thestat

Chris Young is a god amongst men. I can't wait to hear The Piper and Nosferatu in full, having pledged £70 on Nosferatu. The Piper seems wild - but that is good. Very recent:

Actually liked Dead Reckoning and its score, despite my misgivings about Balfe as a non-composer. Interesting when checking this score list that Joshua Pacey seems to be the one in charge of a lot of the great action stuff in the film. Anything credited with the fantastic stuff at the airport etc comes down to Pacey - I reckon a lot of this is Pacey, especially the string figure that comes in at about 0:59.

Perhaps there is some Rachmaninoff influence - I feel it, don't see it. But hey, that's classically trained film composers. Balfe's reference points are Esquire Trevor Jones from 1992.

Totally agree with EdMilson here - Franglen totally pulled this off. Yes, it's not Horner but then again what is? The end of Knife Fight is fantastic action music up there with James or Don Davis in their 1990s heyday with snares and pianos and all manner of mayhem and I am just glad that someone does this sort of work nowadays!

Oh wow. Sorry for you. I hope you have at 30 people writing your posts from now on. And you need to make sure you don't rock the boat - the middle aisle, all the way, no emotion, pure instrumental functionality. ie, nothing.

Thank you - this was my point. The guy was everywhere at the time. There's a lot of these composers that I hated or disliked at times, due to, well, just me being an immature shit that did not understand industry: Examples: Hated Mark Mancina for a year because his Assassins score was weirdly subdued with no melodies or bombast and lacked the Speed and Bad Boys awesomeness - soon to be rectified with Twister. Love/hate with Jerry Goldsmith - 95-97 were rough times for JG fans. He was doing his Stuart-Baird-Refrain (as another mind put it on FSM) for everything, culminating in Chain Reaction where the action was the SBF. River Wild in 94 was terrible and lazy, The Shadow was brilliant and innovative, as was Bad Girls. JG was unbalanced. City Hall is, and remains, a lazy arse Bernstein score as does LA Confidential, no love for these two. But then JG recovers with perhaps the help of the HiJacking from Air Force One, and everything from Mulan to 13th Warrior is fully brilliant.

Dude, totally agree, but the first True Detective broke up the standard on TV crime so was expecting this to do something similar especially with Foster and her reputation, but hey fucking ho, not too bothered if it's a Scandinoir for the non-reading lot. Just expected the brand to aim higher which they will probably do.

What, as in 'let's announce the BBC newsreporters', with a bit more brass oomph but a lot more piano cheese! Kamen's always been a chap that has traversed the line with being a ridiculous character and an amazing icon.....the hair, the beard. I love him, but that is just me

The Davis promo is the one with Eye of the Pyramid, but I guess I will just shut up now as clearly no-one wants to trench up this stuff .....but I do like your acknowledgment of additional music on Die Hard 2. So, does the database function from mostly late 90s when Zimmer started to bring up his co-composers and they got ASCAP credited or is it something else? I'm not seeing much info there on anything pre-1998 outside of the obvious names

Excited for this as the first episode was good, but it better do something that is different from about a 1000 Iceland-shot shows that do more or less the same thing. The Thing references are appreciated, but Katla on Netflix and The Case more or less cover the first episode. Need to be a bit more original if you want to meet the standards of the first one.

No it's not official, none of it will be in most cases - even with Horner and Pagemaster etc. Davis included tracks from the Pagemaster release on his promo CD that he apparently sent out - much like HZ composers do with their websites - and we are just left with a 'well that doesn't sound like composer A and B, but it sure is very similar to the Matrix'.....I mean at least HZ started crediting them...... The problem with HZ composers is that they never get to develop an idiosyncratic style outside of the first patch - Powell, HGW, the rest are interchangeable

Dudes - you are just film music fans like the rest of us and you write blog posts on film scores you like. Get a bit of a perspective. Perhaps use your bloggos to get some fan base momentum if you really are in the business of getting composers' work released instead of dropping silly-arse hints about the supposedly priviledged content that some social media managers have decided to dropped your way.

