Music Reviews

The Tourists – Reality Effect

The Tourists seem to be doomed to forever occupy an odd footnote in history, relegated to the description “the band Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were in before they started the Eurythmics”. Technically, that’s not inaccurate, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. Led by Peet Coombes, the Tourists were a new wave five-piece that rocked harder than some of their peers, leaving real guitars and drums in the mix as quite a few other bands in that genre abandoned them for wall-to-wall synths and drum machines. In many other respects, though, the Tourists were an absolutely typical new wave group, doing more modern cover versions of older songs (such as Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Wanna Be With You”, which was a moderate hit from this album, probably due in no small part to an early music video that demonstrated that Lennox was both a sonically and visually arresting performer).

But let’s not forget that Dave Stewart was in the Tourists as well (it’s bad enough to keep having to remind everyone that he was half of the Eurythmics). His classic rock guitar riffs are unmistakable, and give the Tourists a sound that wasn’t typical in those early days of new wave.

The wild card that really defines the Tourists’ sound, however, is Coombes’ duets with Lennox throughout. Their harmonizing is a sound unique to the Tourists; even on songs where one or the other seems to be taking the lead (as Lennox does on the aforementioned cover of “I Only Want To Be With You”), the other is a prominent co-lead, and their similar vocal ranges make for a unique sound. Really, the Tourists end up barely fitting into the new wave category, perhaps more due to their look than their sound, because in most respects they were very much a classic rock band, applying some of the new aesthetics of the late ’70s and early ’80s to rock ‘n’ roll. The highlights include “Nothing To Do”, “So Good To Be Back Home”, and “In The Morning (When The Madness Has Faded)”, but even in less stand-out-ish tracks such as “In My Mind (There’s Sorrow)”, there’s a lot to love about the Tourists’ sound (and Coombes’ songwriting).

Are the Tourists just the Eurythmics with three extra people tagging along? Hardly. You can hear, in Lennox’s vocal stylings and Stewart’s precision guitar work, some of the seeds being planted, but if the Tourists had scored a bigger hit before breaking up, the ’80s music scene might have taken a very different shape with regard to one of its major success stories.

1. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way (3:38)
2. I Only Want To Be With You (2:21)
3. In The Morning (When The Madness Has Faded) (3:57)
4. All Life’s Tragedies (3:43)
5. Everywhere You Look (3:11)
6. So Good To Be Back Home Again (2:33)
7. Nothing To Do (3:22)
8. Circular Fever (3:00)
9. In My Mind (There’s Sorrow) (4:37)
10. Something In The Air Tonight (4:04)
11. Summer’s Night (3:16)

Released by: Epic
Release date: October 19, 1979
Total running time: 37:42

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu – music by Henry Jackman

I all but had to invent a new movie category for Detective Pikachu, because this is a movie that falls under the “well, that worked so much better than I was expecting it to” category. Given that the Pokemon IP holders were going to throw whatever was necessary at this film to make sure it didn’t fail, I wasn’t expecting abject failure, but I wasn’t expecting a movie that I’d be so utterly engrossed in.

Henry Jackman’s score was a big help in that regard. While it does have some synth elements lending it something of an “old video game” feel (and Jackman has become the de facto “video game movie” composer in recent years, with the Wreck-It Ralph franchise and Pixels under his belt), the bulk of the score wisely plays to the movie’s emotional core. You know, that thing that I wasn’t expecting to be there, and wasn’t expecting to be engrossing.

The music also does a lot to play up the sheer wonder of the movie’s universe, a world where Pokemon do, in fact, exist and have always been there alongside human beings. Absent from this universe are cats, dogs, and other familiar animals; in their place are the fictional creatures from the Pokemon franchise down through the years – Skitties and Growliths instead of cats and dogs.

Some of my favorite music cues are those, like “Apom Attack”, “The Roundhouse,” and “Pikachu vs. Charizard”, accompanying scenes that really highlight what that kind of a world would be like (in both good and bad ways). Taking a world of trainers and gym battles and so on into something resembling our physical reality is not an easy task; the score sells the viewer on these things as a reality (maybe not the viewer’s reality, but a reality for the characters in the movie). Some of this music gets almost hyperkinetic, bordering on dubstep, and it’s fun to hear that colliding with a more traditional orchestral treatment.

Other tracks, like “Embrace” and “Digging Deeper”, to name just a couple, have more traditional supporting roles to play in underscoring the emotional thrust of their respective scenes, helping lend weight and menace to the movie’s central mystery (what happened to Pikachu’s former partner?), which, if the whole movie hadn’t hung together so well, might have been seen as a really silly solution to that portion of the plot. Overall, Detective Pikachu is as engrossing a listening experience as it is a viewing experience, and one can certainly hope that Jackman is on board for whatever next installment might be waiting in the wings to happen.

1. Mewtwo Awakes (1:19)
2. Catching A Cubone (2:05)
3. Bad News (1:17)
4. Howard Clifford (0:56)
5. Ryme City (2:11)
6. A Key To The Past (2:06)
7. Aipom Attack (1:58)
8. On The Case (1:26)
9. Childhood Memories (1:42)
10. Buddies (1:08)
11. Interrogation Of Mr. Mime (1:53)
12. The Roundhouse (1:50)
13. Pikachu vs. Charizard (3:06)
14. Embrace (3:07)
15. Digging Deeper (3:55)
16. Unauthorized Access (3:38)
17. Greninja & Torterra (2:59)
18. The Forest Of Healing (3:53)
19. Shock To The System (1:19)
20. Save The City (1:07)
21. True Colors (2:11)
22. Merge To One (2:08)
23. Game On (1:05)
24. Ditto Battle (2:26)
25. Howard Unplugged (2:35)
26. Epiphany (2:22)
27. Together (2:20)

Released by: Sony Classical
Release date: May 3, 2019
Total running time: 58:02

Röyksopp – The Inevitable End

The Inevitable End isn’t the inevitable end of Röyksopp as a recording entity; the grimly titled album was their farewell to the album as the format in which they’d be releasing their work. That’s a very sad farewell indeed, because some of Röyksopp’s back catalog, including Melody A.M. and Junior, convinced me that maybe the album still had something to offer, and that the entire world wasn’t giving up to the whims of streaming and issuing singles only. And ironically, The Inevitable End falls into that category as well – an album so thematically cohesive that listening to it in one sitting is more rewarding than just hearing any one song from it in isolation.

The theme that recurs most often on The Inevitable End doesn’t become evident until you’re a couple of songs past the inevitable beginning. Beginning with “Sordid Affair”, whose subject matter is quite literally what it says on the box, the album seems to be chronicling different stages and perspectives of an extramarital relationship of some kind. (I always question this as subject matter for a song, especially since the songwriter’s going to be subjected to a lot of scrutiny afterward, i.e. “did you write this as a result of a personal experience?” “Sordid Affair” and “Compulsion” describe the rush of the illicit relationship while it’s happening, and “You Know I Have To Go” and “Save Me” explore the end of it from two perspectives. “I Had This Thing” mourns the relationship, and in a way, “Rong” does too, being an almost classically-flavored piece with a single repeating lyric (“what the f___ is wrong with you?”).

Röyksopp has become famous for its all-star line-up of guest vocalists, and while Robyn is all over the first two tracks of The Inevitable End, the real standout MVP who emerges is Jamie Irrepressible, vocalist on “You Know I Have To Go”, “I Had This Thing”, “Compulsion”, and “Here She Comes Again”. He’s got an incredible range and a great sense for dynamics, as his usual hushed delivery on “I Had This Thing” suddenly explodes into something more pleading and anguished toward the end of the song. (Spoiler: Röyksopp has continued as an entity that issues singles, and they continued to work with Jamie after this album, notably on the excellent “Something In My Heart”, so obviously they know a good thing when they hear it.)

“Coup De Grace” deflates the album’s somewhat steamy topic, filling the obligatory instrumental-only slot that’s become a tradition since “Röyksopp’s Night Out” on the first album. The album closer (and the farewell of Röyksopp as a duo that turns out albums) is “Thank You”, which works as effectively as part of the album’s storyline as it does without any of those trappings.

I’ll really miss Röyksopp as an “album band” – their best work has reminded me of the heyday of the Alan Parsons Project, both production-wise and as proponents of concept-based theme albums. It’s sad to hear them giving up on the latter. The singles that have arrived since The Inevitable End have been fantastic – “Never Ever” and “Something In My Heart” would be highlights of an album if they were on an album. But, I get it, album sales aren’t what drives iTunes…especially if no one wants to continue making them.

1. Skulls (3:46)
2. Monument (TIE Version)(featuring Robyn) (4:46)
3. Sordid Affair (featuring Man Without Country) (6:19)
4. You Know I Have To Go (featuring Jamie Irrepressible) (7:31)
5. Save Me (featuring Susanne Sundfør) (4:38)
6. I Had This Thing (featuring Jamie Irrepressible) (5:46)
7. Rong (featuring Robyn) (2:32)
8. Here She Comes Again (featuring Jamie Irrepressible) (5:04)
9. Running To The Sea (featuring Susanne Sundfør) (4:52)
10. Compulsion (featuring Jamie Irrepressible) (6:57)
11. Coup De Grace (3:14)
12. Thank You (6:15)

Released by: EMBAS
Release date: November 21, 2014
Total running time: 61:40

Doctor Who: The Sun Makers – music by Dudley Simpson

This is a Doctor Who soundtrack release I never expected to be holding in my hands or hearing. Composer Dudley Simpson was as close as classic Doctor Who had to the kind of singular composer-in-residence that seems to be the norm for the modern series; other composers were occasionally employed at the whim of individual directors, but from 1964 through 1979, Dudley Simpson was Doctor Who’s default musical “setting”, composing for and conducting a small ensemble occasionally augmented with synthesizers by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. But despite his music gracing most of the series across that fifteen-year span, most of the original session tapes of Simpson’s Doctor Who music have been lost. The only remaining specimens, in fact, can be traced to the Radiophonic Workshop – if they added their wobbly analog synths to Simpson’s music, a copy of that was retained in their archives. And that’s where the score from The Sun Makers, a 1977 Tom Baker four-part story, comes in – it’s one of only two Simpson scores that still exist in their entirety, both of them thanks to the Workshop’s involvement. (The other, still unreleased, is 1971’s The Mind Of Evil, a Jon Pertwee adventure that was the second-ever appearance of Roger Delgado as the Master, and as such heavily feature’s Simpson’s sinister theme for that character.) To have a complete Simpson score is a gift; for that score to hail from a fondly-remembered story featuring the fourth Doctor, Leela, and K-9 toppling a regime embracing capitalism-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness is just gravy.

Tracks like “Mahogany”, which starts out with a somewhat plaintive bassoon before bringing the rest of the ensemble in to create a rich, warm harmony, exemplify what Simpson was best at. The same goes for “One Thousand Metres” and its interesting keyboard arpeggios floating over the acoustic instruments. Let’s be clear – a lot of people probably wouldn’t have chosen The Sun Makers to be one of the only complete surviving examples of Simpson’s work; they probably would’ve chosen City Of Death or Genesis Of The Daleks or a more “obvious” entry in Simpson’s canon, but The Sun Makers didn’t exactly burn itself into everyone’s memory the way those stories did. That’s actually what makes it a canny choice for a release: it’s a bit of a surprise because you probably don’t remember the score that well.

“Six Suns”, “The Others”, and “K-9, Bite!” remind me a lot of Blake’s 7, of which nearly every episode was also scored by Simpson. (The Sun Makers has a Blake’s 7 connection too – it’s where director Pennant Roberts met actor Michael Keating, giving Keating a hearty recommendation for the role of Vila.) “Subway 13” is a bit more menacing, and, at less than a minute in length, it’s a reminder some Doctor Who stories lent themselves to lengthier musical travelogues, and The Sun Makers wasn’t one of those stories. It’s comprised of shorter, punchier vignettes without the opportunity for the kind of extended musical interludes that, say, City Of Death afforded the composer. In that regard, The Sun Makers is absolutely a straight-down-the-line typical bit of Doctor Who scoring from the ’70s.

A word about the sound quality: The Sun Makers was remastered extensively by Mark Ayres, himself a Doctor Who composer of a later era (but also a die-hard Dudley Simpson fan, as he himself admitted to when he was interviewed for this site quite a few years back). Ayres is also behind the audio remastering of Doctor Who’s DVD and Blu-Ray releases, so it goes without saying that this entire disc is as crisply, lovingly listenable as if the tape had just been recorded last week.

As a whole listening experience, The Sun Makers is a time capsule that may find an audience only among completist collectors, and the older generation of Doctor Who fans who were there for this story the first time around (he said, addressing the mirror). It may not appeal to everyone. But it’s a lovely little slice of the past where, rather than striving to be epic or futuristic, the sound of Doctor Who was quietly, politely going for baroque.

