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•	2008 La-La Land Album

Not all of the pitfalls of hyperactive children's scores are avoided by Lennertz in Alvin and the Chipmunks, but it's a generally pleasing listening experience. The attractive aspects of the score are its attempts to bring sympathy to the film's primary human character, Dave. Lennertz focuses his thematic content on that character, yielding a soothingly tender theme for acoustic guitar, piano, and sometimes the full orchestral ensemble. The composer's ability to balance his orchestral sections with neatly wrapped counterpoint and melody assignment is one of his career distinctions, and "Main Title" is an outstanding example of this talent. The score's mannerisms (and especially the applications of unobtrusive brass counterpoint) place it close to David Newman's lengthy career sound for similar assignments (Newman would not surprisingly score the 2009 sequel in this franchise), while a generally hopelessly optimistic tone will remind of Mark McKenzie's softer character scores of a decade prior. Some of the plucked, staggered movements in the flowing portions pull a few techniques from the Thomas Newman playbook. The resulting balance sometimes features shades of Jerry Goldsmith's fluffier, later material and for true film score collectors may even recall Basil Poledouris' extremely limited forays into this kind of sound (perhaps just a coincidence even given Lennertz's association with the late composer). The press materials for Alvin and the Chipmunks always made note of Lennertz's creative employment of processed or altered percussion to represent the chipmunks' forest heritage. These include backwards renditions of metallic percussive hits and various struck wooden accents to mimic falling acorns and the likes. While seemingly a good initial idea, the finished score really doesn't flaunt these contributions with enough clarity in the mix to make them much of a factor. In fact, some listeners may not even notice them. The backwards triangle edits sound like a cliche given their all-too frequent employment in sampled (or at least partially electronic) scores of the 2000's. Such sounds would be more at home in parody music like Lennertz's Vampires Suck. The personality of Alvin and the Chipmunks remains overwhelmingly orchestral, however, and its brief, 35-minute running time on album is as easy as it is workmanlike and predictable. Aside from the obligatory song compilation soundtrack album, the score alone was released twice soon after its debut. It was first pressed as a composer promo at the time of the film's release and was then afforded a 1,000-copy run by La-La Land Records in 2008. The contents (and sound quality) of these two albums are roughly the same, with some merging and slight rearranging of shorter cues on the latter album. Either way, it's an effortless 35 minutes of fun that will meet but not necessarily exceed your expectations.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download