Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - Hans & Friends

Oh goody, a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean (POTC) movie. I'm not sure I'll ever bother finding out what is so strange about the tides in this one as the reviews have been largely crap and I was bored after half of the first one. No idea how or why I ended up seeing the two ear and eye bleeding sequels. Maybe I really have no willpower of my own.

The one thing that did improve after the first film (nominally by Klaus Badelt, but how come Badelt is never credited with "original POTC themes" in the later, Zimmer scores?) when Zimmer took over to deliver some occasionally jolly accompaniment. On Stranger Tides is more of the same, exactly what you'd expect; action music that sounds like Gladiator (really, Hans, something else, please?) and lots of Captain Jack's theme. Unfortunately, some of the whimsy of the theme is lost as it's ramped up too far, too often.

One significant redeeming feature is the inclusion of some gorgeous guitar cues performed by Rodrigo Y Gabriela (evidently Heitor Pereira is busy these days). The only downside is that they result in the album sounding like two scores mixed up; one intimate, Hispanic, the other trad Hans Zimmer. Still, it makes for a pleasing rest. The album is almost half remixes and other crap, best avoided. Fun enough and worth a punt if you like the previous POTC scores, but hardly essential.

Pieces of eight accepted at Amazon if you want to acquire it. Or they might exchange it for your parrot.*

*They won't, the lily livered bastards.

Thor - Patrick Doyle

If Kenneth Branagh is an unlikely choice to direct a comic book movie, then Patrick Doyle is a mildly unlikely choice to score it, but I guess we should be grateful Branagh as able to engage his composer of choice. Films based on Marvel Comics have had variably good scores, the high water being Elfman's Spider-Man efforts, but with some fine entries from the X-Men films and John Ottman's decent scores for the Fantastic Four.

The most striking thing about Thor is that it doesn't sound a whole lot like Doyle most of the time. Much has been made of its Remote Control-ness, which isn't entirely unfair. There's a lot of sustained string lines and percussion; Frost Giant Battle is typical in this regard. It's all quite exciting and there's more going on than in the average RC (or Brian Tyler) score, at least the strings occasionally bounce around but it sounds from interviews that Doyle very much did what was expected without too much room for manoeuvre.

Outside of the action, the incidental scoring is action without the drums in a lot of cases. Long string lines and low registers predominate (another aspect Doyle commented upon in interviews). The main melodic material is fine enough at the time, but not exactly indelible afterwards. I'm sure it'll look good on his CV and keep his profile raised - I rather dreaded his music being rejected given that his scoring can be a touch intrusive at times (although this usually makes for a great album). Thor is certainly muscular (haha) entertainment, but the strictures of the studio and genre conventions don't really show Doyle at his best.

If you can find your magical hammer, sell it and go buy the score from Amazon.

Film Music Free Friday: Reboot the Music Part 3

OK, a day late, but thought I should finish (probably) this particular column stream.

Not only do film serials get rebooted, but so too do TV shows and where better to look than two of the longest running TV shows in history and, in one case, the longest running sci-fi show in the world.

When Doctor Who started in 1963, I doubt anyone would imagine that Daleks would be running amok at the Royal Albert Hall while a symphony orchestra blasted out a ramped up version of Ron Grainer's ghostly theme (originally produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in a version that changed little for almost 20 years). For all the protestations that Doctor Who was a bit of a cult TV show, the original series actually had MORE viewers than it does today. Yet the BBC rarely considered it more than a show for kids and gave it a budget of about 49 pence per episode until being cancelled in 1989. Even then it regularly received as many viewers as the show does today but in 2011, it's deemed a smash hit.

Fortunately, the good Doctor made a return in 2005 with Russell T Davis rebooted Doctor Who after 16 years off our screens, save for the 1999 movie. Although I am not a fan of Debney's score to the TV movie, it did at least set some kind of precedent for Murray Gold when he took over scoring duties for RTD. The original Doctor Who went through an eclectic mix of composers, some independently engaged by specific directors, but often from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when an electronic score was called for (or, perhaps more accurately, all they could afford). The original scores often seem rather hokey these days. If acoustic, the ensembles were small and the music fairly terse and unmemorable. The same goes for the electronic scores which were often difficult to separate from the sound effects.

However, Davis decided that in 2005, only big scoring would do, although I suspect few remember that the first series of the rebooted show was almost entirely electronic, albeit more synth orchestra than the kind of eerie bleeps of the original show. However, a small chorus for the first Dalek episodes gave a taste of things to come and by the first Christmas special, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales were performing a full orchestral score. If one had to imagine the opposite of the original show's music, Murray surely provided it. Bold, epic, tuneful, not to mention loud - indeed, loud enough to be spoofed for its occasional intrusiveness. However, it was just one element the show had always needed, although I grant that had the original episodes been scored in the same way, they would have come across as ridiculous, but with RTD's grand vision, it all seemed perfect. So it continues as Gold continues to score the show for Stephen Moffat.

