Category: Soundtracks

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2023 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Television Year

Star Wars: Visions Volume 2: Sith – music by Dan Levy

2 min read

Order this CDFor the second year running, Disney Plus celebrated Star Wars Day (i.e. May the Fourth be with you) by dropping a new batch of the highly stylized Star Wars: Visions shorts. The Visions mission statement is pretty simple: hand esteemed animators and animation studios a few minutes in the Star Wars universe, with no obligations to be canonical, or even necessarily serious. Their only obligation is to have some fun with the universe and the lore, in their own unique visual style. The inaugural 2022 batch consisted of shorts all done by respected anime studios; the slots in the 2023 batch (I hesitate to call it a season) were given to studios further afield, not just those in the world of anime.

Clocking in at just under 15 minutes, Sith, written and directed by Rodrigo Blaas, who served as the supervising director of Trollhunters: Tales Of Arcadia, was among the most visually arresting of the 2023 shorts. The entire story is animated in a very stylized, painterly style, befitting the main character – a recovering/escaped former Sith apprentice – who has gone into hiding to lose herself in her art. The score by Dan Levy (a French-born composer who seems to like the short-form animation format; he also die an episode of Netflix’s Love Death + Robots) drenches nearly the entire running time of the short, which is not unusual for the Visions shorts. With so little time, many of the animators and filmmakers contributing Visions shorts make the decision to let the score and the sound effects mix do the talking rather than slowing down too much for mere dialogue.

3 out of 4Levy’s score starts strong – its deceptively quiet opening is a bit more interesting than the inevitable busy chase and fight scenes (because you can’t just quit being a Sith apprentice without some blowback from your former boss). The action music has more in common with The Matrix than with anything in the Star Wars universe, while managing to be less interesting than either of the two. It’s in the quieter, more contemplative moments that this score distinguishes itself as a standalone listening experience; the chase music is best when it’s accompanied by the actual chase.

  1. Blank Canvas (2:59)
  2. Sith Apprentice (2:43)
  3. The Chase (1:24)
  4. Light And Dark (2:57)
  5. Destiny (2:11)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: May 5, 2023
Total running time: 12:14

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2016 Music Reviews R Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Let It Smeg: The Music From Red Dwarf X – music by Howard Goodall

5 min read

Order this CDHey, quick question: Red Dwarf’s a science fiction show with a loyal cult following, right?

I ask that because it sure as hell isn’t consistently merchandised like one. Sure, there have been novelizationss and DVDs, and for the blink of an eye around the turn of the century, UK miniature model manufacturer Corgi had a couple of die-cast spaceships in the shops, namely the small rouge one itself and the indestructible Starbug. There have been fleeting sightings of T-shirts whose provenance runs the gamut from “officially licensed” to “ha! what’s a license?” with characters and catchphrases. I think an official magazine and a paper-and-dice role playing game were in print for about five minutes each. Granted, Red Dwarf is not really an all-audiences show; the little die-cast spaceships were probably intended for adult collectors from the start, and unless Super7 or Wandering Planet Toys get the action figure license, that’s a product category that’s unlikely to happen, because again, it’s not being sold to kids.

Second question: grown-ups like soundtracks from their favorite genre franchises, don’t they? Arguably, 25% of this entire web site exists because of that notion. So it’s surprising that it took 28 years for official Red Dwarf soundtrack releases to arrive, and it’s surprising that, seven years later, even as digital releases go, they’re still shockingly obscure. Now, to be sure, Howard Goodall has other projects aplenty on his plate; the man’s a respected music scholar with lectures and serious texts on the subject of music to his name. He’s renowned for also scoring the likes of the Black Adder series (and nearly everything else Rowan Atkinson has done, from Mr. Bean to the Johnny English movies), The Vicar of Dibley, and many other projects. Red Dwarf is but one feature on his career landscape, but like Mr. Bean himself, it’s a persistent one.

And there’s an elephant in the room as well: the DVD releases of the eight original BBC-produced seasons of Red Dwarf had sub-menus you could visit and listen to every tiny music cue Howard ever recorded for the show. And yes, enterprising fans figured out how to extract those from the DVD audio tracks and effectively made their own soundtrack albums for the show…none of which paid the composer (or indeed the owners of Red Dwarf as an IP) a single cent. The score tracks on the DVDs were a neat feature for those of us who had longed to hear the music in isolation, but as well-meaning as their inclusion was, they proved that there’s a problem if demand isn’t met with product.

The neat thing about the quartet of albums Goodall released digitally in 2016 is that they’re not the same as the DVD’s deluge of often-near-identical tracks, and they can be heard at better-than-DVD-bonus-audio-track quality. (One suspects that Goodall may have even remastered them just a little bit to sound better than they originally did.) These releases are curated, edited together with some regard for musical flow, and they’re probably the composer’s personal favorites; he has also included some bits and pieces that never made it to broadcast (and therefore probably aren’t on the DVDs). The neat thing about this particular release is that it’s kind of a musical ouroboros (yes, I went there), containing both the music from the show’s better-than-we-had-any-right-to-expect return to producing full seasons of shows in 2012, and the music from the first three seasons, spanning the late 1980s launch of the show. You can’t do much better than that for an exercise in contrasts. The Red Dwarf X music is created with modern tools and samples, and Goodall is one of those composers who makes a virtue of the fact that he has next to no music budget. You couldn’t tell from listening, because Goodall is also a master of judiciously choosing samples and mixing them as if they’re the real thing.

4 out of 4The late ’80s material, on the other hand, is chintzy, cheesy, and very, very late ’80s – and yet it’s also beloved if you’re a longtime fan of the show. And again, it’s down to Goodall’s vast skill in arranging and putting the music together: the show’s theme tune, at its most basic, is a brilliant musical construction, flexible enough to start out as a foreboding, echoing lone trumpet in the void and end up as a jaunty end credit song with lyrics, with stops at “glam disco-going-on-new-wave groove”, “hard rock guitar jam”, “almost a church mass”, “waltz”, and “electro/synth-pop”, all in the space of twelve minutes without feeling forced at any point along the way.

We finally have official Red Dwarf soundtracks, you smegheads. Yes, they’re a bit late. But they’re eminently listenable, and they’re long-overdue on the “paying the composer what he’s due” side of the equation that any official soundtrack release should live up to. The cover artwork is a bit… Microsoft Word?… but that’s not the part you’re listening to. Long awaited, eagerly anticipated, and highly recommended for any Red Dwarf fans out there.