1. Doctor Who Opening Title Theme (0:46)
2. Death And Taxes (0:28)
3. Mahogany (0:51)
4. One Thousand Metres (2:12)
5. Six Suns (1:53)
6. The Others (1:29)
7. Subway 13 (0:36)
8. Subway 13 (continued) (1:07)
9. A Heart As Big As Your Mouth (0:30)
10. A Little Hop (0:23)
11. Jelly Babies (0:31)
12. Something In The Air (0:24)
13. K-9, Bite! (0:54)
14. Humbug (1:25)
15. The P45 Return Route (1:08)
16. The P45 Return Route (reprise) (0:55)
17. Morton’s Fork (1:09)
18. I’ve Heard That One, Too (1:05)
19. The Rebellion Begins (0:46)
20. Static Loop (3:20)
21. The Steaming (1:18)
22. The Steaming (continued) (1:10)
23. Gentlemen, Good Luck (0:40)
24. Nobody Works Today (2:11)
25. The Gatherer Excised (0:43)
26. Doctor Who Closing Title Theme (0:55)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: May 8, 2020
Total running time: 28:49

Paul Melançon and the New Insecurities – The Get Gos Action Hour!

There’s certainly no shortage of practitioners of power pop, but I’m always happy when one of my favorites resurfaces, as Paul Melançon has done after a lengthy spell punctuated by side projects, live shows, and an EP or two. Melançon’s 2002 opus Camera Obscura is still one of my favorite specimens of the power pop genre, and while he’s an excellent guitarist, his voice may be his most potent instrument, capable of straight up belting out a song in the best rock traditions as well as handling all the nuances of his homemade singer-songwriter fare. I couldn’t even point you to anyone I can honestly claim he sounds like – maybe a little hint of Robin Zander at the height of Cheap Trick’s popularity? – because he just sounds like himself, and I’m a big fan of that sound.

Armed with a three-piece backing band that perfectly complements his sound, and a clutch of new songs exploring some experiences he’s had confronting chronic anxiety in recent years, Melançon delivers a surprisingly sunny musical meditation on mental health that you’d expect to have been the result of 2020’s non-stop roller-coaster of mental-health-challenging events, but instead it arrived, pleasantly enough, right at the beginning of it, and it’s been one of my go-to albums for my self-quarantining playlist. Some of the songs are obvious with the subject matter – “Hyperventilate” conjures up images of a drowning man – while others make the listener work a little harder to get to the song’s center. Which is an absolute delight, since each song is coated in layers of ’70s-inspired pop-rock confection. There are hints of something new in Melançon’s musical vocabulary here too – I definitely picked up on a newfound love of a good freeform jam, which crops up such songs as the jaw-droppingly hummable “The New Decay”, among others. (And when Paul and the New Insecurities bust out a jam like this, they’re not kidding around either. It’s heady stuff.)

Highlights include the aforementioned “New Decay” and “Hyperventilate”, as well as “St. Cecilia”, a fantastic ballad with – yet again – that terrific ’70s vibe, and “Here And Now I Was” and “When Do We Get Smaller?”, the two songs most reminiscent of Camera Obscura. “Fitzcarraldo” is a mesmerizing mid-tempo rocker that challenges you to figure out which is the verse and which is the chorus, but when the whole song sounds great, does it matter? “Mareación” is an eleven-minute journey in the form of a self-contained, interconnected song cycle that also features that jamming element mentioned earlier. It may be the album’s most challenging listen, but it’s a mini-epic that earns the “power-pop-era” label on the front cover.

All of this is wrapped up in a package suggesting some lost, band-centric 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, an element that also carries over to the videos produced for some of the songs here. In short, this album has just about everything that power pop fans love – new music wrapped up in a dash of nostalgia, and it’s really good new music to boot. Highest recommendations.

1. Theme from The Get Gos Action Hour! (0:40)
2. Permanent Makeup (2:34)
3. Robot World (3:14)
4. This Shaky Lullaby (2:40)
5. Hyperventilate (3:56)
6. The New Decay (5:00)
7. St. Cecilia (4:36)
8. When Do We Get Smaller? (3:54)
9. Fitzcarraldo (3:45)
10. Mareación (11:09)
11. Here And Now I Was (4:29)
12. The Answer Is Yes (3:40)

Released by: Paul Melançon and the New Insecurities
Release date: April 10, 2020
Total running time: 49:37

The Mandalorian: Chapter 1 – music by Ludwig Goransson

Of all of the elements that have been pored over exhaustively where The Mandalorian is concerned, I’m not sure the music is getting its due. There was an entire episode of Disney Plus’ streaming documentary series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian devoted to it, making it clear that showrunner Jon Favreau thought that the music was a big deal.

The most obvious antecedent to The Mandalorian’s music would seem, on the surface, to be the two movies subtitled “A Star Wars Story”, which used elements of John Williams’ music as a flavoring, and his style as a template. Composers Michael Giacchino (Rogue One) and John Powell (Solo) struck out in their own Williams-inspired directions. but it still basically sounded like Star Wars stylistically…but that’s not what Ludwig Goransson (who made a fantastic impact with his score to Marvel’s Black Panther) is doing here.

The Mandalorian takes a very bold step beyond the anthology movies’ stylistic parameters. Not only is the show’s music (at least in the first season) free of even so much as a single reference to Williams’ body of work, but it stylistically breaks free of the 19th century romantic musical lexicon that has defined Star Wars until now. Sure, there’s an orchestra (and, given how much money Disney threw at every aspect of The Mandalorian, a decent-sized one), but there are electronic elements unlike anything that has graced filmed Star Wars before. The strongest resemblance I can think of to any prior entry in the franchise’s musical canon would be the computer game Star Wars: Force Commander, which chopped up and sampled Williams’ music before throwing it into a kind of techno-metal stew.

The Mandalorian is unapologetic about leaning hard on otherworldly eletronic elements if the scene calls for it, sometimes in combination with purely acoustic instruments, but never in a way that seems out of place; it enhances some of the colder aspects of the story, such as Mando’s ruthless nature, and often coincides with story situations that are down to pure survival, such as trying to get a blurrg to stop munching on you (as blurrgs are wont to do), or IG-11’s unsubtle approach to the encampment where his bounty is being hidden away, and the resulting high-octane response.

There’s a second flavor at work here, mostly acoustic, that seems to sit more comfortably in a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone-inspired western vein – just a reminder that The Mandalorian is really more of a modern western with sci-fi trappings than anything. These cues are really among the most fascinating, unafraid to use a momentary silence to build tension rather than slathering on the entire orchestra.

For the big, epic moments, however, Goransson doesn’t disappoint with a full orchestra at his disposal. These three flavors – let’s call them electronic, western, and orchestral for lack of a better set of labels – often occur withing the same cue. “Bounty Droid” starts electronic, but ends with a massive orchestral flourish as Mando commandeers the heavy artillery that, just moments ago, was aimed at him. “The Asset” – the scene which reveals the tiny being whose continued existence is the driver for so much of The Mandalorian’s storyline – starts out in a sparse western vein with electric guitar before culminating in an orchestral conclusion that’s just quite simply magic.

Nearly every aspect of the production The Mandalorian is amazing, and again, nothing less was expected considering that Disney was going to throw everything at the first live-action Star Wars series in an attempt to change course on the franchise after a series of movies that have stirred heated debate among fans (some of whom are, quite honestly, taking the whole thing too damned seriously). The music, either in the show or on its own, is well-judged, perfectly-pitched, epic stuff.

1. Hey Mando! (2:13)
2. Face To Face (5:13)
3. Back For Beskar (2:25)
4. HammerTime (2:17)
5. Blurg Attack (1:25)
6. You Are A Mandalorian (3:55)
7. Bounty Droid (3:02)
8. The Asset (1:35)
9. The Mandalorian (3:18)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: November 12, 2019
Total running time: 25:23

Sarcastalites – Spaces For Strangers

I discovered the Sarcastalites – not really a group as much as it is one woman with a studio, a lot of groove, and an immense amount of talent at her disposal – through a single track contributed to the Raymond Scott cover album The Portofino Variations (of which more another time), and the disco-flavored cover version of Scott’s gem of early electronic music stood out as my favorite thing on the album, so I wanted to find more. That search led to this EP-length BandCamp release, which, it turns out, is even better than Sarcastalites’ excellent Raymond Scott cover.

The whole idea behind Sarcastalites is a throwback to disco’s heyday. Admittedly, this may not be a thing that a lot of people are consciously pining for, but the seven tracks on Spaces For Strangers attempt to distill the best things about that genre of music and then to boil those ingredients down into something new. The best disco always had one foot in R&B and funk, and most of these songs show that songwriter & performer G.T. Thomas totally gets that. Stylistically, Spaces For Strangers is steeped in late ’70s disco, which was starting to play with the kind of electronic elements that would be taking over the following decade with the advent of new wave. But the backbone of each song is the real deal – bass, guitars, drums, all bringing that funk back where it belongs.

There isn’t a weak song on the EP, but there are some that are real standouts – “Advice”‘s sparse instrumentation lets the slinky breathless vocals command center stage, with lyrics complaining about the singer’s overbearing gal pal, who “gives terrible advice” before the bridge of the song becomes something modern and trippy. “Strange Nostalgia”‘s lyrics reminisce about the singer’s first mind-expanding experience of listening to a particular band’s records (Yes, in this case), with some great wah-chicka guitar work fading and phasing in and out. “Three Degrees” is a bit more Blondie than Chic, with lyrics obsessing over – of all things – DVD commentary tracks, and referencing The Manchurian Candidate. Thomas might be reviving disco, but she’s doing it on her own terms and with her own subject matter.

“Party People” may be the purest slice of the sound most people associate with disco here, with “Earth Is For Friends, Space Is For Strangers” following closely behind. It’s worth pointing out that each track has its own unique sound, a result of Thomas engaging the services of different sets of ears – all women, by the way – to mix each song.

If there’s a disappointment involved with Sarcastalites’ debut, I guess it’s the fact that it hasn’t caught fire and led to a follow-up yet. But that’s why I’m writing this right now to bring it to your attention so we can change that. It’s a tremendously enjoyable set of songs to which more people need to be exposed.

1. The Real Thing (3:21)
2. Sand (3:43)
3. Party People (3:03)
4. Advice (3:16)
5. Earth Is For Friends, Space Is For Strangers (4:16)
6. Strange Nostalgia (3:51)
7. Three Degrees (3:51)

Released by: Bullshit Night Records
Release date: December 8, 2017
Total running time: 25:08

Space Station 76 – music by Marc & Steffan Fantini

Ah, Space Station 76 – I hadn’t even thought about this movie in years when the soundtrack popped up out of nowhere in 2020, six years after the movie itself met with some minor film festival buzz before becoming a creature of the streaming media ecosystem. Filmed on a bunch of gorgeously retro-futuristic sets – evoking that ’70s sci-fi vision of what the future might be – Space Station 76 was a joy to look at, but there wasn’t much to actually watch. It was as much a retro sci-fi parody as it was a parody of the entire decade whose sci-fi it was spoofing, poking fun at the “I’m OK, you’re OK” vibe of the 1970s. It’s a pity it just wasn’t that funny, especially since it was billed as a comedy. The score, however, serves as a pleasant reminder that the movie’s music may have been even more successful than its look in evoking that decade.

While there are bits that sound like they’re reaching, in a tongue-in-cheek way, to meet the vibe of a serious sci-fi score of that era, much of the score takes on a laid-back, mellow, ’70s pop vibe, a sound carefully constructed to sit comfortably alongside several vintage slices of Todd Rundgren and Ambrosia that punctuate the proceedings. The blend of new score and older songs is reasonably successful, helping the movie to conjure a lot of its retro vibe. (The Rundgren and Ambrosia selections are not included here, and that’s okay; they’re readily available elsewhere.)

It’s perhaps not the best plaudit for a movie that its most memorable elements are its score and its production design (shame about the story and the characters, though), but the score’s release is a nice reminder that the movie was an audiovisual feast, even if it forgot to stick the landing with a satisfying story.

1. Introduction (0:55)
2. Title Sequence (Alien Ship) (1:55)
3. Roller Skating (1:43)
4. Irregularities (0:33)
5. Stressing Me (0:35)
6. Here Comes The Delivery Man (0:42)
7. 70’s Joy’nt (0:53)
8. World Of Fantasy (0:47)
9. Hello (0:38)
10. Sunshine, No (0:45)
11. Asteroidal Pocket (2:18)
12. Sex and Death (1:09)
13. Never Been To Earth (1:09)
14. Romantic Joy’nt (0:51)
15. Last Gerbil (1:25)
16. Mail’s Here (0:29)
17. Home Movies (1:08)
18. Mom In Pod (1:07)
19. Budding Romance (1:19)
20. Logan Is Coming (0:16)
21. Asteroid Hits (2:25)
22. Asteroid Misses (2:15)
23. Sunshine Floats (0:51)

Released by: Madison Gate Records
Release date: April 3, 2020
Total running time: 26:06

Alan Parsons – The Secret

It used to be, in the 1970s and ’80s, that you could almost keep time by the release of Alan Parsons Project albums, with a new one arriving every year or every other year. Albums started to arrive more sparsely in the late ’80s, with members of the core group exploring side projects (Keats, Andrew Powell scoring Ladyhawke) and, finally, the album that broke the Project apart, Freudiana (which was released not as a Project album, but as the studio concept album for a stage musical). The seemingly hectic pace was made somewhat easier because the Project didn’t play live, though Parsons assembled a touring band (which wasn’t always made up of the same players he had in the studio) to begin touring in the 1990s. The two-or-three-year gaps between albums made more sense then, and the live show was every bit as good as you’d expect it to be given how artfully Parsons crafted the studio sound that went out under his name. And then, after 2004’s A Valid Path…nothing. A single came out alongside Parsons’ Art And Science Of Sound Recording DVD, and then a couple more singles. It was somewhere in there that I read an interview in which Parsons declared the album, and especially the concept album in which he had specialized, dead in the age of iTunes downloads. I really didn’t expect to hear anything more from him after that. He had moved on to teaching the next generation of studio wizards and no longer seemed to be in the business of making and releasing his own music.

