Author: Earl Green

Categories
2004 2020 D Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Don Davis Collection, Volume 1

4 min read

Order this CDIn 2004, the BBC aired an ambitious miniseries combining a little bit of “hard” sci-fi with an attempt to impart information to and educate the audience, framing it as a reality-TV-tinged mockumentary about a fictional crewed mission through the solar system. Keeping in mind that this was a year before the launch of 21st century Doctor Who, the resulting two-night event, Voyage To The Planets, was quite possibly the BBC’s most impressive sci-fi effort to that date (and thanks to a co-production deal with the Discovery Channel in the U.S., it was retitled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets and shown Stateside as well). The mention of Doctor Who is not accidental; quite a few personnel associated with Voyage To The Planets, up to and including writer/director Joe Ahearne, played major roles early in the revival of Russell T. Davies’ version of Doctor Who.

And somehow – in between sequels to The Matrix, when his visibility was at a career high – Voyage To The Planets landed American composer Don Davis, and gave him enough resources to have at least a few live players, which he used to maximum advantage to keep an otherwise synthesized score from having too much of an icy, electronic sheen. The result is a score – unreleased for 16 years – that does have some hints of Davis’ Matrix stylings, but leans much more heavily on the kind of noble, give-the-French-horns-lots-of-whole-notes-in-major-keys feel that has powered many a space exploration epic. With Davis having to work to disguise just how small his ensemble of live players is, there are few opportunities for Voyage To The Planets to be as “big” as, say, James Horner’s Apollo 13 score, but it still successfully conveys the nobility and sense of wonder that the show’s fictional space mission demands.

The “Walking With Spacemen Theme” that kicks off the album is the backbone of the score, returning as a motif throughout (and giving a nod to the early working title of the project, which was initiated by the producers of Walking With Dinosaurs). Various locales visited by the crew of the Pegasus – Venus, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and beyond – receive their own thematic treatments, tipping their hand as to the relative degrees of how inhospitable they are to human life. These tend to be the passages that get the closest to the dissonance of Davis’ scores for the Matrix trilogy, but the material in between returns to a more heroic default setting. (One of the most spectacular examples of Davis more dissonant “we’re in trouble” music arrives in “Forbidden Rays and Asteroid”, which may also be the peak of his skillful arrangements successfully disguising the live-player-to-synth ratio.)

4 out of 4It’s a wonderful score overall, and an unexpected surprise so many years after the fact. (This is also a testament to the lovely niche material that can be unearthed by niche and boutique labels like Dragon’s Domain, balancing out the much more mainstream selections offered by the larger soundtrack labels.) Voyage To The Planets is seriously obscure stuff by U.S. standards – following its one-and-done airing on Discovery, the premise of a mockumentary-with-flashbacks mission through the solar system was sold to ABC, where it was expanded with more fiction than science and became a bit of a soap opera in the 2009-2010 season, a time when ABC was trying to pattern nearly everything on its schedule after Lost. (For what it’s worth, Dragon’s Domain, Defying Gravity had an interesting score too, even though the show itself was a big letdown.) To get Voyage’s full, wonderful soundtrack after all this time was a true treat – it’s very much worth a listen, whether you’re familiar with the miniseries or not.

  1. Walking With Spacemen Theme (2:22)
  2. Main Titles and Apollo (2:38)
  3. Take Off and Venus (5:25)
  4. Hot Planet Venus (4:15)
  5. Time and Space (2:04)
  6. Mars (3:30)
  7. Flare and Storm Patrol (3:43)
  8. Forbidden Rays and Asteroid (4:14)
  9. Dispatching and Jupiter Turn (2:09)
  10. G-Force (2:46)
  11. Moons of Jupiter (3:08)
  12. Zoe’s Trouble (5:15)
  13. Europa (1:52)
  14. Pearson’s Peek (3:19)
  15. Deep Space Despair (4:26)
  16. Burial and Resuming Work (1:40)
  17. The Planet of Peace (2:18)
  18. Pluto People (5:06)
  19. The Comet (2:55)
  20. Comet Stroll and Danger (2:55)
  21. The Calamity on the Comet (4:06)
  22. Happy Homecoming and Finale (3:43)

