Richard Penna

If working in a large corporation has taught me anything, some web interface used by the entire company could be in the sole charge of a bunch of grads and someone half competent keeping an eye on them. Also, no one who's actually in charge of the money ever thinks the 'front end' bits are much more than nice-to-haves. It it doesn't actively crash all the time, it must be fine, surely.

I too hope that they've managed to get things arranged with Disney as The 13th Warrior would be a notable expansion for my nostalgic side. I don't think 'scary' needs to mean straight up horror though - just some character or element of it. Unfortunately I don't think Ice Age or I, Robot qualify. Sphere would of course, but that would take a miracle. What about Evolution, if Powell is continuing his expansion quest?

Ah yes... Murray "I upload entire albums to my agent's website with no security, then get angry when fans love my music" Gold.

I keep forgetting about Spidey 3. The annoying thing is that 99% of it has leaked but that 1% contains a really beautiful cue. The whole thing is a mess - we ideally want Young's complete intended score plus whatever Lurie (and Debney?) did. I have to believe that its problems stem more from the studios being twats than Elfman still not allowing a release of material with his themes. I wonder if anyone's told him that we've all got it anyway....

I don't see where any ideas come from about this not being a "blockbuster release" or a big name composer. Goldsmith's Love Field arrived after precisely zero fanfare back in 2021, as did Williams' Presumed Innocent. Similar with the complete Matrix a while back - they all just use the standard clue game. If they do the emoticon thing again it's probably going to take us 20 minutes to guess them. Oh, and just in time for HTTYD 3 to finally grace us with its presence on streaming (everyone has their CD, right? Otherwise Powell will be mad... )

https://www.facebook.com/varesesarabanderecords/posts/pfbid02jfGy7AsdqBdSQYc5M4tnrPJRUSVrXawActEe9KeEC6yVn9i3NhVtUA3qEoHRDUHXl

I want to like stuff like this, but that was just standard trailerised RCP nonsense. Anyone in the RCP sphere could've done that.

Yes! My formative years were the first half of the 00s - probably by 2005 or so my musical direction was established, because I already had an appreciation of synth/electronic music from other interests I had. I'm not sure where my tolerance for modern horror scoring came from but it definitely wasn't during those initial years.

If the last half page or so is any indication, some super judgemental stuff is about to erupt... The only Barry even remotely close my top 50 is Dances With Wolves, and I think it's overlong and tedious outside of my 35 minute album. Unlikely candidate considering the competition. My non-Williams top 10 is going to look something vaguely like this, although not in this order (and I reckon three of these would go if I included Williams). A lot of scores just miss this list and would easily be in a top 20-30. FotR Gladiator Sleepy Hollow The Mummy The Edge Dante's Peak Signs The Village The Horse Whisperer The New World

I'm not sure a drama with a pretty low key chamber-esque score is going to massively benefit from proper surround sound. A DVD my brother has from the BBC from the late 00s has a sequence with a lot of effects, dialogue and some music, but if you separate the 5.1 channels you find that all of the sfx and vocals are mixed entirely in the centre, leaving the music almost entirely isolated in the sides, and the rears just have vague echoes. At that point a TV budget evidently didn't allow for the sorts of mixes you get now.

The UK is uniquely shit at choosing good songs most of the time, as you say finding neither the cheesiness nor the zaniness. I don't really watch the show unless there are significant numbers of songs that I really like (such as last year). But it's still a nice way to get a curated window into current music on the continent and I've gone on to buy full albums from a handful of artists I've discovered.

This year's crop is out. I'm finding bits to like in San Marino (sort of), Norway and Austria. Don't like ours at all, but we're generally rubbish at this.

Ah, time for my yearly trawl though Europe's cheesiest songs. Last year's was a huge haul but I've sampled this year's crop and not much is sticking out except Austria and Norway. However, I'm always looking for that melodic hook, while I think a lot of traditional fans are just looking for something fun and silly. Also songs such San Marino's, where the vocals are annoying but the instrumental is interesting. Unfortunately our entry, while not as absurdly awful as a few (looking at you, Scooch) is not doing anything for me at all so I just hope we can avoid the murky, discarded depths of null point. I wish we didn't have to deal with the Ukraine situation a few years ago (and the associated sympathy vote to give them first place) because Spaceman was an awesome song that should've won. (and song-wise, way better than whatever it was that Ukraine had)

Varada Sethu joining Gibson as another companion alongside Gibson for 2025 series: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68802766 Looks like all the rumours about Gibson being fired (or leaving for some other reason) were clickbaity rubbish. Unless it had emerged that Gibson was a nightmare to work with, there would be no sense in someone leaving a reboot so quickly. I guess it must've been the talk about a new actress that led the usual suspects to decide she was replacing Gibson.