  1. Let It Smeg: Red Dwarf X: The Underscore (14:19)
  2. Red Dwarf Antique Extras (12:00)

Released by: Howard Goodall
Release date: November 4, 2016
Total running time: 26:19

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2023 Music Reviews Other S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Year

The Wonders Of The Universe: Music From The Big Finish Space: 1999 Audio Dramas

4 min read

Order this CDI’m going to contend that if you have a soundtrack with a track title that is both a plot point of its story, and the title of an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, you know you’re in for a good time. The great news is that there’s a lot more to The Wonders Of The Universe than “Space Madness”. In 2019, Big Finish Productions – purveyors of many fine audio dramas that have been reviewed extensively in theLogBook episode guides – announced that, as part of their ongoing collaboration with Anderson Productions, they would be rebooting legendary ’70s sci-fi drama Space: 1999 as a series of audio dramas, splitting the difference between adapting original TV episodes and brand new stories. This is top-secret Moonbase Alpha encrypted code for “here’s unfettered access to Earl’s wallet”. Naturally, there have been critics of any project that would dare to recast the roles once played by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, and company, but overall the Space: 1999 audio dramas have been well-produced and well-written, offering connecting tissue that shows the writers have been paying careful attention to the original TV series’ weak spots and shoring those up narratively. And, of course, being Big Finish Productions, they’ve commissioned original scores for each one.

That’s where Kraemer, a veteran of such movies as Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher and countless other scoring assignments, comes in. Not just a talented composer, Joe is, deep down, a fan like the rest of us. That gets laid bare in the liner notes, not just where he talks about being a fan of Barry Gray’s original TV scores, but approaching the audio drama scores as if they’re at the same remove from Gray’s work that 1970s animated Star Trek had to be from the live action Star Trek’s scores. When someone makes a reference like that, it’s safe to start chanting “one of us! one of us!” in the background. Without directly, note-for-note quoting Gray’s season one theme, Kraemer manages to still do a stylistic homage to Gray’s despair-laden season one scores. The distinctive sound of Space: 1999’s first year on TV is echoed especially well in the aforementioned “Space Madness”, the first half of “Intentions Revealed”, and “A Chilling Discovery”. There are also some stylistic homages (some of them pretty in-your-face) to John Williams in tracks like “Time Is Running Out” and especially “Eagle One”. But Gray’s music remains the touchstone for most of what’s on this album. (Derek Wadsworth’s funky, near-disco stylings from Space: 1999’s season TV season are not referenced in the selections heard here, other than an orchestral-style rendition of his season two end credits.)

4 out of 4All of this is accomplished with synths and samples that do a reasonable job of mimicking the sound of a large orchestral ensemble, which is something that simply isn’t within the budgetary reach of Big Finish. In some ways, this means there’s actually a “bigger” sound than even the original TV series could have gone for, though the trade-off is that the orchestra is clearly a synthetic one, especially when you’re hearing it away from the dense mix of sound effects and dialogue that normally competes with the music in the mix. The unique demands of an audio drama mean that this music is seldom foregrounded the way it might be on TV, so if an orchestra of sampled instruments strikes you as a shortcoming, keep in mind that in its original (and, it must be said, intended) context, the music is jostling elbows with a dense, world-building layer of sound design. Kraemer’s original themes start to jump out after just a couple of listens, and that’s indicative of the approach of Space: 1999 a la Big Finish overall: it’s the story we already know, but now with more connecting tissue that reinforces the story as an ongoing saga and something less randomly episodic. I recommend both the soundtrack and the audio productions for which it was created.

  1. Theme From Space: 1999 (Season One) (2:30)
  2. Stellar Intrigue (2:26)
  3. Space Madness (1:56)
  4. Mysteries In The Dark (2:21)
  5. Escaping Threats (4:09)
  6. Scheming and Plotting (2:41)
  7. Time Is Running Out (2:31)
  8. The Coldness Of Space (2:18)
  9. Moonbase Mystery (2:10)
  10. Aboard Eagle One (3:30)
  11. Koenig Investigates (3:03)
  12. Intentions Revealed (4:19)
  13. Flight Into Peril (2:13)
  14. The Wonders Of The Universe (2:32)
  15. A Chilling Discovery (2:49)
  16. A Fitting End (0:55)
  17. Theme From Space: 1999 (Season Two) (1:32)

Released by: BSX Records
Release date: May 11, 2023
Total running time: 43:54

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2022 Music Reviews O Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Television Year

Obi-Wan Kenobi – music by Natalie Holt, William Ross, and John Williams

5 min read

Order this CDWho scored this? The credits on the cover seem to make that an interesting question, as does the timeline of the public reveal that John Williams – who, we had already been told, was retiring from scoring Star Wars and from scoring films altogether – was contributing a new theme for Obi-Wan himself. Most of what is heard in the show and on this release is by Natalie Holt, who had already made a splash on another Disney Plus streaming series, Marvel’s Loki. But top billing goes to John Williams for the Obi-Wan theme, and the cover then tells us that theme has been adapted by William Ross. Anywhere Williams’ wistful new theme for the aging Jedi Knight appears in the show itself, it’s in a cue credited to Ross. One begins to suspect that Williams’ involvement (and therefore Ross’ involvement as well) happened at a very late stage, replacing work that had already been done by Natalie Holt. (A bit of research – and a bit of reading between the lines of all the industry-speak – reveals that this is precisely what happened. It’d be neat to hear Holt’s original theme and the replaced score cues to hear what the show would’ve sounded like before the guys dropped in to do a little of the work and claim a lot of the credit.)

Williams’ theme is nice, I will give it that. It does fit Obi-Wan where we find him in this movie – noble, but subdued. In the end credit rendition, there’s a big orchestral build-up that seems a little out of place, but otherwise a nice theme, and a bit more distinctive than the theme Williams penned for inclusion in John Powell’s Solo score (of which more another time). Its first major appearance as a piece of the score arrives in “Thr Journey Begins”; Ross’ adaptations of the Williams theme takes up five more tracks in the soundtrack outside of the opening titles and end credit theme.

The first score cue, “Order 66”, lurches from pastoral to relentless action on a dime for the prologue in which we see the moment that the Emperor’s order to rid the universe of the Jedi affects a class of young padawans. That same propulsive action then shifts down a gear or two into lurking menace as the show jumps to the present day for “Inquisitors’ Hunt”. Tracks like “Young Leia”, “Days of Alderaan” and “Bail and Leia” have a different feel entirely as, for the first time since a fleeting glimpse in the epilogue of Star Wars Episode III, we get to see Alderaan as a utopian world that somehow hung onto its idealistic identity well into the reign of the Empire. The tone darkens significant;y as Obi-Wan leaves the safe obscurity of Tatooine to begin his mission (“Daiyu”, “Cat And Mouse”). There’s an unexpected bit of electronic instrumentation in “Ready To Go” that almost sounds like something that escaped from the Tron Legacy soundtrack; it’s not unwelcome, but does stick out a bit in a score that’s doing its best to stay in Star Wars‘ traditionally orchestral wheelhouse.