Released by: Dragon’s Domain Records
Release date: September 17, 2020
Total running time: 1:13:49

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Categories
1968 2018 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: The Invasion – music by Don Harper

5 min read

Order this CDThe scores for Doctor Who‘s 20th century Cybermen episodes seem to have a habit of taking a torturous route to being released in their original form. A bit of clarification is in order: this release contains the original recordings from 1968 by Don Harper (whose handful of other scoring credits include an episode of the BBC2 sci-fi anthology Out Of The Unknown, and stock music used in George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead), the only music he ever composed for Doctor Who. Better known as a jazz musician, Harper’s services were engaged due to director Douglas Camfield’s curious habit of actively avoiding using Doctor Who’s “house composer” at the time, Dudley Simpson. Though many composers contributed to the 20th century series, there’s not another score quite like this one in the series’ history. Harper’s jazz leanings are on display, along with a very good dramatic instinct for the uniquely eerie music heard throughout The Invasion‘s eight episodes.

Why the clarification? Because Harper also re-recorded this music for the De Wolfe production music library under the title New Decades, which itself was later re-released as Cold Worlds, whereas this release has the original 1968 recordings. (The stories behind Doctor Who’s music can be just as strange-but-true as the rest of its behind-the-scenes lore.) On the one hand, The Invasion’s score sticks out quite noticeably from what came before and after it (the following story, The Krotons, has also been the subject of its own soundtrack release). But Harper has a very good sense of what the show’s “feel” is, and unnervingly dissonant tracks such as “International Electromatics Headquarters”, “The Cyber Director”, “The Cybermen, My Allies”, and “Plans For Invasion”, though brief, make the case that Harper would’ve made a fine addition to the rotation of the series’ musical talent if he had been hired to do so again. A much chirpier tone – almost “smurfy” in a way, and yet very, very 1968 in its feel – takes hold in the track “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart”, giving the newly-promoted future series regular his own theme music in only his second appearance.

But the story doesn’t end there. Harper recorded a total of barely 20 minutes of music, intended to be used and re-used to track eight 25-minute episodes, and then, somewhat confoundingly, Camfield didn’t even use everything that was recorded. (One almost gets the feeling at times that Camfield would have preferred to skip musical underscores altogether but was coerced into including incidental music by the producers.) Also included are several tracks of effects and sound-design-bordering-on-music by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, intended to provide additional musical options; tracks 15-34 are Harper’s unused score cues. Also tracked into the episode is a track by John Baker of the Radiophonic Workshop, “Time In Advance” (simply titled “Muzak” here), originally composed for an Out Of The Unknown episode of the same name. Baker’s work – with a lovely jazzy piano overdub sitting on top of an abstract yet tuneful radiophonic backing – sits nicely alongside Harper’s own jazz influences and doesn’t seem out of place. (I’ve never made a secret of the fact that “Time In Advance” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of classic Doctor Who music, so consider this reviewer’s biases fully on display here.)

3 out of 4With the brevity of the tracks presented, and the brevity of the score overall, it’s something of a minor miracle that this album tops out at just over an hour (thanks in large part to some of the lengthy, looped background sound effects tracks), and it’s a bit mind-boggling that a majority of the tracks presented have no story context, as they were left on the cutting room floor. So very much like the later Revenge Of The Cybermen release (perhaps not coincidentally the next TV outing for the Cybermen), a lot of what’s on the disc was never actually heard in the show itself. Harper achieves a great deal with very limited resources (the liner notes indicate that he never had more than five players, six if he too performed, presumably achieving a denser sound with overdubs), so it’s nice to hear his work free of the context of the show itself. It’s a pity so much of it went unused; some of the material that was left out is some of the most distinctive and enjoyable of the lot. Clearly, the Cybermen can’t have nice things.

