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•	1997 Album

Two primary themes exist in Volcano, one to represent the lava and one for the humans battling to stop and/or channel it. The latter is heard at the outset of the film, but not necessarily in an incarnation you would recognize. Silvestri references a delicate 4-note tingling motif from synthesizers, a sibling to the descending time travel motif in the Back to the Future films, to introduce the city landscape and its unsuspecting population, using hopelessly optimistic string alternations in the major key to suggest what will ultimately morph into the main heroic identity later in the film. He throws in a few dissonant chords in conjunction with this pleasant motif to make sure the audience knows that something will be awry. The transformation this theme makes throughout the picture, from the false security at the outset to the full fantasy mode later on, is remarkable, but it's so totally complete that most viewers of the film won't notice that evolution. (The sound effects are mixed so loudly in the movie, too, that it's tough to notice much about the music at all in context, actually.) As signs of an impending eruption appear in "Miracle Mile," the lava's brutal 6-note theme is suggested and the dissonance grows more prevalent. A short burst of sustained action at the end of the cue offers a secondary phrase associated with the lava. In "Tarnation," the lava's full representation in the score is felt, including the deliberate, low brass theme that sounds like leftovers from Predator. Also of intriguing use is trilling horns, a technique not normally employed by Silvestri; his application of the wavering brass here is far lower in the instruments' ranges than Elliot Goldenthal's concurrent use in scores of the time and is therefore perhaps more palatable for the listener. The percussion section is put to the test in this cue as well, adding both broad thumps and militaristic snare rips at regular intervals. A sense of cohesion, however, doesn't arrive until the breakout cue, "Teamwork," in which the synthetic choir is added to higher ranges of brass and the full bed of percussion to introduce the newly transformed humans' theme at the end of the cue.

Extensions of the better organized action sound in Volcano continue in "Build a Wall"and "March of the Lava," arguably the best cues of the score. The lava and humans' themes do battle in alternating bombastic statements as a nearly constant rhythm propels them both forward. The concert suite from Volcano, of sorts, is "March of the Lava," the only truly engaging take-away on album for sustained appreciation. Aside from a victorious crescendo with the synthetic choir in "Roark's Missing," the score loses its steam and resolves with a light woodwind finale in "Cleansing Rain" that takes a page or two from Jerry Goldsmith's sensitivity. Interestingly, the theme that Silvestri introduces in "Cleansing Rain" does not seem to unwind the humans' motif in any way, oddly choosing instead to provide an all-new theme at that juncture. Never does the Volcano score really involve the listener on album; even at its height, it's a score that can pass by with little notice despite the significant noise that it produces. Countless suspense refrains break up the rhythmic flow of most action cues, too. A very short running time on the original 1997 Varèse Sarabande album long made the score a difficult prospect to recommend, while an expanded 79-minute presentation from Varèse as part of its limited CD Club in 2016 better fleshes out Silvestri's intentions. The longer presentation exposes more solid action passages that will recall Judge Dredd, and hearing the fuller cues from the climax, highlighted by "Explosions," better reveals the heightened melodrama built into that final third of the story. Running the entire gambit from horror to suspense, action to resolution, is the rather short "Tunnel Fever," emblematic of the score's constant shifting of gears. Much of the newly released material on the 2016 product is redundant, including a more than doubling of the light variation of the humans' theme at the outset. It's a respectable, decent listening experience that offers ten to fifteen minutes of enjoyable material for any Silvestri collector, but it receives only a tepid recommendation because the composer accomplishes not much more than the minimum he basically needed to for the assignment, with little memorable gravy left over.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Alan Silvestri reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.46 (in 41 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.34 (in 39,968 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.