Some more exotic flavors creep in as Obi-Wan’s quest takes him further afield (“Spice Den”, “Mapuzo”, “The Path”), and things again take a dark turn as master and apprentice once again find themselves in the other’s proximity (“Sensing Vader”, “Stormtrooper Patrol”, “Hangar Escape”, “Empire ARrival”), the latter of which introduces a strident march that screams “the Empire is here” without just quoting Williams’ “Imperial March”. Holt even sneaks a quotation of Williams’ series theme into “Dark Side Assault” – see, she didn’t need outside help with that, did she?

After Ross shows up to drench another major Kenobi/Vader confrontation with buckets of synthesized choir in “I Will Do What I Must”, Holt gives us a brief reprieve from the action music with the quieter “Sacrifice”, before resuming the chase and finally getting a hint of “The Imperial March” in (“No Further Use”). As is typical, the major action setpiece (“Overcoming The Past”) is handed off to Ross’ arrangement of Williams’ theme, elevated to a grand level as Obi-Wan finally finds his footing within the Force again, leaving Vader in a weakened state both physically and emotionally. Two more Holt cues (“Tatooine Desert Chase”, “Who You Become”) tie off the story of Reva, an Imperial Inquisitor obsessed with tracking down Obi-Wan, with Ross again getting the last word with “Saying Goodbye”, which quotes both Williams’ newly-minted Obi-Wan theme and the original trilogy’s theme for Leia.

4 out of 4It’s all fine music. Despite the number of cooks in the kitchen, it does all integrate better than one might expect. Some of you reading this are probably shouting at your screens something along the lines of “We’re privileged to be getting even one new piece of Star Wars music from John Williams!” And there may be something to that, but as solid as Holt’s work is throughout, why was it not good enough for nearly a quarter of the score, if the soundtrack’s track listing is any indication? It’s a little unsettling to think that while the casting of the Star Wars steaming shows is growing more diverse (though, as the unfortunate pushback against the amazing Moses Ingram demonstrated, not without difficulty), other elements of production very much present the appearance of keeping the glass ceiling in place with Imperial zeal.

  1. Obi-Wan (4:06)
  2. Order 66 (1:40)
  3. Inquistors’ Hunt (3:09)
  4. Young Leia (1:04)
  5. Days of Alderaan (1:38)
  6. The Journey Begins (2:57)
  7. Bail and Leia (2:19)
  8. Nari’s Shadow (1:14)
  9. Ready to Go (2:26)
  10. Daiyu (2:25)
  11. Cat and Mouse (3:10)
  12. Spice Den (1:10)
  13. First Rescue (3:10)
  14. Mapuzo (1:17)
  15. The Path (1:35)
  16. Sensing Vader (2:49)
  17. Parallel Lines (2:12)
  18. Some Things Can’t Be Forgotten (4:47)
  19. Stormtrooper Patrol (2:34)
  20. Hangar Escape (2:33)
  21. Hold Hands (1:39)
  22. Empire Arrival (2:04)
  23. Dark Side Assault (2:37)
  24. I Will Do What I Must (2:48)
  25. Sacrifice (1:41)
  26. No Further Use (3:39)
  27. Overcoming the Past (4:28)
  28. Tatooine Desert Chase (2:19)
  29. Who You Become (3:36)
  30. Saying Goodbye (5:26)
  31. End Credit (4:02)

Released by: Disney Music
Release date: June 27, 2022
Total running time: 82:34

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2023 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Trek Television Year

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 1 – music by Nami Melumad

5 min read

Order this CDIt seems like every new Star Trek series that comes along in the streaming age has its own slightly different sound. All of them stay in the orchestral film music wheelhouse, but do something a little bit different within that wheelhouse: Discovery started out more contemplative and piano-heavy, Lower Decks plays it very straightforward so its music isn’t part of its jokes, Picard eventually settled into Jerry Goldsmith jukebox mode, and Prodigy – probably the best of the bunch and yet simultaneously the most overlooked because it hails from Nickelodeon, which seems to be a signal to some adult viewers to steer clear of it – is big, bombastic, larger than life, and yet fun when it needs to be. Prodigy composer Nami Melumad, a Michael Giacchino protege who had previously scored one of the shorts from the now-apparently-extinct Short Treks series, quickly gained notice for her work on Star Trek’s most recent animated incarnation, and was tapped to provide music for the eagerly awaited Strange New Worlds.

Strange New Worlds is a series that was, for all intents and purposes, created by fan demand to see more of the pre-Kirk-era troika of Captain Pike, Number One, and a younger Spock, established in Star Trek’s original 1964 pilot The Cage and revived (and recast) in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. Set aboard the Enterprise years prior to Kirk’s command, but well after the events of The Cage, the series leans into its retro construction booth figurative (mostly-unconnected adventures to different worlds every week) and literal (its greatest gift to the younger members of the audience may be introducing them to mid-century modern furnishings). It’s a return to Star Trek’s roots – a message-of-the-week space opera, a modern formulation of the original series without the baked-in issues of the original series. It also has a bit of a retro sound, at least in the opening credits – there are hints and near-quotes of the Alexander Courage theme, and when the full quotation of that theme finally happens, it sounds like a theremin – a bit of a stylistic wink to the audience that, if the Star Trek was all started with was from the sixties, this is from even before then. The theme is by Jeff Russo, who previously created the opening themes for Discovery and Picard.

But the scores accounting for most of the album’s (and show’s) runtime are by Nami Melumad, and they boldly get down to business. The pilot episode (which was unafraid to very clearly state the series’ entire mission statement unambiguously) is represented by four tracks, three of which accompany the big setpieces of the episode: “Everyone Wants A Piece Of The Pike” accompanies Captain Pike’s retreat into a wilderness cabin, while “Eyes On The Enterprise” sets the backdrop for Pike’s return to his ship, and “Home Is Where The Helm Is” covers the aftermath of Pike revealing the Federation’s existence to a planet on the all-too-familiar brink of world war. (“Put A T’Pring On It” is the quietest of the four pilot tracks, as Spock has to decide between a call to duty and a call to somewhat more domestic duties.)

Generally speaking, the big musical setpieces of each episode of the season are represented here, with some episodes getting more coverage than others (I was surprised to see only one track for the fanciful late-season episode The Elysian Kingdom.) The album’s musical focus, perhaps quite rightly, is on the music from the cluster of episodes that represented a mid-season series of storytelling slam dunks: three tracks each from Memento Mori and Spock Amok, two from Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach, and four from the Orion pirate romp The Serene Squall. Yes, Spock Amok‘s deceptively low-key riff on Gerald Fried’s immortal Amok time fight theme is here (“Are You A Vulcan Or A Vulcan’t?”); somewhat surprisingly, the season finale seems underrepresented by comparison, so we don’t get that episode’s take on Fred Steiner’s “Romulan Theme” from Balance Of Terror, the original series episode whose story A Quality Of Mercy spents much of its runtime riffing and remixing.