And that’s a big part of what made the announcement that The Secret was forthcoming such a shock, 15 years after A Valid Path saw him dabbling in electronica. Not just that, but The Secret was going to be precisely the kind of concept album that the singles-centric iTunes ecosystem had rendered obsolete. And what’s more, it’s an amazingly good concept album – though all of the “stage magic” imagery may be obfuscating what that theme really is.

Hewing to long-standing Alan Parsons Project tradition, the album has a lengthy instrumental opener, with Steve Hackett shredding “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with an orchestral backing. From there, things get more traditional – “Miracle” is a throwback to the Project of old, with “As Lights Fall” returning to the same mid-tempo musical ground that had proven so effective for songs like “Eye In The Sky”, but it’s in “As Lights Fall” that Parsons – actually doing lead vocals for once – peels back the curtain on what the album’s really about: the imminence of mortality, and the notion that each individual life is really the greatest magic trick of all.

This concept – dressing itself up in allusions to stage magic before revealing the real underlying theme – recurs in “Soirée Fantastique”, “Requiem”, “Years Of Glory”, and “The Limelight Fades Away”. Mortality and the miracle of life itself is the real concept of this concept album – even “Soirée Fantastique” includes the lyric “all the illusions fall away”. So do the allusions: for all of the lyrical nods to performing magic tricks, in the end it acknowledges that mortality is the ultimate disappearing act. With songs like “As Lights Fall” adding an autobiographical dimension, I almost want to call Parsons up and ask, “hey, buddy, is there something you’re not telling us? I’m kinda worried now.” (Parsons is 71 at the time I write this, though he certainly doesn’t sound 71, so yeah, I get it, life and death and legacy are a real concern.)

High points of the album include the return of Foreigner crooner Lou Gramm’s powerful voice on “Sometimes”, the almost Cabaret-esque, burlesque-act-worthy “Requiem”, and my personal favorite, “One Note Symphony”, a song about the Schumann Resonance whose lead vocal is sung in a perfect monotone, while the harmonies woven around it make the song. I could pick nits about the lyrics leaning into some of the more “woo” new-age connotations of the Schumann Resonance (especially at a time when scientific literacy among the public seems to be plummeting more with each passing day at the worst possible time), but it’s a fun listen regardless.

The Secret may be the best album has turned out since the Project’s heyday, and it really does sit alongside the best of the Project’s output in the quality of both the songwriting and the performance and production of the songs, and the degree to which the songs and the underlying theme of the album have been thought out. At numerous points during this album, I found myself thinking that the late Eric Woolfson (composer and theme architect of the Project’s original string of concept albums) would have wholeheartedly approved of The Secret. It’s worthy of sitting alongside Eye In The Sky and I Robot.

1. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (5:44)
2. Miracle (3:22)
3. As Lights Fall (3:58)
4. One Note Symphony (4:43)
5. Sometimes (5:08)
6. Soirée Fantastique (5:27)
7. Fly To Me (3:45)
8. Requiem (4:02)
9. Years Of Glory (4:05)
10. The Limelight Fades Away (3:36)
11. I Can’t Get There From Here (4:38)

Released by: Frontiers SRL
Release date: April 26, 2019
Total running time: 48:28

Crowded House – Woodface (Deluxe Edition)

Since the album’s original release in 1991, the long and twisted road that led to Woodface – Crowded House’s third studio album and arguably the point at which all future Finn Brothers joint efforts took root – has become much more illuminated. From a lengthy stretch of “nice, but we don’t hear a single” conversations with studio heads, to the temporary firing of founding bassist Nick Seymour, to the equally temporary hiring of Neil Finn’s older brother Tim, there’s enough story behind this album alone to power a couple of episodes of VH-1’s Behind The Music, if indeed that show was still being made.

As revealed in Chris Bourke’s warts-and-all band biography Something So Strong (1997), frustrations during the songwriting and recording process led Neil Finn to feel that Seymour wasn’t sparking joy creatively, so the bassist was shown to the door and replacements were auditioned, all of which finally convinced Finn that his angst had been mislaid at Seymour’s feet, opening the door for the band to snap back to its original lineup. The songs recorded without Seymour were put on the shelf; they’d wind up in the live setlist, sure, but the recordings went unheard by the vast majority of us. A few of them surfaced on the post-breakup compilation Afterglow, but the others were a mystery until now, unless you’d happened to hear them in concert. Between the tracks that made it to Afterglow and the bonus disc here, it’s now possible to piece together the original, Tim-less version of Woodface if you’re so inclined.

Spoiler: Tim-free Woodface really wouldn’t have been a bad album. Many of Neil Finn’s rejects are superior to some acts’ number one singles. “My Legs Are Gone” and “The Fields Are Full Of Your Kind” may not be classics on the same level as “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, but they’re worthy additions to the Crowdies’ catalogue, and they’re both incredibly catchy. Another memorable tune that was waiting in the wings is the surprisingly well-developed demo “I May Be Late”, whose harmonies might make you think that it’s a leftover from the Finn brothers’ songwriting sessions, but it was a song written solely by Neil, who apparently deemed it unworthy. Tim-free Woodface would’ve been a very guitar-oriented album that might have needed to lean a bit less on the very “produced” sound that emerged.

Also in the “surprisingly well-developed demo” category are early versions of “She Goes On” and “As Sure As I Am”, both of which seem like they’re a mere stone’s throw from the final studio versions, the latter exhibiting some significant lyric changes. The same can be said for “You Got Me Going”, an early version of “Sacred Cow”, one of the Woodface rejects that wound up on Afterglow. “Be My Guest” and “Burnt Out Tree” are home demos from that period when Neil was trying to write the entire album himself, and while they seem like they each have the germ of something interesting, they evidently ran out of time. A real surprise among the pre-Tim material is “Creek Song / Left Hand”, a fully polished studio version of a known song with a very different lyrical/verse structure, with the “Left Hand” portion being the only recognizable part. “Left Hand” is also part of the Afterglow tracklist, though I think I like the tune of this version better, but not necessarily the lyrics. But perhaps the most unfathomable, glad-they-left-that-on-the-cutting-room-floor specimen is an early rehearsal recording of “Fall At Your Feet”, which combined the verses of “You Got Me Going”/”Sacred Cow” with the chorus of “Fall At Your Feet”. This is what demos are for: to find out what is and isn’t working. (This combination wasn’t working.)

Paul Hester’s home demo of “Italian Plastic” is a particularly fascinating listen, as that’s one of the songs that ended up being “very produced” in its final form on Woodface, and since Hester’s no longer with us to offer any hints on what his original intentions were, this demo is the only clue we have.

Much of the rest of the bonus material was recorded circa 1989 by Neil and Tim Finn, with Hester on drums, as home demos for the Finn Brothers album that was eventually subsumed into Woodface. These are equally fascinating, with “Weather With You”, “There Goes God”, “Four Seasons In One Day”, “All I Ask”, and “How Will You Go” shining as the best examples of these. Also interesting are songs such as “It’s Only Natural” and “Chocolate Cake”, which are far less polished musically and lyrically than the aforementioned tunes, and yet the core of each song didn’t change that much between Neil’s home studio and the final studio recording, which may be why those two songs wound up with the level of production that they did: to disguise those very deficiencies. “Catherine Wheel” is here in demo form, though it would have to wait until Together Alone to make its appearance, and I think the demo makes a strong case for the argument that this song was much better with Youth’s production than it would’ve been with Mitchell Froom’s, especially as Woodface was, in a few places, lumbered with the most gimmicky production of any of the original lineup’s albums. The bonus disc is rounded out with a seven-minute live medley and the full version of “I’m Still Here”, a not-safe-for-work jam from which only an excerpt was heard in the fade-out of the original Woodface.

It’s tempting, and also dangerous, to try to read anything into the bonus disc material (indeed, I’m sure one of Neil’s favorite hobbies is listening to people try to psychoanalyze him on the basis of Bourke’s tell-all book). But I think that a lot of the creative sturm und drang early in Woodface‘s development was down to frustration over what seemed to be the commercial failure of its immediate predecessor, Temple Of Low Men, and a lot of label pressure to just obediently crank out “Don’t Dream It’s Over II: Froom Hammond Organ Solo Boogaloo”. Listening to the original Woodface tracklist, as revealed on both this expanded reissue and Afterglow, I hear an album that would’ve been fine. Perhaps not on a level with Temple Of Low Men or the debut album, but not a stinker. And listening back to some of the more gimmicky production poured into the final mix of Woodface from a distance of 28 years, what I really find myself thinking is: maybe what the world – and Crowded House – really needed was Woodface a la Youth. I find myself taking issue not with the songs, but with the production.

Disc 1 – original album:
1. Chocolate Cake (4:02)
2. It’s Only Natural (3:32)
3. Fall at Your Feet (3:18)
4. Tall Trees (2:19)
5. Weather with You (3:44)
6. Whispers and Moans (3:39)
7. Four Seasons in One Day (2:50)
8. There Goes God (3:50)
9. Fame Is (2:23)
10. All I Ask (3:55)
11. As Sure as I Am (2:53)
12. Italian Plastic (3:39)
13. She Goes On (3:15)
14. How Will You Go (4:14)

Disc 2 – bonus tracks:
1. Burnt Out Tree (Home Demo) (1:36)
2. I May Be Late (Home Demo) (3:06)
3. She Goes On (Home Demo) (3:13)
4. As Sure As I Am (Home Demo) (2:37)
5. My Legs Are Gone (Studio Demo) (4:33)
6. You Got Me Going (Home Demo) (3:23)
7. Italian Plastic (Home Demo) (2:54)
8. Be My Guest (Home Demo) (2:03)
9. Weather With You (Home Demo) (3:08)
10. Chocolate Cake (Home Demo) (3:50)
11. How Will You Go (Home Demo) (2:46)
12. It’s Only Natural (Home Demo) (3:21)
13. Four Seasons In One Day (Home Demo) (2:42)
14. There Goes God (Home Demo) (2:43)
15. Catherine Wheel (Home Demo) (3:00)
16. All I Ask (Home Demo) (2:43)
17. Fields Are Full Of Your Kind (3:29)
18. Creek Song / Left Hand (3:04)
19. Fall At Your Feet (Rehearsal Early Version) (3:22)
20. The Burglar’s Song (Medley) – Around The UK In 7 Minutes (Live) (7:21)
21. I’m Still Here (Full Version) (2:19)

Released by: Capitol Records
Release date: 2016
Disc one total running time: 48:06
Disc two total running time: 1:07:03

Black Mirror: Hang The DJ – music by Alex Somers & Sigur Ros

Arguably the 21st century’s most legitimate and enduring successor to the O’Henry-inspired twisted morality tales of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror began on Channel 4 in the U.K. before migrating to Netflix and gaining an international audience beyond C4’s reach. Each of its stories are couched in the technology we have, or the technology we’re all but destined to invent given current trends of both technology and society. While many an episode of Black Mirror ends with a dark twist, Hang The DJ has a much happier one, an oddball among the show’s typical cynicism.

Hang The DJ‘s score is an exercise in barely-tonal minimalism. The episode concerns itself with an omnipresent matchmaking system, Coach, which pushes couples together for relationships of various lengths as it tries to determine their ideal match. Failure to abide by Coach’s matches risk banishment beyond an unspecified wall around the city/county/country in which the story happens, but when the alternative is being permanently paired with someone who isn’t one’s ideal match, and one is forbidden from doubling back to a former match, is that really such a threat?

Rather than hewing closely to the contours of the two protagonists’ budding-but-uncertain romance, the score almost seems to be providing accompaniment for Coach and its influence on the lives of everyone seen on screen: it’s atonal at times, almost a background drone that only foregrounds itself in melodic terms when the two main characters’ attraction increases. Even at the end, when they seriously contemplate climbing over the wall themselves rather than waiting for banishment, there’s little in the way of urgency or traditional tonality. It’s not an action scene, and the momentousness of it isn’t signalled by the score.

Things become more melodic and “human” once they’ve escaped – the constant drone of Coach’s presence is gone, and along with it the rigid matchmaking system that dominates everyone’s lives, and suddenly it’s Sigur Ros doing the music.

