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Which album do you enjoy listening to more?


Josh500

Which album do you enjoy listening to more?  

50 members have voted

  1. 1. The Adventures of Tintin vs. War Horse

    • The Adventures of Tintin
      20
    • War Horse
      30


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In my opinion, they are both among JW's top scores. You can't really say (objectively) which is better, but you can say, which you personally prefer.

I prefer Tintin (slightly) more, simply because this type of score is more my cup of tea...

Maybe it's just me, but WH was a bit of an anti-climax after all the excitement of Tintin...

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Tintin and I am tempted to say 'by far'.

War Horse is the type of score that will make much more sense after we have seen the movie. Its quite good but the context is lacking right now.

Though I must say Tintin was a great listen even without context.

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I enjoy them both equally quite a bit. And both scores have the same exact problem: no stunning thematic material that anybody (but film music fans) will remember. Besides, everything is top-notch.

Karol

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both scores have the same exact problem: no stunning thematic material that anybody (but film music fans) will remember.

:blink:

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An entertaining score vs. a dramatic score. At the end of the day, I'm gonna have to pick the entertaining one because it's fun to listen to. War Horse is an excellent score, but it doesn't have the fun factor.

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For a long time now I've been getting much more pleasure from listening to scores that are more along the lines of War Horse, Angela's Ashes, etc, than scores like Tintin, the prequels, and the like.

So War Horse, for me.

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I somehow doubt kids hum Tintin's theme while going out of cinema. Do you disagree?

Karol

Which has very little to do to how great the thematic material is

Indeed. Once again, this board confuses popularity with quality.

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I'm not familiar enough with WH yet to vote, but based on my first impressions I think it'll probably be WH. They're both great, though. Couldn't be happier with the quality of JW's latest scores.

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They might have been equal but I have to take the God-Awful Bianca Castafiore and Milanese Nightingdale tracks for Tintin. So War Horse wins by a small margin. The integration of the themes in Tintin are pretty amazing though.

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I somehow doubt kids hum Tintin's theme while going out of cinema. Do you disagree?

Karol

Which has very little to do to how great the thematic material is

Indeed. Once again, this board confuses popularity with quality.

If you read my previous post you'd see popularity is not what I had in mind.

Karol

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I somehow doubt kids hum Tintin's theme while going out of cinema. Do you disagree?

Karol

Which has very little to do to how great the thematic material is

Indeed. Once again, this board confuses popularity with quality.

If you read my previous post you'd see popularity is not what I had in mind.

Karol

My bad, I stand corrected. That said, hummability seems to be an equally superficial way of measuring quality, at least to me. :)

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__________________

I am really starting to get into this score now, and while listening to the album, I kept wondering, what makes this better than The Patriot? The Patriot has a lot of beautiful themes, as well (and a concert version of the main themes, to boot), and it has also some great battle music. And yet... I am sure WH is more highly regarded here than The Patriot. Why?

And how about Far and Away? Is WH better than Far and Away? I don't think so. At the very least, they are equally good...

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I somehow doubt kids hum Tintin's theme while going out of cinema. Do you disagree?

Karol

Which has very little to do to how great the thematic material is

Indeed. Once again, this board confuses popularity with quality.

If you read my previous post you'd see popularity is not what I had in mind.

Karol

My bad, I stand corrected. That said, hummability seems to be an equally superficial way of measuring quality, at least to me. :)

Yeah, it was a wrong way to put it. My mistake.

Karol

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Not sure why the opera music is getting so much hate in Tintin. The edit is horrendous, but the rest of the track is great.

it's not just the sound effect edit

The album was almost excellent missing about 10 minutes of important material

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At this point, War Horse is like a random score I could listen at any time, while I've come to strongly relate the Tintin score to Tintin and I need a Tintin mood for it. This happens to me as well with Harry Potter or Indy.

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Not sure why the opera music is getting so much hate in Tintin. The edit is horrendous, but the rest of the track is great.

it's not just the sound effect edit

The album was almost excellent missing about 10 minutes of important material

Oh yeah, I agree that it shouldn't be on the album, as it's already been released many times I'm sure. But that's not a reason to skip it.

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  • 1 month later...

I finally went back and voted in this thread, having been listening to both albums (albeit months after most of you). War Horse got my vote without a moment's hesitation...Tintin is growing on me, but War Horse has incredible warmth, mature lightheartedness, gut-wrenching pain, bravery, redemption, humor, and more. I knew I loved the bonding theme from the first time I heard it in the trailer, and I'm happy to say that the rest of the score does not disappoint. It would have benefited from an old-fashioned concert arrangement or two, and there are some unfortunate sound quality issues in some specific passages, but Tintin shares those faults.

Like I said, though, Tintin is growing on me, slowly but surely. Maybe in a few years from now I'll be able to regard them as being on the same level, albeit for very different reasons.

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Me too. War Horse is my favorite Williams score since Revenge of the Sith. I think it's the most fluid OST presentation of all of Williams' soundtracks.