4 out of 4As was the case with her work on Prodigy, Melumad’s superpower is in her ability not just to kick butt with major action setpieces, but to make each episode’s more introspective moments memorable as well. Tracks like “Comet Away With Me” let her show off some less-percussive, non-action-oriented fireworks marking inner turmoil for the show’s characters. The solitary track from The Elysian Kingdom, “You’re My Mercury Stone”, is another track like that, and it’s simply gorgeous. Overall, the season one soundtrack hits a nice balance of music from action scenes and music from revelatory character moments as well. I look forward to hearing more of Nami Melumad’s work on both this series and Star Trek: Prodigy in the future. I don’t think it’s much a stretch to say that her work is the current sound of Star Trek at its best.

  1. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Main Title Theme) by Jeff Russo (01:52)
  2. Everyone Wants a Piece of the Pike (03:51)
  3. Put a T’Pring On It (02:56)
  4. Eyes on the Enterprise (04:42)
  5. Home is Where the Helm Is (04:17)
  6. Space Cadet (01:01)
  7. Comet Away With Me (02:36)
  8. Romancing the Comet (03:23)
  9. M’hanit and Greet (07:01)
  10. Since I First Saw the Stars (03:55)
  11. A Holding Pattern (04:44)
  12. Gorn With the Wind (05:29)
  13. The Pike Maneuver (02:03)
  14. Gorn But Not Forgotten (03:25)
  15. Are You a Vulcan or a Vulcan’t? (03:00)
  16. Spock Too Soon (02:03)
  17. Chris Crossed (03:44)
  18. Looking For Ascension in All the Wrong Places (03:04)
  19. Ascent-ial Questions (02:01)
  20. T’Pring It On (01:43)
  21. Pirates in the Sky (02:55)
  22. Will You Be My Vulcantine? (02:45)
  23. Won’t You Be My Pirate? (03:38)
  24. You’re My Mercury Stone (02:05)
  25. Don’t Leave in Uhurry (02:55)
  26. When the Hemmer Falls (04:09)
  27. No One’s Ever Neutral About Spaghetti (02:54)
  28. Throw Plasma From the Train (05:29)
  29. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (End Credits) by Jeff Russo (00:58)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: April 28, 2023
Total running time: 94:23

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2022 D Doctor Who Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: Eve Of The Daleks – music by Segun Akinola

3 min read

Order this CDA bit of pastoral acoustic guitar is almost the last thing you’d expect to here from any soundtrack whose title ends in the words “…of the Daleks”, and yet here we are, with the first of the “series 13 specials” leading up to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Doctor (whose music has already been reviewed here).

Things quickly get more modern, though, with a sense of technological urgency defining much of the score to Eve Of The Daleks. The lower-register minimalism works wonders when contrasted with outbursts of menacing brass, but there’s another kind of minimalism on display in some tracks – particularly “Deja Vu” and “Not A Great Plan” – where things slow down, there’s a little bit more breathing room between notes rather than the insistent bass synth ostinato running through most of the tracks. Particularly in “Not A Great Plan” and “Took You Long Enough”, when the music resumes its slower, acoustic feel, with the addition of a double bass, it’s almost jazzy – might be Doctor Who, might be an episode of The Avengers.

Much of Eve Of The Daleks‘ musical landscape lies in the tension between those two modes: acoustic vs. electronic, less predictable rhythms vs. a steadily percolating synth bass line, and ultimately, as the story itself dictates, human vs. machine. Really a simple idea, but it serves the story remarkably well.

3 out of 4Though “A Brilliant Plan” and “Important Stuff To Do” shake things up with some rapid-fire strings to accompany the score’s synthetic pulse, and “Fireworks” closes things out with a more relaxed sense that all has turned out as it should (and the return of the jazzy acoustic motif), there just isn’t much of a musical exclamation point at the end. The previous end-of-year special (and previous Dalek episode score) Revolution Of The Daleks provided that kind of major shift to accompany the exit of Ryan and Graham, but Eve Of The Daleks just doesn’t have that kind of catharsis at the end of its story or its score. It’s just another day at the office, nobody’s leaving, and the status quo is restored. Without that, Eve Of The Daleks just quietly ends. An interesting episode, and an interesting score, but as a standalone listening experience, it’s the least remarkable of the series 13 specials.

  1. Here We Are Again (02:17)
  2. Out Of Service (03:27)
  3. I Am Not Nick (02:33)
  4. Deja Vu (03:39)
  5. The Correction (03:06)
  6. Sorry Sorry Sorry (01:09)
  7. Not A Great Plan (06:57)
  8. Took You Long Enough (08:44)
  9. We Will Not Stop (03:50)
  10. We Go Again And We Win (04:01)
  11. The Doctor Cannot Save You (03:29)
  12. A Brilliant Plan (03:56)
  13. Important Stuff To Do (04:11)
  14. Fireworks (03:06)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: December 2, 2022
Total running time: 54:21

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2019 Music Reviews O Orville Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Orville: Season 1 – music by Bruce Broughton, Joel McNeely, John Debney, and Andrew Cottee

8 min read

Order this CDIt seems like it was not too long ago that I was gushing about Bruce Broughton having a good handle on how to make a space adventure series sound really epic, and even though I was talking about the doomed second season of Buck Rogers from 1981, I feel like the fact that he went on to craft the main theme and the pilot episode score for The Orville makes my point for me. Spoiler: he’s still got a good handle on how to make a space adventure series sound really epic.

Of course, it helps to have the right series to score, and it’s probably the worst-kept secret in Hollywood that, on the surface, The Orville might just be the most spectacular Star Trek: The Next Generation fan film series ever produced. Though Fox was quick to play up Seth MacFarlane’s involvement and tried to pitch it as a comedy, MacFarlane quickly showed his hand just a few episodes in: he wanted his own Trek spinoff, in every way but name, complete with complex moral issues and serious storytelling and character development. And to help sell that, MacFarlane insisted on enough of a music budget to hire some of the biggest orchestral ensembles that Hollywood TV scoring had seen in years, along with a mix of composers from legendary projects and some rising talent.

While only soundtrack nerds like myself might remember Broughton in the same breath with Buck Rogers, it’s no secret that his score for the 1998 big-screen revival Lost In Space was one of that film’s most redeeming qualities. And it’s really that sound that Broughton brings to the pilot episode, Old Wounds – soaring space adventure music building on his noble, nautical theme tune as a motif. While “Krill Attack / Shuttle Escape” kicks the amount of butt that you’d expect a Broughton action cue to kick, “Emergency Docking” is the real thrill ride from the pilot.