  1. Doctor Who (new opening theme, 1967) (0:52)
  2. The Dark Side of the Moon (Music 2 Variation) (0:33)
  3. The Company (Music 7) (1:31)
  4. Hiding (Music 8) (4:54)
  5. International Electromatics Headquarters (Music 3) (0:16)
  6. Muzak (2:46)
  7. The Cyber Director (Music 5) (0:08)
  8. The Cybermen, My Allies (Music 7) (0:27)
  9. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Music 12a) (1:22)
  10. Plans for Invasion (Music 8) (1:25)
  11. Mysteries (Music 12) (1:31)
  12. Fire Escape (Music 11) (1:11)
  13. The Dark Side of the Moon (Reprise) (Music 2) (0:31)
  14. The Cybermen, My Allies (Reprise) (Music 7, looped) (1:07)
  15. Music 4 (Trapped in Gas Chamber – v. 1 & 2) (1:29)
  16. Music 9 (2:20)
  17. Music 10 (2:00)
  18. Music 13 (0:05)
  19. Music 14 (0:15)
  20. Music 15a (0:04)
  21. Music 15b (0:20)
  22. Music 15c (0:04)
  23. Music 15d (0:20)
  24. Music 15e (0:16)
  25. Music 15f (0:04)
  26. Music 15g (0:04)
  27. Music 15h (0:23)
  28. Music 16a (0:04)
  29. Music 16b (0:05)
  30. Music 16c (0:06)
  31. Music 16d (0:07)
  32. Music 16e (0:04)
  33. Music 16f (0:08)
  34. Music 16g (0:05)
  35. Part of TARDIS disappears (0:25)
  36. All of TARDIS disappears (0:24)
  37. TARDIS take off slow and painful (2:13)
  38. International Electromatics Headquarters Exterior (10:33)
  39. International Electromatics Headquarters Interior (6:26)
  40. Computer Background (0:21)
  41. Computer Whirrs (1:01)
  42. Electronic Eye (2:37)
  43. Cyber Director Appears (2:26)
  44. Cyber Director Constant (7:51)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: September 14, 2018
Total running time: 1:01:15

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Categories
Behind The Scenes Book Reviews Media Prose Nonfiction

Producers On Producing: The Making of Film and Television

1 min read

Order this bookStory: Interviewer Irv Broughton conducts Q&A style interviews with a wide variety of television and television film producers from diverse corners of the medium, from documentarians to news producers to mainstream miniseries and series producers, trying to find out what made their biggest successes in the business work.

Review: A book of Q&A interviews with a various of interview subjects is a bit of an odd duck – did the credited author, who conducted the interviews, write the book, or did the people he interview do the majority of the writing with their answers? And yet it’s an interview format that leaves any editorialization or interpretation by the credited author off the table. The responses are what was said by the respondents, and the closest one gets to “slant” is the choice of the interviewer’s questions. … Read more

Categories
Behind The Scenes Book Reviews Doctor Who Prose Nonfiction Series

Pull To Open: 1962-1963 – The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who

1 min read

Order this bookStory: Attempting to track down anything that might bear the slightest resemblance to “definitive dates” on which Doctor Who, as a concept, was born, the book follows the careers of many key and ancillary players in the show’s gestation, combing through BBC paperwork, interviews both new and vintage, and focuses on the convergence of these talents as a vague push for more science fiction on the BBC becomes the more focused creation of one of the genre’s longest-lasting series.

Review: Well, this is a book whose subject matter is not only already fascinating, but it’s all gotten a bit more complicated since the book was released. This doesn’t mean that the book is outdated in anyway – it’s actually incredibly complete. But, as always where the TARDIS is involved, it keeps evolving. … Read more

Categories
1975 2023 Artists (by group or surname) D Doctor Who Music Reviews R Radiophonic Workshop Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Year

Doctor Who: Revenge Of The Cybermen – music by Carey Blyton

5 min read

Order this CDThere are quite few releases out there now of unused/rejected film scores. But with television? Not so much. The production timetable of TV just can’t handle an unusable score. It’ll either use less/none of what’s produced, but in most cases, there’s no time to hire someone else to come up with a replacement score, assuming that the budget can absorb a replacement. And it’s rarer still for anything left on the cutting room floor to ever be heard again.