While Doctor Who is going strong, Star Trek has stumbled badly and is only just picking itself up again after JJ Abrams' exciting new take. I'm not a massive fan of Abrams' film, at least not a fan of it as a Star Trek film; it doesn't seem to quite get the point of Star Trek, but on its own terms, is a thrilling ride. The franchise has had many reboots over the years, most notably when Jerry Goldsmith scored the first film and made Star Trek grand, but also reflected the mysteries of existence with his thunderous V'Ger music. The films and their music have felt rebooted over and over in some ways. James Horner took an entirely different approach for an entirely different type of Star Trek film in the Wrath of Kahn, although The Search for Spock retains more continuity.

Each subsequent film has felt a little different, until the final three Next Generation movies that almost seemed to undo what Goldsmith originally did with The Motion Picture, making Star Trek progressively less and less grandiose, rather more and more of a standard action/adventure in space. Goldsmith was only reflecting the movies he was given, but the rush of imagination that created The Motion Picture, or even Star Trek V. The latter may have been a terrible film in many ways, but Goldsmith was still composing for the film it should have been and the endless possibilities of existence rather than the disappointing action/adventure film it was. Michael Giacchino's first Star Trek outing was perhaps more successful than Goldsmith's last, Nemesis, but is still more firmly rooted in action and adventure rather than ideas, possibilities and the human condition. However, it'll be interesting to see what he does next. Here's hoping for a more memorable main theme, at least.

One thing Giacchino did with his score was bring the main theme full circle by including a sweeping version of Alexander Courage's original TV series melody. It made me think that Courage's tune wouldn't seem so hokey these days had it been arranged rather differently. It certainly feels a lot more adventurous, soaring between the stars than the bongos and soprano original. The original TV show had some of the best TV music of the 60's, orchestral and in striking contrast to the bleepy Doctor Who music of the same era. While somewhat of its time, it still stands up today and is certainly strikingly different to the broad washes of orchestra that characterised a lot of the Next Generation and early Deep Space Nine scoring.

Fortunately, the producers eased up on the Star Trek composers and some of the later Deep Space Nine and Voyager scores are genuinely rather exciting, although they don't match the best of the early Next Generation scores. Little beats Ron Jones' thrilling music for the classic two hander, the Best of Both Worlds. Should another series ever make it to our screens - which seems unlikely for the foreseeable future, Paramount are clearly happier letting the new film series bed down and make it a nice chunk of cash, more than any of the previous films - one wonders whether maybe it'll be more like Bear McCreery's music for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica which went in a different direction to Stu Phillips' Star Wars Lite score for the original and replaced it with percussion loops, string elegies and even a little Celtic lilt here and there. It's certainly some of the most accomplished and effective scoring of the 2000's.

Reviews, reviews, where are you?

Well hello my lovelies. So, how are you? Really? How interesting. OK, back on me.

Sorry to Miranda Hart for stealing her material there.

Apologies to you, the loyal reader(s) for the lack of updates of late. I'm moving back to Guernsey from London, where I have been living this past earth year. London, you may have heard of it? Fair sized down in the south east of the land of the Angles. Hopefully, once settled back into island life, updates will resume a little more often. Plus there's a few bits of good musical shit coming our way (even if the first of these, Patrick Doyle's score to Thor, has been a bit of a disappointment) which I clearly must pontificate on.

In the meantime, live long and prosper, bitch. As Vulcan youths say.

The Next Three Days - Danny Elfman

Thrillers are a bit of a bugger of a genre to make interesting. If there's enough action, it's not too bad, but suspense is only interesting for so long. John Powell rarely let his Bourne scores get too boring, but it's the action music you remember the longest afterward and Alexandre Desplat made a good fist of his first forays into mainstream Hollywood scoring, notably Firewall and Hostage. Danny Elfman isn't perhaps the most obvious choice for a standard thriller, but he's scored a few in his time. I suppose Mission: Impossible counts and it's one of his finest scores, but the others - Extreme Measures and Article 99 amongst them - are fine enough, but don't musically set the world alight.

The Next Three Days is, however, rather more Extreme Measures than Mission: Impossible. The most striking thing is how little of it sounds like Elfman. Even outside of his most obvious mannerisms through the years, he has plenty of other musical fingerprints that give him away, but here I'd be hard pressed to identify the composer aside from on a couple of occasions. Indeed, the percussive suspense/action passages sound more like John Powell (perhaps a touch less percussion and more low key) than the tick-tick rhythms of Mission: Impossible. While it's not crucial that every score by a particular composer sounds like their others, when the tropes are as strong as Elfman's, they are missed when absent.

A lot of the score is actually fairly subdued, gentle piano and suspended strings are pleasing, albeit a touch slow going. Indeed, not a great deal happens until  Breakout (where it becomes more readily identifiable as Elfman as well) and a good number of the earlier cues could have been dropped at no great loss. After the thematic delights and richness of Alice in Wonderland it doesn't immediately leap out of the speakers. Elfman is always worth a punt, but a bit of judicious pruning might have made for a more readily enjoyable album. As with the Bourne films, a couple of Moby tracks complete the disc and, as with the Bourne films again, compliment the underscore quite nicely.

Acquire within 72 hours from Amazon.com.