Hang The DJ is a fairly brief score, one whose impact and meaning may be a little hard to grasp when heard in isolation. But despite its brief duration, much like the story it accompanies, the score makes an impact.

1. All Mapped Out (1:26)
2. Sorry (2:58)
3. Hours, Days, Months (1:31)
4. Into Place (3:31)
5. Match (1:31 – Sigur Ros)
6. Out There (1:43)
7. Sleeps (0:48)
8. See You (1:53)
9. Treasured (1:34)
10. Ruined It (3:19)
11. One Year (2:09)
12. Doubts (1:58)
13. Three, Two, One (1:12)
14. We Agreed (0:33)
15. One, Two, Three, Four (0:39)
16. There’ll Be A Reason (1:28)
17. End (4L58 – Sigur Ros)
18. Over And Over Again (1:07)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: December 30, 2017
Total running time: 34:18

Raymond Scott Rewired

So, stop me if you’ve heard this one already: three remix producers walk into a bar, suddenly gain access to the complete recorded works of the late big-band-leader and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, and go back to their studios to do their own thing. Actually, it’s not certain if there was a bar involved, but that minor detail aside, that’s how you get this album.

And what a fun album it is! From a near-nonsensical mash-up of Scott’s electronic music and his extensive work in the realm of commercial jingles (“The Night & Day Household Greyhound”) to a career-spanning mash-up that somehow manages to encapsulate everything Raymond Scott was about (“A Bigger, More Important Sound”) to truly tuneful remixes that almost transcend their source material (“Cindy Byrdsong”, “Hey Ray”), every approach from very light remixing to almost rewriting the DNA of the original music is tried out here. Piling the output of Scott’s legendary homemade analog synthesizer/sequencer, the Electronium, on top of most conventional acoustic sounds does wonders (“Very Very Very Pretty Petticoat”), but that’s no less enjoyable than a cut-and-splice treatment of Scott’s narrated notes on a new piece of recording gear (“Love Song To A Dynamic Ribbon Cardioid”). At the end of the album, it’s all hands on deck as all three producers pay tribute to Scott’s most enduring creation (thanks to its heavy use in Carl Stalling’s cartoon music), “Powerhouse”.

I can’t help but think that Raymond Scott would have approved. The man devised and implemented a new instrument combining the functions of analog synths and sequencers in one massive box, in a near-total vacuum of information as to how one would create such a beast, because these ideas were new to everyone at the time. (No less a later electronic music pioneer than Bob Moog himself would go on to say that Scott was a huge influence on him.) A mind that could jump from big band stylings to otherworldly sounds for which there was no frame of reference…one can’t help but think that, had he been born a bit later, Raymond Scott himself would be doing some remixes of his own.

1. A Bigger, More Important Sound by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (1:38)
2. The Toy Penguin by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (3:12)
3. Cindy Byrdsong by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (4:09)
4. Ripples on an Evaporated Lake by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (4:10)
5. Sleigh Ride To A Barn Dance in Sorrento by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (2:01)
6. The Night & Day Household Greyhound by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (2:50)
7. Love Song To A Dynamic Ribbon Cardioid by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (2:25)
8. (Serenade On) Carribea Corner by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (4:08)
9. In An 18th Century Discotheque by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (3:35)
10. The Sleepwalking Tobacco Auctioneer by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (2:10)
11. Very Very Very Pretty Petticoat by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (2:22)
12. Hillbilly Hostess In Haunted Harlem by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (2:28)
13. Good Duquesne Air by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (3:06)
14. Hey Ray by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (2:54)
15. Mountain High, Valley Higher by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (3:35)
16. Siberian Tiger On An Ocean Liner by Raymond Scott & The Evolution Control Committee (2:35)
17. Shirley’s Temple Bells by Raymond Scott & The Bran Flakes (2:12)
18. Tick Tock Cuckoo On Planet Mars by Raymond Scott & Go Home Productions (1:56)
19. Powerhouse by Various Artists (3:29)

Released by: Basta
Release date: January 14, 2014
Total running time: 54:55

Star Wars: The Last Jedi – music by John Williams

Star Wars fandom may never be a cohesive whole again once the post-original-trilogy trilogy wraps up. The Force Awakens was knowingly derivative – on purpose, so we’re told in hindsight – to bring a new, younger audience into the familiar story beats of a Star Wars movie, while The Last Jedi‘s iconoclastic approach to the story’s remaining original trilogy characters seemed to split Star Wars fandom down the middle. The one unchanging constant in this whirlwind, however, has been John Williams, the architect of the orchestral Star Wars sound.

The soundtrack from The Last Jedi, appropriately for the middle chapter of a trilogy, leans heavily on themes already established. Themes for Rey, Kylo Ren/the First Order, and Poe/the Resistance are holdovers from The Force Awakens, with Rey’s theme given a great deal of development here. From the original trilogy, the Force theme (also frequently associated with Obi-Wan Kenobi) gets plenty of play here, as does a theme for another Jedi Master long past. The TIE Fighter battle theme is back as the Millennium Falcon shakes off its pursuers on Crait, with maybe two seconds of whimsy dropped in for Chewie’s new Porg sidekick. (Not heard on the album: the re-use of the Emperor’s theme for Snoke – perhaps a tacitly tuneful admission that the two were nearly interchangeable?) Luke and Leia’s reunion gets a somber, low-key treatment of their theme from Return Of The Jedi, tagged out by a short reference to Han and Leia’s love theme before Luke strides into battle against Kylo Ren.

Virtually the only truly new theme here is reserved for Finn’s winsome new partner, Rose (though that description should, perhaps, be the other way around). This leaves the movie’s major action setpieces for the majority of “new” material – percussive, raging battle music for Rey and Ren’s fight against Snoke’s guards, Finn’s final fight with Phasma, and naturally Luke’s climcactic duel with Kylo Ren. “The Battle Of Crait” rolls out a low, threatening motif for the oncoming First Order forces, as well as a choral interlude for Finn’s futile attempt to sacrifice himself for the Rebel cause.

The introduction to Canto Bight has an opulent opening (hearkening back to some of the “Coruscant” music from the prequel trilogy, which then segues into a boisterous jazz tune that sounds like it’s played by the same ensemble as the original Star Wars‘ Cantina Band music. It’s not a callback to that specific tune, but very much a delightful callback to its style. “The Fathiers”, accompanying the scenes of Finn and Rose lowering Canto Bight’s property value with large, four-legged help, is a callback of another kind – it sounds like a theme from an Indiana Jones movie slipped into the Star Wars universe.

I can handle a soundtrack falling back on old favorites more gracefully than I can handle the entire script of a movie doing so, and – spoiler alert – John Williams gives Luke Skywalker and Leia a truly epic sendoff, the former with a mythic choral treatment, and the latter with her theme from Star Wars arranged for piano during the end credit tribute to the late Carrie Fisher.

With J.J. Abrams back in the driver’s seat for Episode IX, the question isn’t whether John Williams’ final Star Wars outing is worthy of the franchise. The question now becomes whether or not the movie itself will be worthy of Williams’ grand finale.

1. Main Title and Escape (7:26)
2. Ahch-To Island (4:23)
3. Revisiting Snoke (3:29)
4. The Supremacy (4:01)
5. Fun with Finn and Rose (2:34)
6. Old Friends (4:29)
7. The Rebellion is Reborn (4:00)
8. Lesson One (2:10)
9. Canto Bight (2:38)
10. Who Are You? (3:04)
11. The Fathiers (2:42)
12. The Cave (3:00)
13. The Sacred Jedi Texts (3:33)
14. A New Alliance (3:13)
15. Chrome Dome (2:03)
16. The Battle of Crait (6:48)
17. The Spark (3:36)
18. The Last Jedi (3:04)
19. Peace and Purpose (3:08)
20. Finale (8:28)

Released by: Walt Disney Records
Release date: December 15, 2017
Total running time: 77:49

L’uomo Puma (The Pumaman) – music by Renato Serio

Known to the English-speaking world as the infamously cheesy, MST3K-mocked movie Puma Man, L’uomo Puma boasts a score that, heard in isolation, outclasses its accompanying movie in nearly every inportant way. Well, for the most part.

Let’s quantify the outclassing being done by the score here: this isn’t “the first Star Trek movie was okay, but Jerry Goldsmith’s groundbreaking score made it even better” territory. Instead, the orchestral portions of L’uomo Puma‘s score class up the adventures of Tony (the hapless nerd who receives “the powers of a puma”) and Vadinho just enough to give the perhaps mistaken impression that money was spent on the movie as a whole (spoiler: it really wasn’t).

This long, long overdue CD release – this score’s first release on any format – was issued by Italy’s Beat Records in late 2017 in a ridiculously small pressing of 500 units, and to be quite honest, its track titles are opaque and unhelpful at best, managing to completely obscure where that track falls in the movie unless you’re a Puma Man scholar who has memorized the movie (a status which your reviewer is slightly embarrassed to admit he may be approaching).

There are three primary themes in the Puma Man score: a noble-but-mysterious theme for the alien visitors who conferred “the powers of a puma” upon a selected member of the human race, an ominously menacing theme for the machinations of the character played by Donald Pleasence (whose sole instruction from the movie’s director must have been “that’s nice, but can you do it more like Blofeld?”), and of course, the goofily late-’70s-supermarket-commercial-jingle feel of Puma Man’s theme.

The former two categories of music are where the most praise is deserved; they’re nicely composed, marvelously played, and well-engineered. The hollow echo treatment on the cellos lend them more menace than usual. Composer Renato Serio, known primarily to Italian audiences, wasn’t fooling around here; this music outclasses the movie it’s in easily.

If you’re even slightly enamoured of late ’70s scoring that tries to force an orchestra to play to a disco beat, then you’ll be a sucker for the Puma Man theme, a cheery recurring theme that seems oblivious to the fact that its hero seems to have stumbled upon his superpowers and doesn’t really know how to use them. There’s something hilariously compelling about it – you’ll find yourself humming or whistling it for days afterward.

Earlier, the small pressing of 500 copies of L’uomo Puma was described as ridiculously small; maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just right, given how far underground this movie’s cult following must be. But for those who enjoy this slab of finest Italian-made cheese, it’s almost certain to earn a place of honor on the soundtrack shelf.

1. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 1 (2:14)
2. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 2 (2:13)
3. Puma Man #1 (2:03)
4. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 3 (2:38)
5. Puma Man #2 (2:07)
6. Puma Man #3 (3:13)
7. Puma Man #4 (1:43)
8. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 4 (2:04)
9. Puma Man #5 (2:26)
10. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 5 (2:36)
11. Puma Man #6 (2:28)
12. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 6 (2:07)
13. Puma Man #7 (2:26)
14. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 7 (2:40)
15. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 8 (2:24)
16. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 9 (1:42)
17. Puma Man #8 (1:57)
18. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 10 (2:15)
19. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 11 (2:22)
20. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 12 (2:14)
21. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 13 (1:35)
22. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 14 (2:03)
23. Puma Man #9 (2:38)
24. Puma Man #10 (1:49)
25. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 15 (2:46)
26. Puma Man #11 (2:13)
27. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 16 (2:08)
28. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 17 (2:38)
29. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 18 (1:54)
30. L’Uomo Puma – Seq. 19 (2:04)
31. Puma Man #12 (3:14)
32. Puma Man #13 (2:45)

Released by: Beat Records
Release date: October 20, 2017
Total running time: 75:12

Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey

You can probably be forgiven if the name of this movie – shown primarily in museums and other educational venues – doesn’t ring a bell. Animated in Taiwan to accompany an all-star voice cast that included the likes of William Shatner, Chris Pine, Mark Hamill, Samuel L. Jackson, Brent Spiner Robert Picardo, Hayden Christensen, Jason Alexander, James Earl Jones, future Star Trek: Discovery star Doug Jones, and rookie first-time actor Neil Armstrong, Quantum Quest incorporated real-time data from a number of NASA missions that were then ongoing: Cassini, the sun-watching SOHO, Mercury-orbiting MESSENGER, Mars Odyssey, and ESA’s Venus Express and Mars Express orbiters. I’m kind of sorry I missed this one, because the real-time, interactive nature of it precludes any kind of home video release (or at best would result in a home video release robbed of its most compelling features).

But there’s the soundtrack. Shawn K. Clement (composer on several early episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) pulls out all the stops, with the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra delivering a score worthy of a sci-fi epic (complete with theremin performed by Clement himself). With a barrage of percussion and occasional ethnic flourishes, Quantum Quest‘s score shows a bit of Battlestar Galactica influence (but then, so does a lot of other post-2005 sci-fi scoring). But it’s a very different animal, leaning more heavily on traditional 19th century orchestral influences and using the other elements as flavoring rather than foregrounding them.

Given the subject matter and the talent involved, it’s a bummer to have missed Quantum Quest while it was still a current concern. (Even the spacecraft upon whose data the movie relied are not all there now: Cassini, Venus Express and MESSENGER have all ended their missions by crashing into their respective planets.) The soundtrack makes quite a souvenir of both the movie and that very busy era of interplanetary exploration.

