One of the main reasons I abandoned soundtrack reviewing, was the sheer volume of average stuff I ended up wading through. It's fun to trash a terrible album (apologies to those long suffering composers) or try and promote a great one (I remember being thrilled to promote Jeff Beal's terrific score to Pollock, having received a review copy, an album which otherwise might have gone under the radar) but writing about average is just so buggeringly tedious. However, when so many scores are getting substantial releases, sorting the good from the average is increasingly difficult and the same is starting to apply to archive releases.
When they started out, our industrious and dedicated film music labels were unearthing classics from the vaults and putting them onto CD. These were scores that everyone wanted, but we're getting to the Jerry Goldsmith bottle cap collecting stage. Sometimes we forget just how many movies have been made in the history of cinema and not every note of every score needs a release. Sure, there are undiscovered classics, but plenty of dross or scores of limited appeal. It is, of course, great to see them recognised, but it does risk watering down the catalogue of "classic" scores of the past from being essential to a rather more difficult choice of which ones are actually worth picking up.
Another issue of late is the reissue issue. In the last 10/15 years, a number of genuinely classic scores have had multiple rereleases from boutique film music labels: Superman (plus a re-recording), Poltergeist, ET, Patton and the much desired Cherry 2000 (at one point deemed the rarest of the rare) to name but five, not to mention expanded editions of new scores not massively long after they were originally released: Lost in Space, Independence Day, Star Trek and so forth.
It's hard to judge the impact of these. Hopefully they are making some decent cash to prop up those releases that don't sell in such numbers or to allow for more lavish booklets elsewhere, but as fans of George Lucas know, it can get quite frustrating, not to mention expensive, to be asked to dip into the wallet every few years for an incrementally better version of the same thing. It's true that the new release of Poltergeist does indeed sound somewhat better than the Rhino release, although the improvements between the Rhino and FSM Superman are perhaps a bit more marginal. The ET releases open up a whole new kettle of worms since both are 90% (wild guess) the same, but for some reason, none of the producers put together a release that was entirely final, film versions with alternates at the end and so both are a mish mash of both. The difference between the takes are fairly minimal in most cases, but it's frustrating for the die hard Williams fan after an "ultimate" release of the score as heard in the film.
Those are isolated examples and I'm sure a bit of research and the cash strapped fan can make an informed choice as to whether the 43rd version of Stars Wars is an essential purchase and the improvements are material or incremental (if noticeable at all - the Sony releases of the original Special Edition soundtracks are meant to be a soupcon better... but only on high end equipment) and money better spent elsewhere. We should, I suppose, be grateful for living in an age of film music plenty but the cash strapped film music fan is now deluged with both new and old scores to buy. Guess that's why crappy review sites like this one are so important... There, I think I justified my own existence.
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