Russo is the most banal of composers - he gets what he needs to do but never anything more at all. Listen to the theme of For Man Kind - it sounds like the kind of music that should be in a space opera but it is so hopelessly bland. Sure, Fargo had some good Burwell approximations but Alien.....it will be Jed Kunzel again - some orchestrator dude doing ghosting and Russo does the most banal theme imaginable.

Nah, much as I love JH, when JG did a logo, he did a logo. Tyler's terribly pointless reinterpretation (or whatever you might call it) makes this point - who needs sampled choir and dodgy syncophated snare drums for the same bit of music?!

In Noctem is brilliant work - captures so much of the (now decidedly problematic) series well. Order of the Phoenix is a terrible, terrible score. Like Randy Edelman catapulted into 2007 and blasted out a score, horrendous stuff. Ugh.

Yeah, Mulan is massively disappointing and I do worry about the degree of blandness he will bring to Gladiator 2. HGW has always been a bit of a small-scale operator, using small ensembles etc for his work. Spy Game back in 2001 was a brilliant example of what he could do - full on semitechno electronics (randomly based on Mansell's Requiem for a Dream), epic choral stuff, orchestral action stuff in the RC mode, and that great simple piano theme accompanied by a boy soprano, just brilliant work KoH is the other masterpiece but hopefully he can get back to this level of inspiration......

JG's The Deal from Extreme Prejudice - by most accords he recorded the synth track with the orchestra, and the amazing precision this must have taken is phenomenal, as is obviously the music:

Young's scores, both for Nosferatu and Piper need to be released right now. What is his management doing? Their big client has released/performed 2 massive orchestral scores, and they are not getting them released, JFC?

The only Bond, outside of Arnold's awesomeness, that mattered was this, the disco beat, of a cool guy, in his olden times:

I really hate Barry's modernisation attempts in A View to A Kill etc, but fuck, The Living Daylights is a massive beauty in terms of the Old Man Disco he brought along with him, and totally convinced everyone he is the coolest guy in all:

Compared to what Erik is saying, I would wage that Dar the Hero is one of the greatest hero themes of all time (5:14 onwards, NOW that is a theme!)

This is horrible - it is like the worst of Kamen brought to table, cheesy-arse light entertainment music (in this case what sounds like an approximation of British propreity with a dangling piano) and those optimistic melodies. Still, great orchestration.

Edmilson, totally agree with you on Barry's DWW. I loved it when it came out, got annoyed by Barry's style in the 1990s, dismissed DWW. Recently, watched the 4k version of the film and wow. The music is literally a character in the film, especially in the early parts of the film with Dunbar's journey. Accompanied by the cinematography, it is just astonishing work from Barry. I lamented Poledouris missing out on this project due to his very ethical commitment to Milius and what impact this choice had on Basil's career at this crucial moment on him breaking out. At the same time, I am not convinced that even a master composer like Poledouris could have captured Barry's majestic simplicity in such an overt, massively emotional way. It is one of the greatest of scores no doubt. A gift for Barry fans, and indeed, for anyone with a heartbeat, one of Barry's best on an endless loop, so fucking cool:

What about Don Davis on The Pagemaster - Davis included several cues from this on his promo CD If you have access to the archives, can you check what they have for Kamen's Die Hard 2 and Robin Hood - they are both very Kamenesque but it would be interesting to hear if there was any help here, considering the nutty deadlines he was under

Going through this. Yes, it does sound like a massive improvement over the disappointing original album which I can totally frisbee now (much as I would have liked to do when I bought in 2003, terrible, terrible CD, probably listened to it once back then). Not sure if I want to hear this expanded again though despite appreciating JH's work here. The main theme is the umpteenth version of that same old theme, the action stuff is good but in that post-90s style with soft orchestrations (and recording in particular), the dissonance is not sufficiently crazy, but still annoyingly prevalent, just not picking any highlights from this. Yes, it is louder and yes, there is more drumming. Still, it sounds like outtakes from every other 2000s score he did. Not sure why JH did not pick up on that riff from Courage Under Fire (used for Titanic a lot) and deploy that in films like this where he just was not massively inspired.