1. Cassini (0:47)
2. Anti-Matter (1:34)
3. Sun City The Game (3:11)
4. Opportunity To Serve (0:45)
5. Departure Station (1:45)
6. The Core (1:11)
7. The Battle (1:14)
8. Ignorant Moronic Fools (1:05)
9. The Void (1:39)
10. Ghost Fight (0:44)
11. Incoming (0:55)
12. Fate Of Trillions (2:06)
13. Dave In Space (1:05)
14. Fear / The War Machine (3:25)
15. Ring City (0:35)
16. Are You Milton? (1:18)
17. Destroy The Dave, Destroy The Light (1:54)
18. Cassini Commander (0:44)
19. Flipping Switches (1:25)
20. Destroy Me (1:02)
21. Operation Photon Extermination (3:17)
22. The Message / Dave Delivers (4:18)
23. Universe Of Possibilities (2:18)
24. The Quest (remix) (5:23)
25. The Message / Dave Delivers (demo) (4:11)
26. The Message (remix) (6:32)

Released by: BSX Records
Release date: September 1, 2011
Total running time: 54:23

Beep – music by Leonard J. Paul

The soundtrack for a documentary about the evolution of sound in video games, Beep is very much an exercise in electronica, with a healthy dose of chiptune. That seems like an almost obvious way to go, right? Except there’s a bit more to it than that.

Many of the tracks on the Beep soundtrack album are ethereal and just a little bit hypnotic – repeating musical figures that sort of draw you into their sonic spiral. That’s no accident: these sequences were built on a foundation of procedurally-generated tunes. The repeating sequences were created at random by a program (given certain parameters), and then everything on top of that was the work of the film’s human composer. It’s an interesting way to have man and machine working together, and for the subject matter of Beep, it works. Even as a listening experience with none of the context of the movie, it’s very relaxing.

There are a few places where it gets a bit more active, though. There are two versions of “Half Steppin’/Freaky DNA”, a tune that sets up a funky groove, and there’s an ode to game music’s less melodious early years in the form of “Dave’s Atari”, which gives you a really good idea of an Atari 2600’s actual range of notes and octaves. (And it’s still musical in its own way.) “Wood Bug” has a feel similar to “Dave’s Atari”, but with a more modern sound palette.

Beep may not be everyone’s cup of pleasantly arranged sine waves, but it’s mesmerizing and yet unmistakably pays tribute to the 8-bit sound of the early video gaming era. Those are two really strong selling points for a listener in the right frame of mind for something different.

1. Beep Movie – Main Theme (1:17 )
2. Banana Seat (5:28)
3. Karin Originals (5:21)
4. Orange Shag (3:31)
5. Buckwheat Pancakes (4:03)
6. Riverbank (4:10)
7. Ankylosaurus Almonds (2:12)
8. Rotary Dial (3:07)
9. Dave’s Atari (1:58)
10. Skipping Rocks (7:45)
11. Half Steppin’ (Genesis Remix) – Freaky DNA (1:21)
12. Help Steppin’ – Freaky DNA (3:07)
13. Beep Logo (0:06)
14. Magic Hour (4:20)
15. Pluto (4:43)
16. Galaxies (2:30)
17. Googol (3:31)
18. Crusin’ The Cosmos (4:50)
19. Quadra Sunrise (3:54)
20. Wood Bug (2:06)
21. Backyard Flight (4:10)
22. Beep Movie – Closing Theme (2:40)

Released by: Bandcamp
Release date: September 16, 2016
Total running time: 1:16:10

Stargate SG-1: Music From Selected Episodes

If there’s a property I didn’t expect to resurface in the soundtrack world in the summer of 2017, it’s the Stargate TV franchise. In hindsight, though, I wasn’t paying attention to the clues – Intrada has long championed the musical output of Richard Band, brother of Full Moon Pictures producer Charles Band, and composer-in-residence on Full Moon’s extensive slate of low-to-mid-budget horror movies. And, patterned somewhat after the arrangement that governed music during the entirety of spinoff-era Star Trek, Band alternated on episodes of Stargate SG-1 with Joel Goldsmith for the show’s first two years on the Showtime pay cable channel, with other composers occasionally filling in (including, ironically, Star Trek’s Dennis McCarthy). This 2-CD set from Intrada gather’s Band’s carefully selected highlights from his time with the Stargate franchise.

The episodes for which Band felt he’d done his best work were Cold Lazarus, In The Line Of Duty, In The Serpent’s Lair, and Singularity – oddly enough, all early favorites of mine. Listening to the scores Band composed for these episodes, which feature small orchestral ensembles attempting to fill out and deepen the sound of synthesizers and samples, it’s easy to tell the real musicians from the electronic sounds. With the show opening every week with an adapted version of David Arnold’s theme from the original Stargate movie (for which Arnold had to be paid for every usage), the rest of the music budget – especially before Stargate SG-1 found its legs and popularity with its audience – was tightly constrained. But even when roughly half of what you hear is synthesized, it’s still a fun listen. Military drums, low, urgent brass ostinatos, and actual recurring themes (including quotes of Arnold’s theme) – the music of SG-1 was everything that the music of the show’s Star Trek contemporaries usually wasn’t: propulsive and threatening and dangerous. Stuff was happening in the music rather than it being relegated to background wallpaper. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the nearly-nine-minute solid cue covering the entire final act of In The Serpent’s Lair: literally wall-to-wall music for the show’s climax.

Cold Lazarus, which uncovers a painful incident from Jack O’Neill’s past, is the outlier here, with gentle piano accompanying the unfolding revelation that Jack had lost a child. In The Line Of Duty and Singularity are far more representative of the musical sound of Stargate SG-1 as a whole, with both quiet passages, mysterious music for the team’s discoveries of ancient (or is that Ancient?) mysteries, and gung-ho action music where needed.

I remember, when first seeing that Intrada was releasing a new round of Stargate TV scores, being a bit let down that Joel Goldsmith’s work wasn’t represented. Now I realize this wasn’t a downside: Richard Band was as much a part of SG-1’s sound in those heady formative years of the show – where anything was possible and the Stargate franchise had yet to fall into the trap that befalls many a long-running series, namely slipping its neck into the noose of ever-thickening continuity – as Joel Goldsmith’s sound was. Much like the Star Trek: The Next Generation box sets that finally gave Dennis McCarthy’s work exposure in the wake of a massive all-Ron-Jones soundtrack box set, this SG-1 soundtrack set redresses an imbalance and is worth a listen.

Disc One
Cold Lazarus
1. Teaser (3:42)
2. Is It Really Jack? (3:53)
3. Jack At Ex-Wife’s House (3:25)
4. Jack Visits Charlie’s Room (3:24)
5. The Crystals (2:14)
6. The Crystal Monitor (2:18)
7. Jack And Wife On Park Bench (3:08)
8. They Re-Activate The Crystal Monitor (2:03)
9. Pushing Back Through Gate To Hospital (3:53)
10. Jack Meets Alien Self And Finale (9:10)

    In The Line Of Duty

11. Teaser (2:50)
12. Medical Time (3:12)
13. O’Neill Comforts Cassie (3:05)
14. O’Neill To Burn Victim (0:38)
15. Teal’c Gives O’Neill Advice (2:28)
16. Daniel Talks To Girl Survivor (2:07)
17. Bad Guy Bandages Doc (2:20)
18. Daniel Talks To Alien Carter (2:26)
19. Finale – Daniel And Then Others Visit (10:11)

Disc Two
In The Serpent’s Lair
1. Finale (8:50)

   Singularity

2. Teaser (3:34)
3. From Stargate To New World (2:36)
4. Sam With Girl And Back Through Gate (2:49)
5. Sam And Little Girl Get Closer (2:58)
6. Heart Attack And Operation (3:36)
7. Jack And Teal’c Escaping Battle (4:22)
8. To The Underground Site (2:35)
9. Time Is Up And Finale (8:26)

Released by: Intrada
Release date: June 27, 2017
Disc one total running time: 67:01
Disc two total running time: 40:01

8 Bit Weapon – Class Apples

I remember the Apple II. By way of the Franklin ACE 1000 clone that was later sued off the market, I grew up with the Apple II as my first computer. I programmed it – or tried to – endlessly. Trying to get music and sound right with the native Apple II speaker was an especially bruising experience: endless data tables, pokes, and very seldom getting what I wanted out of the machine. A whole sub-industry was born to bolt better audio capability onto the Apple II via add-ons like the Mockingboard sound card. It was never as easy as just plugging a MIDI-capable keyboard into it and just playing what was in your head.

Except that now, it is. And that’s how we got Class Apples – a new MIDI controller interface, and a modern-day software hack allowing for samples to expand the sound of the Apple II, and 8 Bit Weapon doing what 8 Bit Weapon does. The entirety of Class Apples is performed on Apple II computers, with minor post-production tweaks providing the finishing touches that the Apple itself can’t (reverb, stereo tricks, a bit of flanging here and there). It’s still the same lo-fi machine that it always was, but the Apple II can do more musically thanks to persistent fans of the machine grafting new abilities onto it, inspired by technological developments that have taken place since the Apple II’s heyday.

The music here is all from the classical repertoire, and heavy on pieces with complex counterpoint. Everything has a beat to it, and there’s a strong Hooked On Classics vibe to the whole thing. It’s hard to nominate any one track as a standout – each of them have their own charms – though I’m always a sucker for “Ave Maria” and, well, just about any flavor of Bach.

Computer music may be nothing new, and classics filtered through computer music may be nothing new, but there is something new here – significant musical capabilities have been grafted onto a machine that was known for little more than the plaintive PR#6 “BEEP” that accompanied a startup or reset. Just as 8 Bit Weapon helped alert the public to the possibilities of the NES and Game Boy as musical instruments, the same can now be said of the not-especially-musically-inclined Apple II. It’s a musical tech demo that is, if you know anything about the Apple II’s native sound capabilities, surprisingly listenable. You had me at INIT HELLO,S6,D1.

1. Sheep May Safely Graze (Bach – 2:55)
2. Two Part Invention (Bach – 1:03)
3. Prelude and Fugue 1 in C Major (Bach – 1:29)
4. Für Elise (For Elise) (Beethoven – 2:14)
5. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) (Mozart – 5:24)
6. Invention 8 (Bach – 0:51)
7. Prelude in C Minor (Bach – 1:35)
8. Rondo Alla Turca (Mozart – 2:07)
9. Invention 14 (Bach – 1:13)
10. Air Tromb (Bach – 1:29)
11. Ave Maria (Bach & Gounod – 2:52)
12. Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven – 4:43)

Released by: 8 Bit Weapon
Release date: July 22, 2017
Total running time: 27:55

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Volume 1 – music by Alan Silvestri

When the original Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, premiered in 1980 on PBS, it was tracked with a hand-picked combination drawing from the classical orchestral repertoire and the synth-heavy works of Vangelis. It defined the show beautifully. Doing something even remotely resembling Cosmos in the 21st century, however, has a whole different list of demands. Photorealistic CGI allows actual images from space to be incorporated into beautifully choreographed and detailed simulations of space. It’s movie quality. The music should probably step up and meet that definition of epic as well.

With that in mind, it was no surprise to see veteran Hollywood composer Alan Silvestri selected to bring the new Cosmos to musical life. Silvestri’s score for the film version of Sagan’s Contact was one of the highlights of that movie, and if you understand the musical vocabulary of awe and wonder that his music brought to Contact, you’ll dig this, for that’s the same sensibility he brings to the 2014 series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Four generous albums of music from the series have been available digitally for some time, but this is their first official CD release, and the discs bring previously unreleased material with them (the music from a sequence covering the planet Venus and an alternate version of the deceptively gentle main theme).

The 21st century Cosmos has a sense of awe and wonder worthy of the original, but its more filmic sensibilities get a wide-screen musical treatment that would do any sci-fi movie proud. It’s unapologetically bold and adventurous, and very much the real thing – a real orchestra and choir are embellished, but very seldom overtaken, by electronics. Each episode featured at least one lavishly animated tale of a pioneering scientific mind, and Silvestri deftly navigated the narrow strait between “music from the part of the world that person was from” and “ethnic musical stereotypes”, usually by erring primarily on the side of scoring it like straight-up live-action drama. This volume’s suite of music from the sequence depicting the life of Giordano Bruno is really its emotional center, an island of human drama in an album of what might otherwise be considered “space music”.

But there’s nothing bland here – every moment of music has mystery and drama propelling it, much of it originating from that first episode in which Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us that we’re all starstuff. This soundtrack would be equally at home on the flight deck of Tyson’s “ship of the imagination”, or on the bridge of any movie or TV starship you care to name. Best of all, it accompanies a story much more grounded in reality. Just a beautiful listen, and if the existing downloads are any indication, the later volumes are even better.