Joel McNeely arrived in the second episode as one of the show’s regular composers; with such projects as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the score-without-a-movie project Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire behind him, McNeely’s an ideal pick for this series. His score for If The Stars Should Appear is moody, mysterious, and a marvelous stylistic homage (if an obvious one) to Jerry Goldsmith’s “V’Ger music” from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That mention is a good time to point out that what differentiates The Orville from its inspiration is that, as a musician himself, Seth MacFarlane knows the value of a strong, memorable score, and of occasionally letting the music carry the picture. Music this distinctive and bold would never have made it to the screen in the Rick Berman era of Star Trek, a period that saw perfectly capable and talented composers having to try to sneak anything thematically strong under the radar of a producer who essentially wanted sonic wallpaper. The Orville’s music isn’t wallpaper; it isn’t more concerned with the rumble of the ship’s engines than it is with music that conveys emotions, and MacFarlane gives his composers a free hand to express that. About A Girl gets a rollicking start (and a rollicking interlude in “Arriving On Moclus”), but is more contemplative overall, befitting the story where the show really made clear what mix of drama-with-occasional-comedy it would be embracing in the future. His Krill score is considerably more active, with a John Williams flavor in both action and suspense scenes, and a deliciously unsettling, musically-unresolved ending in the “New Enemies” cue closing the first disc. Into The Fold, the first McNeely score on disc two, starts with a killer shuttle-crash opening and builds menace from there with horror-movie-ready action cues and quiter, but still menacing, passages. McNeely rounds things out on the second disc with the quieter score for Mad Idolatry, an episode more concerned with landing its concept and its message than attempting to be the season’s action showcase. Debney’s score supports that sets the mood without getting in the way.

John Debney comes out swinging with his first score, Command Performance, which again has stylistic nods to Goldsmith (complete with the Blaster Beam!) as well as Horner and Williams, and fireworks aplenty. Pria also opens with a bang, and a Williams-esque one at that, with some ominous passages as the crew – well, everyone except Captain Mercer, who’s smitten with her – begins to suspect that enigmatic visitor Captain Pria Levesque (played by very promotable guest star Charlize Theron) is not telling them the whole story of where she comes from. Things get overly synthesized for the first time with Majority Rule, sounding almost like Alan Silvestri’s work from the MacFarlane-produced Cosmos series. Though it’s a surreal romantic comedy episode, Cupid’s Dagger still gets a deceptively straightforward dramatic treatment from Debney (though only two tracks and seven minutes’ worth). Debney pulls double duty, also scoring the following episode, Firestorm, which he helps turn into an action blockbuster (and quite possibly my favorite score from the first season). Firestorm comes out swinging from the first second and doesn’t let up. I’m not of the opinion that a film composer should be judged only by their action music – quite the contrary, actually – but Debney drenches it with diverse action and horror stylings aplenty, making it his showpiece for The Orville’s first year. (And note: more Blaster Beam.)

Andrew Cottee, an internationally-known arranger who had already done some work on MacFarlane’s 2019 album Once In A While, gets to sink his teeth into a full-length episode score with New Dimensions, a late-season episode that was already conceptually challenging. Dealing with the three-dimensional ship and crew being pulled into a two-dimensional realm of space in which they can only hope to survive for a short time before they have to exit again, New Dimensions is one of those “how do you even express that musically?” exercises. The score Cottee delivered for this episode does not sounds like someone’s first effort for hour-long dramatic TV – it sounds like he’s been doing this for years. There’s a sense of awe and wonder to the “two-dimensional” scenes, and a restrained sense of menace elsewhere that reminds me of the original Star Trek with its economical and yet forceful arrangements. Delivering more “oomph” with fewer players is a real gift in film scoring, and it’s all down to careful arrangement. Cottee has that gift; I look forward to hearing more from him.

4 out of 4As musically inclined and adept as Seth MacFarlane is, whether he would be a composer’s greatest collaborator or greatest liability rests on a delicate tipping point. He obviously had a clear vision for what he wanted The Orville to sound like, picked the composers who could make that happen, and both encouraged them and was able to give them a detailed idea of what he wanted. The fact that all of the show’s composers returned to contribute to its later seasons would seem to be an indication of a good working atmosphere; it certainly produced eminently listenable results.

    Disc 1
  1. The Orville Main Title (01:04)

       

    Old Wounds – music by Bruce Broughton

  2. Shuttle to the Ship (01:54)
  3. She Requested It / Departing for Landing (01:09)
  4. Krill Attack / Shuttle Escape (04:14)
  5. Emergency Docking (02:27)
  6. Kelly Has a Plan / Asking Kelly to Stay (03:51)

       

    If The Stars Should Appear – music by Joel McNeely

  7. The Bio-Ship / Exploring the Hull (02:22)
  8. Exploring the Bio-Ship (02:45)
  9. Finding Alara / Space Battle (02:53)
  10. Dorahl / The Roof Opens (04:05)

       

    Command Performance – music by John Debney

  11. Distress Signal Received / Alara Freaks Out / Explosion (05:54)
  12. Alara Gets the Cold Shoulder / Approaching Calivon (03:52)
  13. Extermination Process Continues / Bortus Hatches His Egg (02:39)

       

    About A Girl – music by Joel McNeely

  14. Western Simulation (01:01)
  15. Asteroid Destroyed / Relieved Of Duty (01:07)
  16. Arriving On Moclus (01:43)
  17. Trip To The Mountains (02:16)
  18. Tribunal Adjourned / Epilogue (03:27)

       

    Pria – music by John Debney

  19. Rescuing Pria (03:51)
  20. Searching Pria’s Room / Dark Matter Storm / Navigating The Storm (04:06)
  21. Approaching The Coordinates / Isaac Saves The Crew (03:20)
  22. Pria’s Theme (01:41)

       

    Krill – music by Joel McNeely

  23. Distress Call (01:29)
  24. Krill Attack The Orville (02:49)
  25. Bomb Found (04:54)
  26. Intruder Alert / Preparing The Weapon (02:59)
  27. Turning On The Lights / New Enemies (02:29)
    Disc 2
    Majority Rule – music by John Debney
  1. Lysella Wakes Up / Looks Like Earth / Rescue Mission (01:39)
  2. John Gets Arrested / Alara Seems Suspicious (02:05)
  3. Ed Has A Plan (01:33)
  4. Bringing Lysella Aboard / Casting The Votes / Their World Can Do Better (06:06)

       

