CD Review: THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 12/14/2012
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER soundtrack | ©2012 Atlantic

Not since the days of John Hughes has an upper class teen film captured the agony and ecstasy of entering true adulthood with the poetry of PERKS. So perhaps it’s only fitting that the movie takes place in the 80s, an era when alt. music by The New Order, The Smiths, Sonic Youth and XTC was showing the smart, disaffected kids in class that they counted. Their mix cassette tape likely would have been this terrific CD (or vinyl) compilation on Atlantic, which provides a well-thought out flashback to an unequalled musical era with the likes of “Temptation,” “Asleep,” “Teenage […]Read On »


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CD Review: HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 12/13/2012
HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER soundtrack | ©2012 Intrada Records

Intrada’s new partnership with Universal to celebrate the studio’s 100th anniversary has yielded many blasts from the company’s musical past, but none so singularly vengeful-minded, or more crazy fun than Dee Barton’s score for Clint Eastwood’s Stranger, the undead sheriff who paints a godforsaken town hell red in 1973’s HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. Playing, and directing a character who was easily the most sadistic Man With No Name in his cannon, Eastwood deconstructed the genre that made his bones with a picture that was just as much horror as it was western, a genre mix for which his frequent musical collaborator […]Read On »


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CD Review: BLADE RUNNER: 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 12/12/2012
BLADE RUNNER: 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION soundtrack | ©2012 Buysoundtrax

If there was one score that made a generation rip their hair out in frustration, then it was Vangelis’ BLADE RUNNER. In 1982, there’s no doubt that hundreds of people went directly from theaters to the record stores in search of the Greek composer’s seminal synth future noir score, only to find a vinyl album performed by some group called The New American Orchestra instead of the promised Polydor original soundtrack. Needless to say, Vangelis’s lush and technically sophisticated work this was not. So one can understand fans’ reluctance when presented with a “30th Anniversary Celebration” produced by Buysoundtrax, a […]Read On »


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CD Review: BLACK RAIN soundtrack (3,000 edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
BLACK RAIN soundtrack | ©2012 La La Land Records

While his earliest hit among the masses was with The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Hans Zimmer’s Krautrock-inspired synth-pop rhythms would soon be putting a similarly prophetic stake through the heart of traditional Hollywood scoring. It was Zimmer’s talent for music tech that marked his journeyman progression to deservedly becoming film scoring’s King of the World, creating a singularly unique fusion of electronics, exotic beats and rock adrenalin through such works as BURNING SECRET, PAPERHOUSE and A WORLD APART. The studios’ ears would really be pricked up with Zimmer’s whimsical Afro-centric score to 1988′s Best Picture RAIN MAN, music […]Read On »


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CD Review: TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 12/02/2012
TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE soundtrack | ©2012 Varese Sarabande Records

Though primarily scaring the daylights out of listeners with the likes of the SCREAM series and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, Marco Beltrami can be just as capable of emotional Americana when given the shot. And for a grizzled icon whose last several self-directed pictures have suffered from his own truly horrific scores, it’s welcome indeed to have Beltrami step up to the plate for TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE. There’s no doubt that Eastwood’s longtime second A.D. Robert Lorenz can be thanked for bringing in a musical pinch hitter for his first time up at directing plate. And Beltrami shines with […]Read On »


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CD Review: FOR GREATER GLORY: THE TRUE STORY OF CRISTIADA soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
FOR GREATER GLORY soundtrack | ©2012 Varese Sarabande Records

In an age when so many hypercritical film music fans rant about how every movie score sounds exactly the same, it’s to a composer’s credit if they have a musical signature that makes them stand out from the pack. But then, said golden age soundtrack devotees who are often the people mouthing these crotchety good old days generalities could easily say the same thing about their idols in a time when one could have easily interchanged the undeniably brilliant work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold with Max Steiner, or Dmitri Tiomkin with Victor Young for that matter. But there was certainly […]Read On »


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CD Review: MORRICONE: UNCOVERED

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 11/03/2012
MORRICONE: UNCOVERED soundtrack | ©2012 Perseverance Records

Ennio Morricone has always been one of film music’s most intensely lyrical composers. Indefatigably writing one great theme after the other through over five decades and a few hundred scores. Morricone’s soulful, longing melodies have always come across like songs just waiting to happen, a feeling often reinforced by the wordlessly haunting, female vocals of Edda Dell’Orso. But when it’s come to doing an actual songbook based on Il Maestro’s work, Italian chanteuse Romina Arena has done a yeoman job of making Morricone her own, with a number of beautiful tunes that don’t play so much as film music set […]Read On »


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CD Review: LAWLESS soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 11/01/2012
LAWLESS soundtrack | ©2012 Sony Classical

The team of director John Hillcoat and composer-screenwriter Nick Cave have resonated with a raw, innovative energy that’s made such pictures as THE PROPOSITION and THE ROAD anything but the same old outlaw story. The duo’s in-your-face creativity now pays off with triple-proof results for their violently entertaining moonshiner flick LAWLESS. Sure they could have gone for tunes that would have sounded just like the prohibition period. But it’s a contemporary energy that suffuses this song album. Getting off to a bang with the r & b cover of “Fire and Brimstone” by Mark Lanegan, LAWLESS‘ first impresses with a […]Read On »


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CD Review: TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/30/2012
TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE soundtrack | ©2012 Howlin Wolf

Albert Pyun arguably never had it better than when he made his visually splashy directorial debut thirty years ago with THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, a film that energetically personified the wackier excesses of that titular 80′s genre. One element that made SWORD‘s” low budget a virtue was a powerful score by David Whitaker (available on Buysoundtrax), whose rousing music impressed, even when the playing of it didn’t. Flash-forward now to the SORCERER‘s sorta follow-up TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE, which takes on said kingdom with even far fewer shekels. But at the least, let it not be said that […]Read On »


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CD Review: THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 10/29/2012
THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE soundtrack | ©2012 Buysoundtrax

While Craig Safan impressed with his big-budget 80s orchestral scores for THE LAST STARFIGHTER and REMO WILLIAMS, the composer was first at home with a smaller sound that particularly befitted the drive-in speakers of red state America during the 1970s- two cases in point being the south-sploitation cult favorites THE GREAT SMOKEY ROADBLACK and THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE. First up is a 1976 Henry Fonda vehicle whose title road the coattails of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT knock-offs, while the film itself was a far more serious trucker flick about facing one’s final run by smashing into a bunch of […]Read On »


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