1. Cosmos Main Title (1:38)
2. “Come With Me” (2:00)
3. “The Cosmos Is Yours” (6:23)
4. Virgo Supercluster (4:05)
5. Multiverse (2:10)
6. Giordano Bruno (2:39)
7. Revelation of Immensity (3:57)
8. The Inquisition (3:35)
9. The Staggering Immensity of Time (2:11)
10. Star Stuff (4:12)
11. Chance Nature of Existence (3:27)
12. New Years’ Eve (3:49)
13. “Our Journey Is Just Beginning” (3:04)
14. Venus (2:50)
15. Cosmos Main Title – Alternate (1:54)

Released by: Intrada
Release date: June 13, 2017
Total running time: 48:31

Twister – music by Mark Mancina

Every once in a while, a soundtrack appears that you just kind of order on sight. This was one of those. I was no stranger to Mark Mancina’s propulsive, all-American-sounding score from the 1996 tornado disaster flick Twister, as I already had the original release of the score from that year, but the thought of a complete Twister score release was enough to lighten my wallet a bit…mainly for the love of a single piece of music omitted from the ’96 CD.

One of the film’s best sequences follows a somewhat introspective series of vignettes that nail home, none too subtly, the emotional stakes for the movie’s characters. After a hasty retreat from a decidedly southern meal, the ragtag storm chasers led by Bill Paxton’s character do a bit of ill-advised off-roading without being entirely sure where they’re going to wind up. The orchestral part of the soundtrack begins churning in a steady rhythm with the signature battery of cellos that anchor the entire score, eventually transitioning into “Humans Being”, the song Van Halen contributed to Twister‘s “songtrack” album. It’s quite possibly the best integration of score and tie-in song I’ve ever heard Hollywood pull off, and…it was missing from the original album.

That track, “Walk In The Woods”, tapers off rather than crashing into rock music territory (the Van Halen song can still be found on the readily available song CD), but it sold me on this whole remaster. Unlike some past reissues which doubled the amount of music available or blew our minds with alternates or unused takes, there are probably fewer than ten minutes of truly “new” music to be found on this reissue. But in conversing with fellow soundtrack afficionados, I found that “Walk In The Woods” was the tipping point for them picking this one up too.

The familiar tracks from the original album are renamed and shuffled around a bit from the original 1996 release, but it’s all there – with one exception. Missing from this new release is the snippet of movie dialogue (well, singing, really) in which a couple of the storm chasers sing a bit of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma (particularly badly); if you’re a fan of that few seconds of silliness, you need to hang on to the 1996 release as well as this one.

1. Wheatfield (film version) (1:25)
2. The Hunt Begins (3:50)
3. The Sky (1:03)
4. Dorothy IV (film version) (1:57)
5. The First Twister (0:49)
6. In the Ditch / Where’s My Truck? (2:00)
7. Waterspouts (2:49)
8. Cow (5:42)
9. Walk In The Woods (2:05)
10. Bob’s Road (2:13)
11. Hail No! (2:43)
12. Futility (film version) (2:17)
13. Drive-In Twister (2:57)
14. Wakita (film version) (5:19)
15. Sculptures (film version) (3:06)
16. House Visit (4:47)
17. The Big Suck (film version) (1:47)
18. End Titles (2:25)
19. Wheatfield (alternate) (1:28)
20. Waterspouts (alternate) (2:50)
21. The Big Suck (alternate) (1:14)
22. End Title / Respect the Wind (9:20)

Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: January 20, 2017
Total running time: 64:07

The Radiophonic Workshop: Burials In Several Earths

The Radiophonic Workshop is back, minus the BBC. If the band’s retinue of veteran analog electronic music pioneers can keep turning out original material like this, it might result in a new generation of fans wondering why they were slumming it for the BBC for so long. The Radiophonic Workshop is made up of former members of the storied BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an experimental electronic music & effects department of the BBC founded in the late 1950s to provide unique music and sounds for the steadily growing output of the BBC’s radio and television channels. The work, in those days before samplers and digital synthesizers, was grueling; membership in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was always fairly limited because you had to love what you were doing, working with oscillators a beat and tone generators and analog reverb and tape loops. The Workshop remains, perhaps unjustly, best known for the original Doctor Who theme music dating back to 1963, but its body of work spread so much further than that…until the BBC closed the Workshop’s doors in the 1990s.

But its members, it turns out, weren’t averse to workshopping their unique sound without Auntie Beeb paying the bills. Having spent over a decade as a touring group recreating their sound the old-fashioned way for audiences who already knew their work and audiences only just discovering them, the Radiophonic Workshop has now gifted us with a new album with the unmistakable sound that gained them a following in the 1960s and ’70s. Is it abstract? At times, yes – about 13 minutes into the lead track, you’d swear they were trying to make a musical instrument out of the sound of the Liberator’s teleport from Blake’s 7. Everything from white noise to whalesong crops up. But what’s amazing is how tuneful it is at times. Echoing piano is a constant presence, along with actual guitar work (Paddy Kingsland, whose Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide scores in the early ’80s were ear-wormingly hummable, take a bow). There are a few places where a groove emerges from the soundscape and the Radiophonic Workshop proceeds to rock out.

Not a bad feat considering that some of these gentlemen are past what many touring musicians would consider retirement age.

The real fascination of Burials In Several Earths is that it’s electronic music created in a way that has almost been lost to time and the march of technology. That description doesn’t really do it justice though – that sounds more like the description of a tech demo. The Radiophonic Workshop is making actual music this way, delighting audiences on stage, and bolting new chapters onto a legacy of ridiculously hummable short tunes from a bygone age. At times ethereal, at times exciting, the one thing Burials isn’t is boring.

1. Burials In Several Earths (18:58)
2. Things Buried In Water (22:01)
3. Some Hope Of Land (25:15)
4. Not Come To Light (3:58)
5. The Stranger’s House (11:23)

Released by: Room 13
Release date: May 19, 2016
Total running time: 1:21:35

Fight For Space – music by Ron Jones

Ron Jones is an inspired choice to score a space documentary, even if you’ve never heard of him. Mention his name in a room full of diehard Star Trek: The Next Generation fans and you’ll probably get a conversation started: during that show’s first four years, he kicked over numerous restrictive rules put in place by the producers, who wanted the music to be “wallpaper”, and did his own thing…until the showrunners responded in kind by simply ceasing to engage his services any further.

But the producers of that particular series seem to be the only ones who don’t remember him fondly. The makers of computer games such as Starfleet Academy and Starfleet Command availed themselves of his services, as did the backers of last year’s 50th anniversary concert tour, commissioning him to write new music in a Trek vein, which was also recorded for the recent 50th anniversary soundtrack album.

It’s those recent compositions that his music from Fight For Space most closely resemble: noble, yearning, vaguely nautical. But there are other flavors that aren’t exactly Trekkish: quiter, piano-led tracks, even a couple of somewhat comical pieces. Then there are the real surprises, a full-on rock ‘n’ roll track titled “Chaos Never Stopped Us”, whole other tracks such as “The Greatest Possibilities” and “The Letter That Killed Space” combine the sonic palettes of orchestra and rock band.

But it’s all recognizably Ron Jones – the sound that no sane showrunner ever would have jettisoned from the Star Trek franchise. Whether it’s for the 24th century, or the 21st century struggle of a chronically underfunded NASA to live up to its 20th century glories, that sound is a perfect fit. Those who have missed Jones’ odes to the final frontier will enjoy this one a lot.

1. Space Calls Us (4:23)
2. Cold War Fears (2:02)
3. Moving a Nation (2:39)
4. The Spin Offs (1:51)
5. Earthrise (1:02)
6. The Hope Killers (6:34)
7. First Homes Off Earth (2:54)
8. Messy Politics of Space (4:22)
9. Rockets and Budgets to Nowhere (7:42)
10. Chaos Never Stopped Us (5:34)
11. The Letter That Killed Space (3:35)
12. Why arn’t We There Yet? (4:41)
13. Progress and Fear (2:16)
14. The Greatest Possibilities (7:42)
15. The Universe Awaits (6:44)
16. First Sketches and Themes (3:45)

Released by: SkyMuse Records
Release date: March 29, 2017
Total running time: 1:07:46

Star Trek Beyond (Deluxe) – music by Michael Giacchino

Varese Sarabande’s handling of the soundtracks from the modern Star Trek movies has made me wise up: I didn’t even bother with Michael Giacchino’s score from Star Trek Beyond until the 2-CD Deluxe Edition was released. I’m just not in a position to fall for the double dip every time.

Sadly, the irony is that, while Beyond got the current iteration of Star Trek back “on message”, preaching the virtues of peace and compassion over the values of a violent, twisted being out for revenge, Giacchino’s third visit to the Trek well seems to be his least inspired of the three movies he’s scored to date.

That’s somewhat understandable: the after-the-fact heaping of criticism on the second movie, Star Trek Into Darkness, had to have a palpable effect on those involved in making it. (Ironically, Giacchino’s score from Into Darkness was one of the very, very few things I could find to enjoy about that otherwise lamentably derivative entry in the franchise.) It could be that his creative energies were sapped by the time he went to work on Beyond.

There are highlights, though. The appearances of Starbase Yorktown, a marvel of alternative-23rd-century Starfleet construction that would dwarf a 24th century Borg cube, are graced with a gorgeous fanfare, featuring a long melody line of the kind that seems like it went out of style after John Williams re-educated everyone about uses of the leitmotif. There are some nice cues covering the series of vignettes following the surviving members of the Enterprise crew trying to simply survive on the surface of the planet over which their ship was brought down, though those tend toward brevity.

The action scenes involving Krall’s attack on the Enterprise are frenetic and noisy, probably with the idea that they’d be competing with frenetic and noisy sound effects for dominance in the movie’s audio mix. As a listening experience with no accompanying visuals, they’re a bit much – compare to Giacchino’s more gracefully Williams-esque action scenes from Rogue One for an exercise in contrast.

Though I know some uppity Star Trek fans may recoil against the thought of including a track that could be even remotely considered R&B on their precious soundtrack albums – one can still hear the howls of protest over “Ooby Dooby” and “Magic Carpet Ride” 20 years after Star Trek: First Contact – I’m a bit disappointed to find that, even with a second disc worth of material and more breathing room – Rihanna’s “Sledgehammer” single wasn’t included here. I know there’s licensing, label politics, and yes, that whole blow-up among fans about whether the singer had any business dipping her toe into the world of Star Trek, a pointless
kerfuffle that, let’s face it, exposed some shocking racism among fans of a franchise that rails against racism at every turn. The song still belonged here, and I was disappointed to see it omitted.

At the time of this writing, there’s still no solid word on whether or not there will be a fourth movie with this cast, or indeed a fourth movie with Giacchino at the podium. In that context, it’s a bit of a bummer that he may well be leaving the Star Trek franchise on the weakest note that he had yet provided for it.

Disc 1
1. Logo And Prosper (1:47)
2. Trick Or Treaty (:45)
3. We Come In Pieces (1:17)
4. Thank Your Lucky Star Date (2:14)
5. Night On The Yorktown (5:36)
6. To Thine Own Death Be True (3:32)
7. We Make A Good Team (:22)
8. The Dance Of The Nebula (2:22)
9. A Swarm Reception (2:30)
10. Krall Hell Breaks Loose (3:04)
11. The Evacuation Variations (2:47)
12. Hitting The Saucer A Little Hard (6:10)
13. Scotland’s Worst Cliffhanger (:23)
14. A Hive And Kicking (3:30)
15. Port Of Krall (:52)
16. Jaylah Damage (2:50)
17. No Enterprise For Guessing (:37)
18. In Artifacts As In Life (1:51)
19. She’s One Hell Of A Dish (1:26)
20. Make No Escape About It (2:04)
21. Eat My Thrusters (3:56)
22. The Krall Of The Wild (2:10)
23. Spock’s Vulcan Grip On Death (1:31)
24. Captain On Ice (:42)

    Disc 2

25. Franklin, My Dear (2:50)
26. Transporting Good Time (3:43)
27. Krall Work And No Play (:37)
28. A Lesson in Vulcan Mineralogy (5:17)
29. The Cost Of Abronath (2:35)
30. MotorCycles Of Relief (3:18)
31. Mocking Jaylah (3:27)
32. Jaylah House Rock (3:18)
33. Bright Lights Big Velocity (Part 1) (:57)
34. Bright Lights Big Velocity (Part 2) (2:59)
35. Spock Speaks Hive (3:10)
36. Crash Decisions (3:16)
37. Krall-y Krall-y Oxen Free (4:23)
38. Shutdown Happens (4:35)
39. The Root Of Krall Evil (1:31)
40. Cater-Krall In Zero G (2:17)
41. The Dreaded Rear Admiral (2:02)
42. Par-tay For The Course (2:46)
43. Space, The Final Frontier (2:42)
44. Jaylah’s Theme (2:36)
45. Yorktown Theme (4:32)
46. Star Trek Main Theme* (3:44)
47. Krall Things Being Equal (4:25)

Released by: Varese Sarabande
Release date: December 12, 2016
Disc one total running time: 54:42
Disc two total running time: 1:11:18

Jodorowsky’s Dune – music by Kurt Stenzel

A unique documentary about a movie that almost, but didn’t, get made, the musical treatment for Jodorowsky’s Dune is a novel one: score the documentary with the music that the unmade movie should’ve gotten. Chronicling, as it does, an abortive attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s genre-redefining novel to the big screen in the 1970s, Jodorowsky’s Dune is graced with a fittingly ’70s-style score awash with analog synths (or very good approximations of them).