    Into The Fold – music by Joel McNeely

  5. Sucked In (02:44)
  6. Claire Breaks Out (01:26)
  7. The Fight (01:21)
  8. Claire Returns To The Wreck (02:11)
  9. The Attack (01:55)
  10. Claire Thanks Isaac (01:21)

       

    Cupid’s Dagger – music by John Debney

  11. Archaeologist Arrives / Claire Visits Yaphit / Claire Kisses Yaphit (03:12)
  12. Fleets Approach / War Before Peace / Cleared For Duty / Darulio Departs (04:38)

       

    Firestorm – music by John Debney

  13. Plasma Storm / It Was Late Evening (03:08)
  14. Alara Blows Off Steam / There Was A Clown (03:04)
  15. Alara Hallucinates / Deserted Ship (06:55)
  16. Cannot End Simulation / Back To Normal (04:03)

       

    New Dimensions – music by Andrew Cottee

  17. Damage Report / What Happened To The Plants? (02:00)
  18. Krill Ships Approaching (02:30)
  19. Within The Anomaly / Time To Reflect / Quantum Bubble Is Deteriorating (02:25)
  20. Engaging Tractor Beam (02:17)
  21. Mission Complete / Commander Lamarr (02:48)

       

    Mad Idolatry – music by Joel McNeely

  22. Investigating An Anomaly (01:09)
  23. Emergency Landing (03:41)
  24. Searching The Planet (02:38)
  25. Walking Through Town (02:21)
  26. Spread The Word (01:17)
  27. Isaac Steps Up / Civilization Restored (03:14)
  28. The Orville End Titles (00:35)

Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: February 6, 2019
Disc one running time: 76:07
Disc two running time: 74:02
Total running time: 2:30:09

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2021 Music Reviews Other S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Wars Year

Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge

8 min read

Order this CDPoor Disney. You know, despite the fact that I realize that they’re a gigantic media conglomerate that no one’s really supposed to root for, I can’t help but feel for them. Opening an in-person Star Wars attraction had to be very high on their list of reasons to purchase Lucasfilm outright; after all, Star Tours had been doing fairly brisk business since the 1980s. Surely an entire Star Wars theme park would be the most obvious money-maker in the world for Disney – never mind movies and merch, Galaxy’s Edge would probably make back most of the astronomical purchase price of Lucasfilm by itself. And then COVID happened and emptied it out. And then they overcompensated and overshot the mark with the far-too-expensive-for-most-fans Galactic Starcruiser attraction, which remains perennially underbooked. Just as the sequel movies made depressingly clear that our beloved space heroes could find no lasting peace, this chain of real-world events just underlined that you can’t have nice things in the Star Wars universe.

But hey, let’s talk about this soundtrack’s very, very good reason to exist: we get to hear Star Wars a la Bear McCreary, which is the kind of thing one hears is the stuff of days long remembered. McCreary, of course, made his very splashy entry into the ears of genre soundtrack fans with the early aughts revival of Battlestar Galactica, to which he brought a pan-cultural sensibility that was telegraphing, from the first season, what the story eventually told us at its end: these people from other worlds are where all of our world’s music comes from. So yes, you do, in fact, hear every Earth culture in there. In a lot of ways, honestly, McCreary’s scores for each episode told the story more succinctly than the scripts did. He’s since put his very audible musical stamp on such things as Outlander, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Walking Dead, Lord Of The Rings: The Ring Of Power, and Foundation, as well as modern big-screen revivals of Godzilla, Child’s Play, and more. McCreary builds worlds in his music, sometimes better than the scripts that inspire his music.

When Disney bought Lucasfilm and made it clear that more Star Wars was on the way, of course we expected John Williams to return for the sequel movies (and he did, for all of them). But then side-story movies started happening, and it became clear that Williams’ presumptive absolute lock on the franchise’s musical sound was on the verge of expiring. Rogue One went through two composers, meaning that movie has an entire Alexandre Desplat score we’ve never gotten to hear. Solo was an odd musical duck: an experienced composer, new to the franchise, under the obligation to refer to a freshly-penned Williams theme for young Han Solo (an arrangement also in place for the more recent Obi-Wan Kenobi streaming series). But after Solo, and mere weeks before The Rise Of Skywalker, came The Mandalorian, with a very clear musical vision and a very clear message: John Williams does not have to be the only one who can do this.

But the moment that other composers started entering Williams’ well-constructed sandbox, with its established classical/romantic lexicon, I started wondering when McCreary might enter the chat. One of my other picks, Michael Giacchino, landed a Star Wars assignment almost instantly, replacing Desplat’s Rogue One score. But – allowing for the fact that his schedule with TV and movie projects alike keeps him incredibly busy – when would McCreary get to play in that sandbox and bring his impeccable sense of musical world building with him? The answer came in late 2021, at a time when Disney – trying desperately to keep Galaxy’s Edge alive as its own brand at a time when it still wasn’t the greatest idea to actually go there – created a virtual reality universe built around the Galaxy’s Edge storyline. Now you could stay home and explore that world without paying travel expenses or contracting a deadly disease. This was not only its own new product, but was also served as a promo piece for the “real” Galaxy’s Edge. And would it have its own soundtrack? Oh, of course it would – even Williams had contributed a symphonic suite for the opening of the attraction itself.

But other composers would be devising the music for the VR attraction – enter the very interesting combination of McCreary, Joseph Trapanese (Tron Legacy, Tron Uprising), and Danny Piccione (sound designer for a previous Star Wars VR game). McCreary is an obvious composer to bring to the Star Wars party; the lengthy opening track reveals that he’s adept at honoring Williams’ musical lexicon while also bringing more modern sonics into play. (If you found the synths in The Mandalorian’s early episodes off-putting, this will probably be more to your liking.) “Tara Rashin” not only sees McCreary bringing his trademark thundering percussion to the table, but also a theremin-like synth. More woodwinds, percussion, and a mysterious sound accompany the “Guavian Death Gang”, characters glimpsed briefly in The Force Awakens, who I always assumed probably killed people by pushing a button and burying their victims under an avalanche of fresh guavas. Hell of a tasty way to go. “Baron Attsmun” is also swathed in mystery, but has more string-driven grandeur. “Dok-Ondar Treasures” is very much a throwback to the style that won McCreary so many fans in the Galactica days; it’s safe to say that if you know Bear chiefly from Battlestar, you’ll be pleased with his contributions here.

But wait! Joseph Trapanese is also here. He did a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes for the Tron Legacy score attributed to Daft Punk (and then proved, by effortlessly scoring the animated spinoff series Tron Uprising, that he was deservedly the co-author of Tron Legacy‘s sound). His first three tracks bring something of the “big wall of ominous brass and pulsing synth notes” feel of his Tron work, though obviously without using the exact sounds so closely associated with that universe. It’s definitely a more synth-oriented approach.