All of that is to explain that Revenge Of The Cybermen, the more-than-complete score from Tom Baker’s first season-closing story as the star of Doctor Who in 1975, is a highly improbable release. The powers that be weren’t exactly crazy about the music Carey Blyton turned in, his third and final contribution to the series’ music. (His two prior scores were in Jon Pertwee’s first and final seasons, under a different producer.) With little time for a fix, Blyton’s recordings were handed off to Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to add some analog synths to the existing music…and then the makers of the show didn’t use most of that either. In the end, Revenge Of The Cybermen‘s four 25-minute episodes were sparse on music, and the vast majority of what’s on this CD was never heard in the show. Add to that the fact that it’s a Tom Baker-era score, and the music presented here is all sorts of rare. (The discovery that Blyton had kept tapes of his largely-unheard work for himself makes this release possible; even Revenge‘s DVD release and the 50th anniversary soundtrack collection had very little music from this story.)

The liner notes are particularly fascinating, digging into Blyton’s own correspondence to examine his reliance on non-traditional instruments, something the composer felt was a good fit for the show’s often non-traditional subject matter. But to Blyton’s mind, this meant instruments that had fallen out of common use in orchestral ensembles – some of them decidedly closer to “ancient” than “futuristic”, which may have been meant to signify the Vogans rather than the Cybermen, but may also have explained the synthesizer overdubs ordered by the show’s makers. All of this information helps to explain why so little of Blyton’s distinctive music was used…and, perhaps, why he was never tapped to provide music for Doctor Who again.

3 out of 4The resulting sound is spare (like Doctor Who’s more frequent composer, Dudley Simpson, Blyton simply couldn’t afford to assemble a full orchestra), and in all likelihood, this album will achieve the hat trick of feeling odd both to modern audiences (accustomed to the full force and fury of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) and to fans of the 20th century series’ frequent scoring with synthesizers and radiophonic sound. There are synths here, but they weren’t intended to be there in the music’s original formulation, and they don’t really “rescue” it in any meaningful way (assuming you listen to the original, non-overdubbed pieces and feel that some kind of triage was needed). It’s an interesting listen that may fall into the category of being only for completists or the very curious. Despite that, it’s still incredible to hear a complete – and almost completely unused – score from a Tom Baker story from the ’70s.

  1. Doctor Who – Opening Title Theme (0:45)
  2. Return to Nerva Beacon (2:02)
  3. Can Anyone Hear Me? (0:36)
  4. Cybermat / Unspool / Plague (1:53)
  5. Cybership I (0:23)
  6. Searching Kellman’s Room (1:05)
  7. Sarah vs Cybermat Part 1 (0:31)
  8. Sarah vs Cybermat Part 2 (0:18)
  9. Sabotage (0:42)
  10. It’s Happening All Over Again (0:11)
  11. The Skystriker (0:26)
  12. On Voga (0:40)
  13. Sarah and Harry Captured Part 1 (0:47)
  14. Sarah and Harry Captured Part 2 (0:10)
  15. Cybership II (0:19)
  16. Enter Vorus (0:08)
  17. Remote Control Threat (0:33)
  18. Tyrum and Vorus (0:37)
  19. One More Pull (0:17)
  20. Caves Chase (0:50)
  21. Caves Chase Continued (0:29)
  22. Surrounded (0:35)
  23. Boarding Party (0:59)
  24. The Beacon is Ours (0:41)
  25. Tyrum Fanfare (0:15)
  26. Prisoners (0:13)
  27. Fresh Orders (0:19)
  28. It Cannot Be Stopped (0:21)
  29. Loose Thinking / The Bomb (1:27)
  30. The Countdown Has Commenced (1:01)
  31. Cybermarch (1:27)
  32. Radarscope (0:23)
  33. Adventures on Voga (1:19)
  34. Rockfall (1:15)
  35. Surface Party and Detonation (1:47)
  36. Nine Minutes (0:26)
  37. Cybermat vs Cybermen (0:44)
  38. The Biggest Bang in History? (0:45)
  39. Waltz – All’s Well That Ends Well (0:17)
  40. Doctor Who – Closing Title Theme (53” Version) (0:54)
     