Think of early Tangerine Dream (composer Kurt Stenzel’s auditory reference point), or the all-synth, almost-abstract score of Enter The Dragon, or the music of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who: that sound in your head is the sound of the Arrakis that was never meant to be. It’s the sound of a Dune that would’ve starred the likes of Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger, rather than Kyle MacLachlan and Sting. The music is authentically trippy – as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s vision for Herbert’s epic likely would’ve been – and anyone born in the ’70s or steeped in ’70s genre cinema will likely find the wobbly analog synth sounds are a comforting old friend.

On a few tracks, there is dialogue from the documentary itself, and depending on my mood I can come down on either the “no, just let me hear the music, please” or the “oh, that’s kinda neat and it helps set the tone” side of the fence. It’s only on a few tracks. Stenzel sequences the album as a four-sided double LP, staying true to the medium that would’ve been available to a soundtrack album from the unmade movie. Tracks blend together as ethereal suites and reach an end point whereupon, in some alternate universe where Jodorowsky beat David Lynch to the punch, someone presumably turns the record over.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-1970s attempt to change how sci-fi reached the big screen never happened, and Dune languished in Hollywood turnaround hell while a little movie about the last of the Jedi Knights became the film that changed the entire playbook in 1977. That movie, of course, redirected movie music back onto a European-inspired orchestral course, almost exactly 180 degrees away from the music Stenzel imagines here (and 180 degrees away from Jodorowsky’s pie-in-the-sky dream of having post-Syd-Barrett-era Pink Floyd score his vision of Dune). But Kurt Stenzel’s realization of the course on which movie sci-fi soundtracks could have continued is an incredible, atmospheric listen.

1. Coming of a God (5:27)
2. Greatest Movie Never Made (1:01)
3. Parallel World (1:41)
4. Parallel World (outro) (1:03)
5. Leap of Faith (0:43)
6. Time and Space (2:04)
7. Optical World (2:55)
8. Nebula (1:25)
9. Invitation (1:02)
10. Point of View (2:36)
11. Moebius (4:48)
12. Arrakis (1:58)
13. Millions of Stars (0:21)
14. Into the Galaxy (1:26)
15. O’Bannon Meets Jodo (1:18)
16. Finding the Others (0:57)
17. Spiritual Warriors (1:36)
18. Conception of Paul (2:01)
19. Ships With Souls (1:51)
20. The Pirate Spaceship (5:23)
21. Rescue From a Sandworm (2:36)
22. Mad Emperor (0:23)
23. Burning Giraffes (1:42)
24. Baron Harkonnen (0:33)
25. Giger’s Theme (1:06)
26. Deepest Darkness of the Soul (1:15)
27. Feyd Rautha (4:17)
28. Total Extermination (2:16)
29. I Am Dune (6:00)
30. Hollywood (2:22)
31. Fingerprints (4:16)
32. Open the Mind (3:38)
33. Try (2:30)

Released by: Cinewax
Release date: November 13, 2015
Total running time: 75:31

Journey To Space – music by Cody Westheimer

Even as NASA continues planning its much-advertised journey to Mars, the space agency faces a problem that it didn’t have to contend with in the 1960s: selling that vision to a public wondering why we should bother. The push to reach the moon can be credited, in no small part, to the call to action of a charismatic, fallen president. The scientific and technological benefits of Apollo were almost an afterthought; the real mission to the moon was one of projecting America’s technological power (and, by extension, putting the Soviet Union on notice that this technological might could be used against them if they lashed out).

These days, presidents mention that it’d be nice to go to Mars, but we also have so many other priorities, so the funding for the stuff that might get us to Mars in the next 20 years could be cut out from under NASA at any time. Ironically, NASA is now the space agency that has to make agitprop films to push its vision. Journey To Space is one of numerous space PR films in the past decade, using the audiovisual playbook of Hollywood sci-fi to pitch real space exploration to the American public. Cody Westheimer’s music from Journey certainly sounds like it belongs to a sci-fi epic; some tracks have that great nautical questing feel that typified some of James Horner’s best work. Westheimer’s collaborator, Max Braverman, turns in a uniquely 80s-synthpop-styled cue, “Building A Spacesuit”, that’s a lot of fun.

It’s sad that the human adventure, once said by a purely fictional film’s marketing tagline, is just beginning, if only movies like Journey To Space can convince a skeptical and often uninformed public of the benefits. Just the soundtrack alone makes me feel like it’s time to suit up, strap in, and blast off.

1. The Endless Horizon (1:43)
2. To Mars and Beyond (0:47)
3. Endeavor’s Final Journey (1:45)
4. Inside the Shuttle (0:45)
5. An Eye on the Cosmos (1:12)
6. Docking with Mir (0:29)
7. Space Science – music by Max Braverman (0:53)
8. A Home Above – music by Max Braverman (0:44)
9. ISS Construction (0:48)
10. Grace of the Brave (1:41)
11. Orion Training (1:05)
12. Mars (1:08)
13. Extended Weightlessness (2:23)
14. A Spacegirl’s Dream (0:44)
15. How to Build a Spacesuit – music by Max Braverman (1:36)
16. Mars in My Backyard (1:39)
17. Underwater Training (2:48)
18. The Exploring Kind (4:00)
19. Red Planet Arrival (2:24)
20. Meet Me on Mars (1:18)
21. The Unimagined (0:51)
22. End Credits (1:41)
23. Blue Danube (0:40)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: May 5, 2015
Total running time: 35:04

Mars – music by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

The spare, atmospheric sound of National Geographic’s short-run series Mars fits the show’s tone like a glove – the awe and wonder of exploring another world is jettisoned in favor of claustrophobia and worse.

Nick Cave (yes, he of the Bad Seeds) and Warren Ellis can at least claim a coup with the throbbing, foreboding theme song for the show. I’m of the opinion that it’s almost a waste to have Cave score something without singing a few words, and this certainly satisfies that requirement. It may actually be the best thing on the whole album.

The rest of the selections from the Mars score aren’t musically lacking; everything’s nicely produced. But with the show’s dense sound design, almost constant narration or dialogue or documentary sound, and its pace, this is the kind of whole-note synth-pad scoring that has started to seem less in vogue in the 21st century. It can be a bit of a somnolent listen.

And yet you can’t fault the composers for that – they’re responding perfectly to the show’s perhaps-too-bleak tone, which was really my only complaint with the show as a whole. It was all beautifully photographed, the set design and the spacesuits and other hardware were very convincing, and the actors delivered the goods, interspering the fictional story with relevant present-day documentary segments. If you want the music to reflect something other than the oppressive bleakness portrayed on screen, maybe…put something a little more noble and hopeful and wondrous on screen?

A good listen, but perhaps not all in one sitting. The Mars score is probably just a little too tied into the visuals of the series to be purely a listening experience.

1. Mars Theme (1:42)
2. Mars (4:00)
3. Daedalus (3:00)
4. Earth (2:11)
5. Science (2:15)
6. Voyage (4:52)
7. Space X (2:42)
8. Space Station (4:16)
9. Symphony of the Dead (9:38)
10. Planetarium (2:43)
11. Aftermath (4:42)
12. Towards Daedalus (3:00)
13. Life on Mars (3:52)

Released by: Milan Records
Release date: December 30, 2016
Total running time: 49:08

Star Trek: The 50th Anniversary Collection

In the early ’90s, I was positively obsessed with Star Trek music – every new movie score released, any new television soundtracks that came along, anything was a cause for celebration, because I was in “maximum Trekkie” mode, and there never seemed to be enough of it.

Fast-forward a bit to the 21st century, in an era where we’re starving for the seemingly perpetually-delayed first new Star Trek TV series in a decade…and yet we’re positively drowning in music from the franchise’s glory days. I’ve gone from “not being to get enough Star Trek music” to “how in the hell do I organize this huge glut of music when I rip the latest box set worth of CDs to my hard drive straight out of the mail?”

Not that I’m complaining. The 50th Anniversary Collection from La-La Land Records is a fine buffet line adding to the embarrassment of riches we’ve gotten since 2009, a year during which the first J.J. Abrams movie (and yes, its soundtrack) came along, revitalized Trek as a media juggernaut, and convinced new Paramount music executive Randy Spendlove that maybe, just maybe, he should license some of the gems from the Trek music vaults to these specialty soundtrack labels that are clamoring to release it.

Rather than a laser-like focus on any one series, this four-disc set tries to patch some holes, right some wrongs, and answer some fannish prayers. The first disc consists, mostly, of remastered selections from the original series, piece of music of which better copies have been found since La-La Land’s monumental 2012 box set release of every note of music recorded for classic Trek. There are a few new 1960s gems as well: Wilbur Hatch’s “bumper” music, played over still slides of the Enterprise and the Star Trek logo as the show went to commercial during its broadcast premieres, is something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. An alternate take of a cue from Star Trek: The Motion Picture also appears, but the big takeaway from disc one is the dialogue-free version of the end credits from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, a track which had previously only appeared on CD with the late Leonard Nimoy’s ethereal narration. Fans have been demanding this since Film Score Monthly released an otherwise complete Star Trek II score on CD in 2009, and at last, here it is.

The second disc, however, contains the box set’s biggest knock-me-over-with-a-feather surprises: virtually the entire music library from the 1973-74 Filmation animated Star Trek series, a segment of the franchise that’s often overlooked for no readily justifiable reason. These selections come courtesy not of a miraculous session tape find (stories have circulated for years about how the original tapes no longer exist), but from the box set’s restoration experts and producers painstakingly editing together all of the cues from the audio of the episodes themselves, meticulously splicing together dialogue-and-FX-free sections of music until they had the entire piece of music reconstructed. Fans have been trying to do this since the days of cassette tapes with moderate success, so to hear an expert reconstruction of this music is nothing short of amazing. (Sharp-eared Filmation fans will also recognize a lot of this music from its later reuse in the live-action series Jason Of Star Command.)

As the animated series’ music consists primarily of fairly short cues, the second disc is rounded out with Dennis McCarthy’s all-synth score from the PC game Star Trek: Borg (previously heard on a private-release CD sold by McCarthy himself) and something that I never would’ve anticipated hearing: new Ron Jones Star Trek music. Let me repeat, for emphasis: new Ron Jones Star Trek music. In 1991, Jones was effectively “let go” by the TNG producers for consistently pushing the bounds of both the show’s creative parameters and its music budget, and aside from scoring a couple of late ’90s computer games, Star Trek has been a thing that’s in Jones’ past…until he composed an original three-part concert suite that, free of having to match the timing or editing of film, simply conveys the spirit of Trek as Jones interpreted it. That music makes its debut as a recorded piece here, tacking a new coda onto Jones’ musical legacy with the franchise.

Discs three and four stay with TNG, offering highlights or nearly-complete scores from such episodes as Coming Of Age, Symbiosis, Contagion, The Bonding, The Hunted, Qpid, Tapestry, Parallels, and even the McCarthy-arranged cutdowns of Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture theme. There’s a nice slice of unreleased tracks from Jay Chattaway’s sophomore TNG effort, Tin Man (a score which, in many ways, he never topped); combined with the tracks released on CD by GNP Crescendo in the 1990s, you now have the entire score from Tin Man. The original synth demos for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager themes are heard for the first time, as well as the premiere of Jay Chattaway’s music from the “Klingon Encounter” ride at the much-missed Star Trek: The Experience attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton. A variety of source music is also made available – Q’s mariachi band from Deja Q, the Brahms string quartet piece from Sarek, and oddball source music from Voyager and Enterprise.

If nothing else on this box set has convinced you what a delightful dive into Trek’s musical deep cuts it is, the last track of the last disc should do it: it’s “Comminique (C)”, the piece of 1988 library techno music that graced TNG’s “next week” trailers in the early 1990s. Were thousands of Trek fans clamoring for this? Probably not, but La-La Land identified and licensed it for this set anyway.

The Star Trek 50th Anniversary Collection probably isn’t for the casual fan of Star Trek soundtracks. It’s for the obsessives, the diehards – the people who are still in “maximum Trekkie” mode and still can’t get enough of it.