Danny Piccione takes up the middle of the album, offering up shorter selections with more of a pop music sensibility; you could dance to this stuff, though he’s clearly trying to go for the “unconventional used of earhly instrumentation standing in for alien instrumentation” feel of, say, the original Cantina Band music. All five of his tracks tend to top out at around the three minute mark. These are all fun in-universe listens, not a million miles away from the “previously unreleased Cantina Band music” remit of the two Oga’s Cantina: R3X’s Playlist albums. “Azu Ragga” is the best of these tracks, succeeding in hitting an otherworldly but still tuneful balance.

Trapanese returns for five more tracks, including the album’s longest, “IG-88”, clocking in at over 15 minutes; again, appropriately enough for a bounty hunter droid, the technological precision of his Tron work is a useful frame of reference for what to expect here. A more orchestral tone is struck with “Life Wind” and “Sacred Garden”, which is the closest that Trapanese gets to the Williams wheelhouse of most prior Star Wars music. “Patience” sees the return of the slightly-reminiscent-of-Tron synth work, while “Fountain – The Message” does away with pulsating synth bass lines.

McCreary brings things to a close with three final tracks, “The First Order” giving the sequel era’s big had a theme that isn’t borrowed from previous iterations of the franchise. “I Would Do It Again” strikes a much more hopeful note, and by the time the end credits wrap up, you’ve heard a whole hour and a half of Star Wars music without a single Williams theme.

4 out of 4In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t played Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge itself. I’m going entirely by how enjoyable its music is. Kind of a weird way to judge a soundtrack, sure, but if the music does anything, it actually makes me want to play the game (you know, if I owned any VR gear). Surely it’s quite an experience if it merits the considerable talents of these three composers. Also, let’s set these gentlemen loose on some movies and streaming shows. Because they just spent the running time of this album proving that any one of them is worthy of the task. And because this taste of Star Wars a la Bear McCreary is an indication that we could have a whole feast.

  1. Batuu Wilderness by Bear McCreary (11:05)
  2. Tara Rashin by Bear McCreary (02:55)
  3. Guavian Death Gang by Bear McCreary (07:48)
  4. Baron Attsmun by Bear McCreary (06:49)
  5. Dok-Ondar Treasures by Bear McCreary (03:31)
  6. Age of Jedi by Joseph Trapanese (03:33)
  7. Shadows by Joseph Trapanese (04:59)
  8. Ady’s Theme – Hyperdrive by Joseph Trapanese (02:51)
  9. Pinteeka Dub by Danny Piccione (02:37)
  10. Desert Dance by Danny Piccione (02:33)
  11. Ghenza Shuffle by Danny Piccione (03:04)
  12. Cyinarc by Danny Piccione (02:25)
  13. Azu Ragga by Danny Piccione (03:09)
  14. IG-88 by Joseph Trapanese (15:25)
  15. Life Wind by Joseph Trapanese (02:55)
  16. Sacred Garden by Joseph Trapanese (04:07)
  17. Patience by Joseph Trapanese (01:54)
  18. Fountain – The Message by Joseph Trapanese (01:27)
  19. The First Order by Bear McCreary (02:49)
  20. I Would Do It Again by Bear McCreary (03:18)
  21. Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge End Credits by Bear McCreary (02:37)

Released by: Walt Disney Records
Release date: December 3, 2021
Total running time: 1:31:40

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2023 Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Star Trek Television Year

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 – music by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann

6 min read

Order this CDThe third and final season of Star Trek: Picard has now unspooled in full on Paramount Plus, and its soundtrack is also now readily available. The third season was heavily promoted, promising a full reunion of the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and late in the season, even miraculously brought back the Next Generation’s beloved Enterprise from what we’d all assumed was its final resting place on the planet onto whose surface it crashed in 1994’s Star Trek: Generations. Of course, to bring all of the characters back to their original places on that iconic bridge, there had to be a tremendous threat that they’d risk everything to fight, and perhaps predictably, that turned out to be the Borg, a well-worn Star Trek foe getting its third wildly different treatment in as many consecutive seasons of Picard. Whether it all holds together as a story without relying on dropping nostalgia bombs on the audience to distract them from the predictability of the plot – look, space squirrel! – is something I suspect fans and critics will be debating for years to come. In the meantime, the actors got to work together one more time, save the universe one more time, and pay their mortgages.

Into this fray walked two composers new to the franchise. Where Jeff Russo – also the resident composer of Star Trek: Discovery – had performed similar duties for Picard’s first and second seasons, giving those proceedings a somewhat more contemplative feel with the obligatory ramping-up-to-maximum-orchestral-anxiety required by end-of-act and end-of-episode breaks, Picard’s showrunners opted to bring in some fresh talent for the show’s last season. It’s also possible that they were looking to bring in talent that wouldn’t balk at the producers’ requests to reference Jerry Goldsmith and other previous Star Trek composers often. (There’s less money to be made from a new arrangement of someone else’s composition than there is from composing something completely original, but make no mistake, with all of the other easter eggs in the show, the producers of Picard make it clear they wanted to hear Goldsmith themes and hear them often.) What a spot to be in: your name is appearing in a high-profile streaming show with the weight of the expectations of the entire franchise on your shoulders, but what you’ve been asked to do is play Jerry Goldsmith’s greatest hits, with some stylistic nods to James Horner’s nautical stylings from Star Trek II. What a musical Kobayashi Maru scenario. (And one that’s likely to keep repeating itself as various long-running IPs play the nostalgia card more blatantly.)

The good news is that the two composers get quite a few original licks in during their sprints between the Goldsmith-ian goalposts. Barton, who did the music for the game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and previously worked with Picard showrunner Terry Matalas on Syfy’s series adaptation of 12 Monkeys (of which Matalas was also the showrunner), and Wiedmann, whose credits include numerous DC Comics direct-to-video animation projects, are no strangers to the epic side of the genre, and they bring that sound in bucketfuls. Rapid-fire brass runs, sinister bass notes, and the requisite strings are all there in abundance, along with a very few fleeting hints of the legendary Blaster Beam, but when it’s time for Picard and company to save the day, the Goldsmith theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (adapted to serve as the theme for The Next Generation’s TV run) returns, along with hints of Goldsmith’s Star Trek: First Contact Theme. Ironically, it’s everything that the weekly episode scores for Next Generation were strictly forbidden to be by that show’s showrunner: loud, thematic, percussive, and developing Goldsmith’s theme(s) as a motif. Courage’s Star Trek theme is quoted occasionally as well, and especially in the suite of material from the first episode, there are audible references to the style, if not necessarily the melodies, of James Horner’s Star Trek II score. In tracks like “Blood In The Water” there are even hints of Don Davis’ action music stylings from The Matrix trilogy.