    Alternative and Synthesizer Cues
  41. Sarah vs Cybermat (end of part 1 alternative) (0:20)
  42. Sarah vs Cybermat (start of part 2) (0:56)
  43. It’s Happening All Over Again (random organ) (0:06)
  44. Sarah and Harry Captured (alternative) (0:46)
  45. Put That Gun Down (synth cue) (0:20)
  46. Cybership II (alternative) (0:24)
  47. Remote Control Threat (alternative) (0:35)
  48. One More Pull (alternative) and Vogan Gunfight (0:58)
  49. Cybership III (synth cue) (0:17)
  50. Caves Chase (alternative) (1:20)
  51. Cybership IV (synth cue) (0:23)
  52. Caves Chase Continued (alternative) (0:36)
  53. Surrounded (alternative) (0:38)
  54. Boarding Party (end of Part 2 alternative) (0:25)
  55. Jelly Babies (synth cue) (0:10)
  56. Tyrum Fanfare (edited cue as used) (0:10)
  57. It Cannot Be Stopped (alternative) (0:37)
  58. Loose Thinking (alternative) (0:31)
  59. The Bomb (alternative) (0:19)
  60. The Countdown Has Commenced (alternative) (0:06)
  61. Looped Cybermarch (0:29)
  62. Looped Cybermarch with Synth (0:47)
  63. Adventures on Voga (synth cues) (1:07)
  64. The Red Zone (Random Organ) (0:06)
  65. Heartbeat Countdown I (synth cue) (1:25)
  66. Heartbeat Countdown II (synth cue) (1:09)
  67. Rockfall (alternative) (1:17)
     
    Bonus Tracks
  68. Session Tapes – Random Organ, Specimen Gong, Timps (3:08)
  69. Session Tapes – m42a & 42b (improvs) (1:58)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: November 24, 2023
Total running time: 51:54

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Categories
1979 2014 A Alan Parsons Project Artists (by group or surname) Music Reviews Non-Soundtrack Music Year

Alan Parsons Project – The Sicilian Defence

4 min read

Order this CDSome albums become legendary because they were never released, and then the fan clamoring begins until someone, sensing a good opportunity to pay the mortgage for a month or two, relents, and puts out some kind of unfinished, compromised, or finished-after-the-fact-many-years-later version of whatever it was going to be (but hey, enough about the various versions of Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse or Brian Wilson’s Smile out there). (Sometimes something remains unreleased permanently, unless someone just straight up raids the vaults.) The fact that it couldn’t be heard, the fact that the fans were being denied their prize, becomes the main vector of attraction.

The Sicilian Defence was never actually intended to be released, though. Recorded in 1979 between Alan Parsons and his songwriting collaborator in the Project, Eric Woolfson, it was always a negotiating tactic between the two principals of the Alan Parsons Project and their label at the time, Arista. In short, Parsons and Woolfson wanted to alter their deal, and delivered the all-instrumental Sicilian Defence to Arista almost simultaneously with the released 1979 album Eve to give them leverage: they’d delivered the last two albums of the Project’s contract. They were either done with Arista and free to go elsewhere, or Arista could give them more time and money to work on the next album. The Sicilian Defence was disposable. It was Alan and Eric screwing around on pianos and synthesizers in studio downtime. It was a ploy designed to freak out their handlers at the label, not the Project’s great unfinished symphony.

The inclusion of a piano instrumental track from the unreleased album on the 2008 remastered reissue of Eve seemed to portend a change of heart, even though Parsons was public in his desire for the entire unreleased album to stay that way permanently. (As Sony/Legacy was now controlling the band’s back catalog, the label insisted.) And then in 2014, it was included as a bonus disc in a pricey, career-spanning box set. But now The Sicilian Defence has finally become available on its own in digital form, and it’s not without its charms. As the album is named after an aggressive set of chess moves, the tracks are named after moves in that sequence. The track from which three minutes were excerpted for the “Elsie’s Theme” track on the Eve remaster is “P-Qb4”, and is twice the length of the previously released excerpt. It’s a lovely solo piano piece, and “P-Q4” and “KtxP” follow in a similar vein (the latter with a very chintzy late ’70s drum machine in the background). “Kt-QB3”, another piano piece, has a more aggressive pace and feels like it’s threatening to develop into a proper song, but as it noodles on for over eight minutes, it lands as a piece that wouldn’t been well off calling it a day at the four-and-a-half-minute mark.