Disc 1 – Star Trek: The Original Series

1. Third Season Theme Music – Main Title/End Title (soprano version, stereo) (1:14)
2. Love Scene (1:15)
3. Ship in Orbit (Big) (0:40)
4. Sad and Thoughtful on Captain’s Theme (2:30)
5. Captain Playoff No. 1 (Heavy) (0:08)
6. Smooth Neutral Ship Theme (0:41)
7. Playoff on M.T. Theme (0:23)
8. Fight on Captain’s Theme (1:50)
9. Captain Playoff No. 2 (Neutral—Slightly Ominous) (0:12)
10. Stingers (0:51)
11. New Sexy Exotic (2:17)
12. Captain Playoff No. 3 (Sad and Alone) (0:20)
13. Prime Specimen (“The Cage”) (3:13)
14. Monster Illusion (“The Cage”) (2:34)
15. Mr. Spock (“Captain’s Wig” From “The Naked Time”) (3:27)
16. The Big Go (“The Naked Time”) (2:30)
17. Mudd’s Perfidy (0:33)
18. Zap the Cap (1:34)
19. Zap the Cap take 1 (0:08)
20. Zap the Cap take 2 (0:06)
21. Zap the Spaceship (1:28)
22. Zap the Spaceship (0:34)
23. Zap the Spaceship (0:08)
24. Ruk Attacks (1:41)
25. 2nd Ruth (2:35)
26. No Mind / Tense Meeting / Tracking the Alien / The Question (2:31)
27. Survivors (1:42)
28. Bottled (1:52)
29. Monster Illusion (2:46)
30. Monster Illusion (tag) (0:10)
31. The Kibitzers (0:41)
32. Vina’s Punishment (1:54)
33. Vina’s Dance (1:53)
34. Wrong Think (0:43)
35. Act 1 Card (0:38)
36. Crippled Ship (0:55)
37. Speedy Reader (1:06)
38. End Title (0:24)
39. First Goner take 3 (0:48)
40. First Goner take 4 (0:49)
41. Dressing Down (0:08)
42. Monitor Gizzard (0:14)
43. Monitor Gizzard (0:09)
44. Lazer Dazer (2:44)
45. Dodo Girl (0:09)
46. Drugged (1:23)
47. Mace Fight (0:59)
48. Mace Fight (0:18)
49. Down the Throat (1:13)
50. Arrows (1:25)
51. Bumper (broadcast edit) (0:06)
52. Bumpers (alternates) (0:25)
53. Paramount Television I.D. (0:05)
54. Paramount Television I.D. (alternate) (0:04)
55. Inner Workings (alternate mix) (4:03)
56. Star Trek II Epilogue / End Title (sans narration) (8:41)

Disc 2 – Star Trek: The Animated Series

1. Title Theme (1:01)
2. Captain’s Log (1:19)
3. Something Ahead (0:54)
4. Evasive Maneuvers (1:07)
5. Sensor Data (1:07)
6. Intercept Course (0:14)
7. Fire Phasers (0:50)
8. Enterprise Attacked (1:32)
9. Illogical (0:13)
10. Briefing (0:43)
11. On the Viewscreen (1:02)
12. New Heading (0:19)
13. Scanning (0:54)
14. Deflector Shields (0:19)
15. Red Alert (0:33)
16. Battle Stations (0:41)
17. Surprise (0:07)
18. Supplemental Log (0:49)
19. Kirk’s Command (1:11)
20. Sickbay (0:28)
21. Library Computer (0:44)
22. Full Power (0:28)
23. Approaching Coordinates (0:08)
24. The Bigger Meaning (1:15)
25. Trouble in Engineering (0:29)
26. Spock’s Analysis (0:42)
27. Enterprise Wins the Space Race (0:43)
28. McCoy’s Summary (0:16)
29. Just Another Stardate (0:39)
30. Ongoing Mission (0:18)
31. Title Theme (alternate mix) (1:01)
32. Sensor Data (alternate mix) (1:02)
33. Enterprise Attacked (alternate opening) (1:42)
34. Scanning (alternate mix) (0:54)
35. Turbolift Music (0:29)
36. Mr. Arex Lends an Extra Hand (0:38)
37. Fascinating (0:17)
38. Don’t Mess With M’Ress (0:22)
39. Oh My (0:17)
40. Spock’s Quick Analysis (0:22)
41. Yellow Alert (0:26)
42. Off Duty (0:15)
43. Suite: Stingers and Act-Out Music (2:03)
    Music inspired by Star Trek – Ron Jones
44. The Ascent (7:43)
45. Meaning (2:27)
46. Pathway to the Stars (3:17)
    Star Trek: Borg – Dennis McCarthy
47. Main Theme (1:02)
48. The Legend of the Borg (1:24)
49. Battle at Wolf 359 (2:58)
50. The Battle Rages (0:58)
51. Club Q (0:55)
52. I Am Berman of Borg (1:36)
53. Goldsmith Has Been Assimilated! (1:37)
54. Welcome to the Collective Cadet (2:22)
55. Searching the Borg Ship (2:20)
56. Time Is Running Out (1:17)
57. Escape From the Borg Collective (1:42)
58. Borg Hell (2:03)
59. You Will Be Assimilated, Have a Nice Day (2:21)
60. “Resistance Is Futile, My Ass!” / Finale (7:25)
61. End Titles (1:03)

Disc 3 – Star Trek: The Next Generation

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation Main Title (1st season, alternate take) (1:48)
   Coming Of Age
2. Physics / Shuttle Fuss (3:35)
3. Air Bounce (2:04)
4. Competition (2:14)
5. Decisions (2:04)
   Symbisos
6. Flares (3:04)
7. Precious Cargo (2:10)
8. Four Out of Six (1:03)
   Unnatural Selection
9. Searchin’ (1:10)
   The Measure Of A Man
10. Memories (1:19)
    Contagion
11. U.S.S. Yamato / Vaporized (1:22)
12. Floral Tea / Otis’ Revenge (2:07)
13. Romulan Misfire / Phasers / Escape / Goodbye Iconia (2:27)
    The Survivors
14. Diversion (2:16)
    The Bonding
15. Dad / Mom’s Double (2:04)
16. Release / Ceremonial Worf / Off Into Space (4:01)
    The Enemy
17. Into the Pit (3:01)
    The Hunted
18. Escape Artist / Melee (3:28)
19. Breakout (0:32)
20. Phased / Geordi (4:14)
21. Confronted / To the Stars (3:30)
    Sins Of The Father
22. Condemned (1:22)
    Transfigurations
23. Lookin’ Fine (1:44)
24. Lazarus (3:48)
25. Choke Hold / Explanatory / El Ascencio (5:11)
    Future Imperfect
26. Delusionary (4:08)
    Tapestry
27. Saint Q (2:05)
28. It’s a Wonderful Life / Deja Vuosity / War Stories (3:18)
    Parallels
29. Instant Family (2:42)
30. Wolfman Riker (3:09)
    Trailer music
31. Theme From Star Trek: The Motion Picture (30-second version) (0:33)

Disc 4

Theme From Star Trek (“Gene Roddenberry 1921–1991” unused alternate) (0:10)
Tin Man

1. Soft / Student (1:04)
2. Unique / Welcome / Data (0:48)
3. Problems / Land of Living (1:41)
4. Scared (broadcast version) (0:47)
5. One Way Trip (1:08)
6. All of It (0:57)
   Deja Q
7. Tractor Moon / Hoisted (2:58)
8. La Paloma (traditional) (1:13)
9. Coffin Spike (0:45)
   Captain’s Holiday
10. Planet Vegas (1:12)
    Qpid
11. Hat Trick / Sir Guy / Nottingham Castle / Maid Marian (unused) / Betrayed (3:21)
12. To the Block / Swordplay / Game’s Over (4:16)
13. Adieu (1:04)
14. Plucking Three (0:13)
    Elementary, Dear Data
15. Sherlock Tones (0:55)
16. Dead End / Turtleback (2:36)
17. Short Goodbye (1:21)
    Ship In A Bottle
18. Holo Tolodo! (4:02)
    Clues
19. Peace Dividends / Gloria / Blown Away (1:39)
    Manhunt
20. Juke Boxer (3:29)
21. How High the Moon (3:36)
    Star Trek: First Contact
22. Moonlight Becomes You (2:55)
    Unification II
23. Andorian Blues (0:37)
24. Aktuh and Maylota (0:49)
25. Melor Famigal (0:58)
    Lessons
26. Picard and Nella, Date #1 (Picard’s Cabin) (2:43)
27. Picard and Nella, Date #2 (Jefferies Tube) (2:22)
    Sarek
28. Sextet #1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18 (II, Andante) (1:53)
    Star Trek: The Experience
29. Klingon Encounter (4:24)
30. Borg Invasion 4D (7:22)
    Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
31. Main Title Demo (1:59)
32. Single Bridge Demo (2:24)
    Star Trek: Voyager
33. Main Title Demo (1:51)
34. Lookover / Maiden Voyager (1:34)
35. Opera Alla Alienosity (1:11)
    Star Trek: Enterprise
36. Dance-O-Matic (2:28)
    Trailer music
37. Communique (C) (2:33)

Released by: La-La Land Record
Release date: November 25, 2016
Disc one total running time: 1:16:13
Disc two total running time: 1:17:23
Disc three total running time: 1:18:57
Disc four total running time: 1:18:57
Box set total running time: 5:16:50

Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders – music by Lolita Ritmanis, Michael McCuistion & Kristopher Carter

Consider, for a moment, how long it’s taken for the 1966 Batman to reach the torrent of merchandise that we’ve seen recently. We have the entire series on Blu-Ray, there are comics, there are action figures on the way, and Adam West and Burt Ward have reunited as the Dynamic Duo for some direct-to-video animated adventures. It’s glorious. Batman ’66, as we now call it, was my Batman – the Batman I watched over grilled cheese sandwiches at my grandmother’s house every day after school. I’m pleased to see it come out from under the post-Alan-Miller “received fandom wisdom” shadow of “But it isn’t, and never was, what Batman was supposed to be!” (If you’ve been reading either this site or my books long enough, you know that I live to debunk “received fan wisdom” – just about every corner of every franchise has its charms if you go in with an open mind.)

But a Batman ’66 soundtrack album? The thrice-reissued score from the movie that was released between the show’s first and second seasons is as close as we’re likely to get. Take the tangle of sometimes conflicting rightsholders that held up the show’s release on Blu-Ray, add the estates and publishers of two composers, stir, and you have a scenario where even the label that finally brought us a massive CD box set of every classic Star Trek TV score has admitted defeat.

But they can bring us this: the complete score from the first of those animated Batman ’66 adventures, Return Of The Caped Crusaders. I had very, very mixed feelings about the movie itself, but the soundtrack is just about magical. Frequent collaborators Ritmans, Carter and McCuistion have been composing music for Batman since the 1990s animated series, so they know what’s up in the Batcave – and they’re not afraid to luxuriate in the classic TV show’s jazzy-with-surf-guitar style, or quote Neal Hefti’s immortal Batman theme, to make it fit in almost seamlessly alongside the three season of live action. It helps matters considerably that they were given enough of a music budget to hire real players to bring it to life: it’s a really lush score for a cartoon.

But it’s perfectly in keeping with the Batman ’66 ethos, and that alone makes the Return Of The Caped Crusaders soundtrack an absolute joy.

1. Classic Batman Main Title (1:24)
2. Batman’s New Look (0:25)
3. Meet Our Baddies / It’s the Bat-Signal (2:22)
4. To the Batcave (1:53)
5. Not So Fast, Old Chum / Crosswalk Conundrum (0:30)
6. Riddle Me This? / Atomic Lab Fight (3:13)
7. Jokermobile Chase (1:49)
8. Catwoman Has Batnip (1:49)
9. TV Dinner Factory Arrival (1:24)
10. TV Dinner Factory Kerfuffle / TV Tray Death Trap / Dessert Denouement (4:31)
11. Establish Police HQ / The BatShadow Rises / A Moment With Aunt Harriet / You’re Dismissed (2:15)
12. In Search of Criminal Activity (1:10)
13. Batcave Batmobile Arrival / To the Bat-Rocket (1:20)
14. The Right Bat Stuff / Space Joker Playon (1:29)
15. Bat-Rocket Approaches the Station (1:21)
16. Outer Space Rendezvous / Under the Influence (3:34)
17. Zero-G Brawl (2:29)
18. Like a Bat in the Night / Holy Hitchhiker, Robin (0:37)
19. Bruce Snaps at Aunt / Back Alley Dirge (1:03)
20. Why Won’t He Answer? (0:33)
21. Gotham Crime Spree (0:39)
22. Bat Dupe See / Batmen Take Over / Robin Figures It Out (3:39)
23. Catwoman Is in Her Element / To the Catmobile (2:10)
24. Batcave Showdown (2:24)
25. Radioactive Silo Trap / Bat Anti-Isotope Spray / Surprise Prison Inspection (2:46)
26. Mass Prison Break (1:32)
27. The Show Must Go On / Bat TV Two See (2:38)
28. Bad Batmen (2:00)
29. One Step Ahead (2:22)
30. Villains Plan (3:44)
31. Airship Battle (2:18)
32. Farewell Catwoman (1:39)
33. Classic Batman End Title (3:22)
    Bonus Tracks
34. Gotham Palace TV Theme (0:21)
35. Hector and the Hoedaddies (0:21)
36. Bedbugs TV Source (0:53)
37. Kitkat Kave Dancing (0:35)
38. Gotham Palace TV Source #2 (0:45)
39. Joker Circus (0:43)
40. Elegant Party Source (1:01)

Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: November 11, 2016
Total running time: 1:12:30