive used throughout the score is very haunting, yet signals the danger hidden somewhere

>Action cues are effectively terrific - loud, dissonant and horrifying, >wonderfully orchestrated and produced.

The Hand of Fate, Part I is awesome with some rousing bold brass, especially last two minutes ended with heroic, victorious finale - something that James Newton Howard can do very well . I love also "Brazilian Video" when he really giving us some frightening cues, especially this menacing sound used couple of seconds before when we may see what contains this video in film

>There's only one thing I can't really understand - why the album starts with >such a raving (but ultimately short) action cue "Main Titles" which >ends "nowhere" and a quite peaceful stuff appears for a pretty long time after >that, thus making the whole album slightly hardly perceivable. The album >really needs some more action stuff in the middle - somewhere before "Throwing >the Stone" because at that time there already have been too much quiet and >calm music.

The answer is very simple, because there were no such scenes in the middle part of the movie (till the dramatic finale) and thus this kind of dramatic music was unnecessery. JNH did a fabulous job with this calm and atmospheric music of the hidden danger and "calm before the thunder"

>And I'd like to agree to those people, who say "Signs" should have more >expressive theme.

Is this theme not expressive? . As far as I know it is a tribute to Bernard Herrmann's scoring style, because M.Night Shyamalan made the opening titles very similiar to opening titles of "Psycho" and JNH's rousing music fits there perfectly. This "Main Title" is for me combination of Herrmann and Williams into one. The theme is great. It's haunting, what man could be more wanted from a good and memorable theme

Tomek