But the really interesting stuff is a handful of lo-fi synthesizer jams. “P-K4”, “Kt-KB3”, and “PxP” have a percolating, vintage synth vibe that I can be describe with the following ludicrous phrase: “early ’80s Weather Channel local forecast”. That may seem like the most obscure possible descriptor, and yet I can’t think of a better one. They’re not light-years away from “Hyper-Gamma-Spaces” or “Mammagamma”, but they are at least 273,600 miles from them – they seem more like demos than anything close to a finished product. “…Kt-QB3” and “Kt-B3”, the two shortest tracks, have strings and choral vocals probably recorded as warm-ups or outtakes from previous albums’ sessions and edited together. “P-Q3” is a synth piece with a pastoral, classical feel. Rather than building to anything significant, the album – such as it is – just…ends.

None of it was ever developed further for use on later releases, and in some cases that’s a pity, because there are some promising starts – but only starts.

3 out of 4The part of me that loves new wave and analog synths doing analog synth things loves those tracks on this album, but let’s face it: this album should probably be recused from getting a rating because we were never meant to hear it, and wouldn’t have, except that the studio-owned master recordings changed hands and the new label decided that it would be heard regardless of Parsons’ wishes (Woolfson died in 2009). As a standalone listening experience, The Sicilian Defence really doesn’t work unless you know its backstory, even though the Project was renowned for its instrumental pieces. But if you’re looking for that circa-1983 local forecast vibe? I can give this a hearty recommendation.

  1. P-K4 (5:06)
  2. P-Qb4 (6:22)
  3. Kt-KB3 (3:07)
  4. …Kt-QB3 (1:15)
  5. P-Q4 (3:55)
  6. PxP (3:28)
  7. KtxP (4:01)
  8. Kt-B3 (0:53)
  9. Kt-QB3 (8:16)
  10. P-Q3 (3:29)

Released by: Sony/Legacy/Arista
Release date: March 23, 2014
Total running time: 39:50

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Categories
2023 D Film Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Year

A Disturbance In The Force – music by Karl Preusser

2 min read

Order this CDI’ve already raved elsewhere about the better-than-anyone-had-any-right-to-expect documentary about the making of the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, A Disturbance In The Force: How The Star Wars Holiday Special Happened. In short, it’s a better documentary than you ever expected about such an arcane, niche topic. The documentary actually has wider appeal than the subject it’s covering. That’s a neat trick.

Karl Preusser’s score for A Disturbance In The Force: How The Star Wars Holiday Special Happened is just over half an hour long (the frequent clips and needle drops in the movie don’t leave a lot of room for an original score), but there’s actually a lot to love in that half-hour-and-change. I found myself hoping that the whole thing would be drenched with disco cheese, but Preusser shows admirable restraint by containing that style reference to only three tracks (“So Bad, It’s Not Good”, “A Disturbance In The Force”, and “The Lost Treatment”, the first two of which walk right up to the edge of riffing on Meco’s disco cover of the Star Wars theme). The rest of the score riffs on John Williams’ style of arrangement without ever directly quoting any Williams themes. There are passages that are almost the Jawa theme, or hint at other Williams compositions, and this is an impressively sharp-eared feat made more impressive by the fact that it’s all carried off fairly convincingly with samples.

4 out of 4And now that this score, for a documentary about the Holiday Special, has been released? Go find and release the score from the special itself, you cowards. Seriously. I dare you. It’s got to exist somewhere in the files of the late composer Ian Fraser (who shouldn’t be obscure: he was a frequent music collaborator on Julie Andrews’ prime time variety specials, was the music director for the opening of EPCOT, and arranged the accompaniment for Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s “Little Drummer Boy” duet). Because chances are I’ll buy that too. You can bet your Life Day on it.