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Yeah, this is a VERY good OST presentation. Of course, part of that is simply because the structure of the film lends itself to a musical arc that works well on album, but the real miracle is that Williams and friends didn't screw that up for the OST! ;) I know it's not 100% chronological, but as far as I can tell, the slight scrambling of the order genuinely does help the flow without compromising the musical storytelling. This is a really rewarding album to listen to in its entirety...I feel a little Thor-like about this one, haha.

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Yeah, this is a VERY good OST presentation. Of course, part of that is simply because the structure of the film lends itself to a musical arc that works well on album, but the real miracle is that Williams and friends didn't screw that up for the OST! ;) I know it's not 100% chronological, but as far as I can tell, the slight scrambling of the order genuinely does help the flow without compromising the musical storytelling. This is a really rewarding album to listen to in its entirety...I feel a little Thor-like about this one, haha.

Hehehe. True. It is one of the most satisfying OSTs JW has compiled in a long time.

Oh and after difficult and long deliberation I choose War Horse. Just a tiny fraction more satisfying on album for me than Tintin.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I somehow doubt kids hum Tintin's theme while going out of cinema. Do you disagree?

Karol

You're right. The kids are all humming Pirates of the Caribbean, but yeah, that is totally a good criteria to base your rating off of.

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Of course it's a good criterion. Just because not all memorable music fits our tastes doesn't mean that being memorable isn't a good thing. And I hate to say it, but Tintin's theme is one of the least memorable themes Williams has ever written, and it MUST be THE least memorable theme for a titular character he's ever written. It sounds like a little throwaway fanfare that was never intended to be used more than once...and not even the sort that makes you think, Oh man, if only Williams had taken that little moment and expanded it out into a full theme. I mean, I'm liking Tintin more and more each time I listen to it, but I still think Williams massively dropped the ball in the case of that theme.

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But there's a difference between memorability and hummability. I doubt you could hum segments of "The Chase Through Coruscant," doesn't mean it's not memorable. And there's also a difference between memorability for the masses and memorability period. How many people do you know who could remember Monica's Theme from AI (outside of this MB)?

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I don't care how memorable something is for the masses. I care how memorable something is to me.

As for Tintin's three motifs, I can't get them out of my head. They usually follow each other in my mind. I think the heroic motif is very strong (the way it opens it's stronger than the Raider's March (because it goes down before jumping up) but at the same time it's not meant to last more than a few seconds), and the other one is sneaky slightly jazzy enough for my tastes.

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But there's a difference between memorability and hummability. I doubt you could hum segments of "The Chase Through Coruscant," doesn't mean it's not memorable. And there's also a difference between memorability for the masses and memorability period. How many people do you know who could remember Monica's Theme from AI (outside of this MB)?

Sure, there's a difference. Case in point: Tintin's theme is extremely hummable. It's also the least memorable titular character theme Williams has ever written! :P

Perhaps "memorable" is the wrong word to use. The aspect of the music that I'm talking about might be described as "star quality." It's extremely subjective, extremely hard to describe or quantify, and extremely important. One of many reasons why Williams has been so successful is because much of his music has this quality in spades, particularly where the actual themes and melodies are concerned. This is the quality that is so conspicuously lacking in Tintin's theme...I can remember it, and I can hum it, but I can't care about it. Williams' great classic themes are completely different...they may take a longer time to remember in their entirety, but their emotional resonance is so much more profound. War Horse (and the Unicorn theme) proves that Williams is still capable of this.

EDIT: And I don't really care how much other people remember the music, either. I'm primarily concerned with my own emotional reaction to it.

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But there's a difference between memorability and hummability. I doubt you could hum segments of "The Chase Through Coruscant," doesn't mean it's not memorable. And there's also a difference between memorability for the masses and memorability period. How many people do you know who could remember Monica's Theme from AI (outside of this MB)?

Sure, there's a difference. Case in point: Tintin's theme is extremely hummable. It's also the least memorable titular character theme Williams has ever written! :P

Perhaps "memorable" is the wrong word to use. The aspect of the music that I'm talking about might be described as "star quality." It's extremely subjective, extremely hard to describe or quantify, and extremely important. One of many reasons why Williams has been so successful is because much of his music has this quality in spades, particularly where the actual themes and melodies are concerned. This is the quality that is so conspicuously lacking in Tintin's theme...I can remember it, and I can hum it, but I can't care about it. Williams' great classic themes are completely different...they may take a longer time to remember in their entirety, but their emotional resonance is so much more profound. War Horse (and the Unicorn theme) proves that Williams is still capable of this.

To each his own. In some ways I think we agree - I like Tintin, but it's far from my favorite JW theme/score. I'd even say it's Williams' least good score since Minority Report (which I also really like). I guess that's the great thing about a genius like John Williams - even his below average scores are really quite good.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So the winner here is "War Horse"? Anybody wanna change their minds? ;)

After listening to both scores for a couple of months now, I am inclined to say, in my opinion they are both equally good (albeit in markedly different ways, of course). I'd rate both scores 4,5 stars (out of 5)!

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They're both high 5 star scores and in terms of enjoyability, I'd say they're about equal! And Thor, you're definition of JW's middle ground must be some really damn high stuff ;)

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