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July/August 2021
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8/31/21
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How to Train Your Dragon (John Powell)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you have always appreciated John Powell's dense and rowdy orchestral style for animated films and seek the opening
entry in his resoundingly exciting and thematically rich trio of award-winning scores for this concept.
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| Avoid it... |
if you become easily overwhelmed by bombastic fantasy music of immense size or cannot accept hearing Celtic specialty
instrumentation at the forefront of a score meant for Vikings.
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8/26/21
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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Michael Kamen)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
on the outstanding 2018 or 2020 albums if you seek a more comprehensive presentation of this flawed but occasionally
highly entertaining score, a work highlighted by a memorable title fanfare and fine orchestral interpolations of the
melody from the famous Bryan Adams song for the film.
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| Avoid it... |
if you expect the whole of Michael Kamen's music to soar with any sense of convincing swashbuckling spirit or, more
importantly, if you demand a decent performance and recording strategy for a score that deserved far better execution.
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8/21/21
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Wild Wild West (Elmer Bernstein/Peter Bernstein)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you expect to hear an outlandish Western parody score, for there's a fair dose of Stripes and Airplane! squeezed
into this wildly schizophrenic romp.
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| Avoid it... |
if you are hoping to hear Elmer Bernstein write one last, great Western theme, for his merging of The Magnificent Seven
and How the West Was Won here is stunted by the awkward presence of the film's parody elements.
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8/16/21
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Casper (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you seek one of James Horner's most charmingly heartbreaking lullabies for loss and loneliness, performed by solo
piano, choir, and full ensemble over the course of twenty gorgeous minutes in Casper.
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| Avoid it... |
if the presence of the lullaby cannot compensate for a remainder of the work that supplies merely average comedy action
and fluffy children's suspense writing common to both the careers of Horner and Danny Elfman.
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8/11/21
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Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Joel
McNeely)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you appreciate Joel McNeely's now-proven talents and are willing to explore his
occasionally impressive and consistently robust venture into the Star Wars universe.
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| Avoid it... |
if you approach this video game score expecting McNeely to make extensive use of John
Williams' established themes, their applications frustratingly infrequent.
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8/6/21
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The Rocketeer (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you grew tired of James Horner's later, more seriously weighty dramatic scores and prefer
the unrestrained enthusiasm of his early adventure works, among which The Rocketeer is one of
the best.
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| Avoid it... |
if the overly-consistent innocence of Horner's soaring themes only serves to remind you of a
composer rolling shamelessly in a bed of his own favorite musical constructs.
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8/1/21
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Interstellar (Hans Zimmer)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you appreciate scores that appeal to your gut rather than your head, because Hans Zimmer
attempts to compensate for an extremely simplistic set of musical constructs by conveying them
stylishly through his unique methodology.
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| Avoid it... |
on any album presentation other than the long overdue "Expanded Edition" of 2020 if you do not
own the score as of yet and wish to zone out to the best of its predictably ambient series of
repetitive crescendos.
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7/27/21
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seaQuest DSV (John Debney)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you desire a campy, low-budget preview of the ambitious action rhythms and thematic
progressions of John Debney's classic score to the 1995 epic, Cutthroat Island.
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| Avoid it... |
on the available albums if you are a devoted "seaQuest DSV" enthusiast seeking an
all-encompassing selection of the best music from throughout the series, the 2020 product
alluring in its scope but containing only Debney's work.
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7/22/21
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The River (John Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you have grown weary of John Williams' space operas and high adventure style of the 1980's
and seek a change of pace with one of the composer's most heartfelt and organic works of pure
Americana.
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| Avoid it... |
if you have absolutely no tolerance for the moderate use of contemporary rhythms and
percussion in parts of the score, as The River is somewhat dated in these regards.
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7/17/21
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Legends of the Fall (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you're looking for the weightiest, most tragically melodramatic score in James Horner's
career, a symphonic masterpiece of thematic beauty and elegance.
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| Avoid it... |
if you have no interest in hearing Horner adapt the broad, simplistic strokes of John Barry's
Dances With Wolves into his own templates.
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7/12/21
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The Swarm (Jerry Goldsmith)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you are an enthusiast of the campy Irwin Allen disaster epics and have an appreciation for
Jerry Goldsmith's more ambitious action scores of the 1970's and 1980's.
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| Avoid it... |
if the thought of Goldsmith using every section of an orchestra, sans synthesizer, to emulate
the swirling buzzing of bees as a technique of horror makes you squirm.
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7/7/21
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The Towering Inferno (John
Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
as part of the 2019 La-La Land Records set if you want to explore the best of John Williams'
endeavors for blockbuster
disaster flicks of the Silver Age.
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| Avoid it... |
if twenty to thirty minutes of classic Williams action and melodrama can't compensate for the
dated sound of the
contemporary 1970's elements rendering the score's character and romance portions.
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7/2/21
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The Poseidon Adventure (John Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
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| Buy it... |
if you're exploring the early triumphs of John Williams' transformation into a master of large-scale orchestral action
and desire an early taste of his grim, dissonant style of dread.
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| Avoid it... |
on any album other than the 2019 La-La Land Records collection with its sibling score, The Towering Inferno, for all
other releases offer unsatisfyingly poor sound quality.
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