  1. So Bad, It’s Not Good (1:59)
  2. Charley Lippincott (2:24)
  3. Boba Fett Genesis (2:16)
  4. Fan Outreach (1:01)
  5. It All Started In 1978 (1:40)
  6. Maintaining Momentum (2:46)
  7. The Talent (0:54)
  8. Life Day (1:49)
  9. The Faithful Wookiee (1:36)
  10. The Lost Treatment (1:57)
  11. Costume Difficulties (1:31)
  12. Sell Toys To Kids (1:10)
  13. It Just Was Not Working (1:49)
  14. And They Loved It (2:14)
  15. Fanbase Grows (3:01)
  16. A Disturbance In The Force (3:30)

Released by: Gription Music
Release date: December 4, 2023
Total running time: 31:17

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Categories
2016 Music Reviews R Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Year

Captain Rimmer’s Mandolin: Red Dwarf VI: The Underscore – music by Howard Goodall

3 min read

Order this CDIn 2023, Red Dwarf turned 35 years old. That’s the same number as the combined IQ of 35 P.E. teachers. It’s astonishing that there’s not more music officially available; sure, nearly every note recorded for the series is available in the bonus features of the DVDs, but when you’re talking about some of the major landmarks of the show’s history, it’d be nice to have more music, not less. That’s what makes this 2016 release – focusing entirely on Red Dwarf scores from the 1990s – maddening. I can’t dock it a point on account of the music itself; Howard Goodall’s music always manages to rise above its very ’90s synthesized execution, becoming more than the sum of its parts. The problem with this release is that we only get some of its parts – and it’s misidentified in a big way.

The Red Dwarf VI track actually contains music from Red Dwarf VI and Red Dwarf VII. The distinctive western pastiche of the music from the Emmy-winning Gunmen Of The Apocalypse takes pride of place early on, justifiably eating up nearly half of the almost-12-minute track. But much of the rest is taken up by music from the Red Dwarf VII episodes Stoke Me A Clipper and Blue. (The good news is that the latter is represented by the song sung by an entire gallery of Rimmer puppets, with vocals supplied not by Chris Barrie, but by Goodall himself.) It’s a bizarre choice given that Red Dwarf VII also takes up a separate release.

The second track crams highlights from the fourth and fifth seasons into 18 minutes. The Red Dwarf IV music comes mainly from White Hole and Dimension Jump, including the latter’s instrumental spoof of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” accompanying the audience’s first glimpse of “Ace” Rimmer (and the organ rendition of the end credits theme, signaling that we’re very much stuck with “our” Rimmer and not his more heroic duplicate). Another spoof follows, the Casablanca parody for the B&W opening scenes of Back To Reality. But the remainder of the episode’s unique score gets shortchanged, represented by a percussion-heavy action cue (not the highlight of Back To Reality‘s music), leaving the episode’s thundering piano-bass-note motif off the album entirely. White Hole fares better, as we get most of the music from the climactic “playing pool with planets” scene. Some really incomprehensible choices were made here – and that’s where this release loses a point.

3 out of 4It’s still puzzling that a show with a large cult following the size of the Red Dwarf fanbase – which has always been a bit starved for any merch that’s not a T-shirt – is musically represented only by four obscure EP-length digital releases, so these continue to be criminally underexposed treasures. The music from the episode Back To Reality is really deserving of its own track, and the same could be said of Gunmen Of The Apocalypse – they’re among the most popular episodes of the entire series. While I’m glad to have any kind of official soundtrack release from Red Dwarf, burying brief excerpts from these two in suites of other music from the show does them both a disservice.

  1. Captain Rimmer’s Mandolin: Red Dwarf VI: The Underscore (11:42)
  2. Bach To Reality: Red Dwarf IV & V: The Underscore (18:00)

Released by: Howard Goodall
Release date: November 4, 2016
Total running time: 29:42

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Categories
2023 Artists (by group or surname) H Music Reviews Non-Soundtrack Music Trevor Horn Year

Trevor Horn – Echoes: Ancient & Modern

2 min read

Order this CDI wasn’t a huge fan of superstar producer Trevor Horn’s previous album along similar lines, Trevor Horn Reimagines The Eighties, but the list of “guest stars” on this album reeled me in anyway – and I discovered I liked this album much, much better.