Dear god... what incompetence. If ever there was a release they should've let Intrada handle instead of whatever nimwits are deciding pressing arrangements for this.

The only release where that bothers me with Young is Hard Rain, gratefully corrected by LLL's release from a few years ago. Similar to Jurassic, it's not really missing anything huge, but quite a few tracks are moved out of film order for no listenability reason I can see. Otherwise, I'm a big fan of The Core, Something The Lord Made and of course Spidey 3. Hush is also very enjoyable.

I have the original and it sounds fine. Even if it's got extra music I'm likely happy as is, as I've never seen the film. The art attached to my current album has the same outline the new one does, and a google of posters from the film show varying degrees of some sort of 'thing' encasing the women. Looks like it's just part of the original design.

Wall-E is a beautiful score but with an album that would've benefitted from a little bit of trimming. Passengers... hmm. It has bits that work very well on album but it's largely a background thing for me. Also messes with chronology in a way that bizarrely loses you narratively but also doesn't seem to me to help with the listening experience either. I'm not sure what Newman was trying to do here.

Wow, quite a few then! Although some of those strike me as either Williams making a poetic name for a suite of 'bits' or a name that is vaguely correct - I wouldn't call Escape From Venice entirely inaccurate, for example, and other ones like Rescuing Sarah are presenting music from that overall scene - just not all of it. Whereas Entry into the Great Hall.... is a clear two parter name where it's not like there's a first half that has different music... it's just not there at all, if you see what I mean. I think that makes it a bit different.

Considering JKR's grip on most story related aspects and on all British cast, I'm a bit surprised she allowed the filmmakers to hire an American composer. I'm not sure making it a score and concert suite-only album would've made that much difference considering the entire score though - maybe ten minutes of material given to more score? And knowing Williams he'd have done a KotCS and chosen the most incidental and random cues. For me it's more what those smattering of children's suite pieces does to the flow of the album, and the vast stylistic difference between it and the score.

I don't know whether I got this or LotR first, but both are textbook examples of albums missing vast amounts of music, and therefore maximum confusion for a new soundtrack fan. But AFAIK this is the only example of Williams omitting music promised by a track title.

I could swear in the earlier days of collecting I must've downloaded Entry into the Great Hall... more than once out of assumption that a copy was going round with half the track missing. Maybe he intended to include it at one point and forgot to rename the track? Given its omission from there and just how damn well it works in the alley sequence it felt like a double betrayal. The whole OST is frustrating to me anyway. The Children's suite is written in such a different style to the score that creating a concept album that blended the two doesn't work for me at all.

I doubt piracy is a factor. Probably just too much effort - they'd have to get publishers to send them PDFs for everything. I'm amazed Apple Music is able to get so many album covers at 3000px.

Boom. While I'm sure there are directors/producers who have an unusually detached view of the music (maybe similar to those directors who let their DP do what they want and focus on actors' performances), it seems to me that the vast majority know what they want and don't want, and that what we get from a composer has been gatekept by the filmmakers from at least the creative apect (perhaps not theory perspective). Hence if a score just sucks I very much hesitate to blame the composer, although there's cognitive bias on my part because there are very few scores that I feel are truly horrendous. It's more the elitists who decide that if a score isn't Mozart then it shouldn't exist, or that if a composer doesn't have their required standard of training, their music isn't worth anything.

The OST feels a bit overly long to me for the type of score and movie, given we're not dealing with large numbers of themes and concepts that need representing. I had the full album at one point and gradually lost tracks I never listened to, and it came down to Isabel's Horse and Buggy and one of the tracks with Parkening's extended performance. I've seen the film and the score works well and it's perfectly fine as a nicely crafted domestic score, but for listening purposes The Village is more to my tastes for an Autumnal sound.