And it's beautiful. The packaging and art direction is fantastic; I do have a quibble about it though. The liner text is quite small, so when the printing runs slightly off (as half of the pages in mine did) it can get difficult to read. I consider my eyesight pretty good, so those with lesser eyesight may be more irritated than I am. But oh well.
Anyway... the music. BF gets compared to Wagner a lot, and it makes sense - you know how hard it is to get through a Wagner opera in one sitting (urge to conquer Poland notwithstanding)? Like those massive works, this is such a dense and aggressive listen that it's almost a challenge to get through at once. Fortunately, almost every bar has something interesting to offer - a unique idea, a little orchestrational quirk, a BADASS burst of the main theme - that it easily justifies any potential exhaustion.
The big surprise is how well-assembled the original album was - it didn't have everything you needed from the movie (which, I should admit, I love to pieces - I constantly had it on as a kid, and despite its flaws I still find it a lot of fun, and might be why I'm head over heels for the music), but it was very well thought out. Two-Face Three Step, for instance - one would think that's a self-contained composition if they hadn't seen the film, or otherwise known it's cobbled from four separate cues. But it has the coherency of a concert piece - a wild, modernistic concert piece, but all the same.
Presentation-wise, it's all good - the sequencing differs slightly from the film, and there's bits of music that aren't here ("Boys, KILL THE BAT!"), but like 96% of the score is here, and I don't miss the other 4%. I'll live, and you will too.
Can you tell I enjoyed this? haha