While there are some ’80s icons participating in this album of covers (is anyone actually capable of not being at least morbidly curious about Rick Astley tackling Yes’ “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”?), including Toyah Wilcox and Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, the guest artists who emerge from further afield really make this album. Sure, hearing familiar ’80s voices cover songs by other associated-with-the-’80s acts is fun, but hearing Seal take Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” and run with it (with Horn coming dangerously close to turning it into a bossa nova groove), or hearing Iggy Pop do his own thing with Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”, really makes this album for me.

The flip-side of Horn’s recurring theme of covering the ’80s, of course, is that he’s dropping an orchestra on top of most of it (particularly here for his debut on Deutsche Grammophon, a label usually identified with classical recordings) and diluting it down to muzak. And, hey, I get it – those of us who were listening to these songs back when they were brand new and perhaps more innovative are now rocketing through middle age at alarming speed. But if dropping pretty orchestral accompaniment on top of new wave gems isn’t bizarre enough, there’s Tori Amos’ cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)”, which is a walloping dose of cognitive dissonance – a song about a troubling subject is suddenly inordinately ornate.

4 out of 4There’s a lot to like here, but after two albums in a similar vein, Trevor Horn is in danger of becoming his own cover band, and I have mixed feelings about that. Any chance of reconvening The Producers and doing anything new, Trevor?

  1. Swimming Pools (Drank) (with Tori Amos)
  2. Steppin’ Out (with Seal)
  3. Owner Of A Lonely Heart (with Rick Astley)
  4. Slave To The Rhythm (with Lady Blackbird)
  5. Love Is A Battlefield (with Marc Almond)
  6. Personal Jesus (with Iggy Pop & Phoebe Lunny)
  7. Drive (with Steve Hogarth)
  8. Relax (with Toyah Willcox & Robert Fripp)
  9. White Wedding (with Andrea Corr & Jack Lukeman)
  10. Smells Like Teen Spirit (with Jack Lukeman)
  11. Avalon

Released by: Deutsche Grammophon
Release date: December 1, 2023
Total running time: 44:26

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Categories
2023 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Tribute / Reinterpretation Year

Doctor Who: The Survival Mixes – music by Dominic Glynn

2 min read

Order this CDIf the Time And The Rani soundtrack was the alpha of the seventh Doctor’s era on Doctor Who, Survival is its omega, and of course already has its own soundtrack release. But its composer, Dominic Glynn, is back among the cat people, and this time he’s here to get them dancing. The Survival Mixes remixes four key cues from the Survival score, and as with Glynn’s past remixes of his Doctor Who music, we start with the track that changes the least about its source material and the mixes after it gradually make more significant changes to the original tracks.

“Catflap” takes an eerie, piano-based cue and gradually builds an insistent, urgent rhythm around that loop, making for a nicely atmospheric track. “Run Doctor, Run!” has a more aggressive, percussion-driven cue from the original soundtrack as its starting point, and adds to that percussion, as well as new bassline layers and samples of dialogue from the show. (While the dialogue is neat, I kind of wish that maybe the tracks with dialogue had been repeated in dialogue-free form as bonus tracks.) “The Dead Valley” takes a quieter piece of the soundtrack and turns it into a mesmerizing, hypnotic loop, again with some show dialogue toward the end. The dialogue starts almost immediately in “Good Hunting, Sister” and quickly becomes the most radically reworked track of the bunch. Those four tracks are followed by “Indefinable Magic: Podcast Theme”, an original commission for a podcast hosted by Toby Hadoke; while not based on anything from Survival, it has a feel that certainly fits in with the other tracks.

4 out of 4If you’re a fan of classic Doctor Who music, and don’t mind mixing things up a bit, this EP is a nice way to spend the better part of a half hour. That it starts out with bits of one of the best scores to grace the Sylvester McCoy era of the show doesn’t hurt (to be fair, McCoy’s entire final season in the role of the Doctor was full of great music).

  1. Catflap (5:15)
  2. Run Doctor, Run! (4:49)
  3. The Dead Valley (5:53)
  4. Good Hunting Sister (4:35)
  5. Bonus track: Indefinable Magic: Podcast Theme (2:30)

Released by: No Bones Records
Release date: November 24, 2023
Total running time: 23:00

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