Some of the best-utilized quotes are the most understated: the track “Legacies”, accompanying the lovingly languid survey of the ships in Geordi’s Fleet Museum, quotes Dennis McCarthy’s Deep Space Nine theme, Courage’s original series theme, Goldsmith’s Star Trek: Voyager theme, and Leonard Rosenman’s theme from Star Trek IV (as that movie’s recovered Klingon ship is glimpsed), all in the space of three minutes with a lovely subtlety (which is good, because the scene it accompanied was not a thing of subtely, bringing the story to a standstill to wallow in its nostalgia grace notes). The Rosenman theme – and indeed, that movie’s entire underrated score – is often omitted from the Star Trek musical canon, and it’s nice to hear it reclaim its place. Maximum Goldsmithification resumes with the track “Make It So”, unveiling the restored Enterprise-D.

3 out of 4It’s all nicely put together, but it reminds me of when, in the 1990s, with my ridiculously massive 18-disc Pioneer magazine CD changer loaded down with every available Star Trek TV and film soundtrack, I would hit “shuffle” and just bask in it. What I liked about Russo’s approach was that it was very much in line with Star Trek: Picard’s original remit to move the character, and his universe, forward into a new context, filled with new and sometimes less-than-sympathetic characters we hadn’t met before. It was something new. Both this season of the show, and its soundtrack, try very hard to hit shuffle play on Star Trek’s greatest hits, and so a lot of it sounds like something you’ve heard before, which does a disservice to the decent original material that Barton and Wiedmann did manage to squeeze in between the musical references. The point of Picard, the series, in its original formulation, was to use one character as a jumping-off point into new territory for the franchise. This season seemed like a decisive step away from that goal. I wonder what we might have gotten if the two talented composers hired for this gig were told to avoid all the Jerry Goldsmith references and chart their own course.

  1. Beverly Crusher (3:02)
  2. Old Communicator (1:58)
  3. Hello, Beautiful (1:57)
  4. Leaving Spacedock (3:44)
  5. I Like That Seven! (3:29)
  6. Breaking the Beam (3:59)
  7. The Shrike (3:34)
  8. Picard’s Answer (4:08)
  9. Riker and Jack (2:08)
  10. Call Me Number One (2:02)
  11. No Win Scenario (3:57)
  12. Blood in the Water (2:58)
  13. Let’s Go Home (3:24)
  14. Flying Blind (5:51)
  15. A New Family (4:16)
  16. Klingons Never Disappoint (5:32)
  17. I Do See You (5:26)
  18. Legacies (3:15)
  19. Evolution (2:44)
  20. La Forges (2:08)
  21. Invisible Rescue (3:34)
  22. Catch Me First (2:32)
  23. Proteus (3:46)
  24. Dominion (7:04)
  25. Lower The Partition (3:38)
  26. Get Off My Bridge (4:26)
  27. Family Reunion (3:18)
  28. Impossible (1:37)
  29. Frontier Day (2:43)
  30. Hail The Fleet (4:03)
  31. You Have The Conn (3:44)
  32. Make It So (6:02)
  33. This Ends Tonight (3:07)
  34. Battle on the Bridge (2:58)
  35. All That’s Left (2:02)
  36. Annihilate (3:05)
  37. Trust Me (2:06)
  38. The Last Generation (2:51)
  39. Where It All Began (2:19)
  40. The Missing Part Of Me (4:30)
  41. Must Come To An End (1:32)
  42. A New Day (3:22)
  43. Legacy and Future (1:44)
  44. Names Mean Everything (1:43)
  45. The Stars – End Credits (2:59)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: April 20, 2023
Total running time: 2:30:15

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2022 A Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Avenue 5 – music by Adem Ilhan

5 min read

Order this CDAs a fan, I could complain about how Avenue 5 was treated, but the truth is, it was a very quirky show filling a niche that wasn’t exactly huge. It made it all the way to production and distribution because creator Armando Iannuzzi had a sweetheart deal giving HBO the first crack at anything he created, and he created a caustic comedy about a space cruise ship gone astray. That it was a sci-fi comedy on a pay-cable-channel-morphing-into-a-streaming-service already put Avenue 5 at a disadvantage in terms of eyeballs; that it landed right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic should’ve given it a chance to be sampled by more people… except that the same pandemic inevitably delayed production of a second season, making it easy to think the show was dead when it wasn’t. (When the second season did arrive, the lackadaisical promotional push for it pretty much confirmed that HBO, at least, had already decided the show was dead, and an official cancellation followed shortly thereafter.) It was impossible timing for a show that wanted to stick around, though one of its episodes – one in which the passengers, led by a particularly clueless rumormonger, ceases to even believe that the show is in space and starts demanding to walk out the airlocks – was one of the best-timed episodes in the history of television. Though written and shot nearly a year before COVID, and probably intended to target climate science denialists, it perfectly encapsulated everything about that early stage of the pandemic when disinformation was starting its alarming spread through the internet.

And the show’s music, seldom foregrounded, just seemed weird – intentionally dissonant, almost like it was sticking its tongue out at the kind of grand orchestrations that usually accompany lovingly detailed shots of massive spaceships on TV. It was far enough down in the show’s sound mix that it was hard to gauge sometimes, but I found it intriguing enough that I was delighted – and, to be honest, very surprised – to see a soundtrack release. And it surprised me even more when it actually stood up as a listening experience without the rest of the show. That’s not always the case with a sitcom. (Then again, there’s actually an album of all of those bass licks from Seinfeld, so what do I know?) Sitcom music tends to be transitional – it gets over a time jump in the story, but seldom serves a dramatic purpose, and isn’t necessarily memorable.

The music for Avenue 5 is different, because Iannuzzi specializes in biting satire. Better known for In The Thick Of It (the series that put Peter Capaldi on the radar as its foulmouthed breakout star) and Veep (an American take on In The Thick Of It, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, produced for HBO), Iannuzzi sets up terrible situations, often full of terrible or incompetent people, winds them up, and lets them go. It’s baked into the cake of Avenue 5 that each episode will land on a schadenfreude-laden callback to every problem that everyone’s been warned about earlier in the show, and that’s usually where Ilhan made his musical presence known.

There are some tracks, such as “The Continuing Journey” and “Your Ears Are Beautiful, To Me”, which are just gorgeous – this is what you’re supposed to hear in a show where an enormous, luxurious spaceship lumbers past the camera! – but the “house style” for Avenue 5’s music seems to be more of a trippy flavor of sound collage. Incomplete vocal samples, chugging cellos and bassoons and bass clarinets that never quite seem to be perfectly in tune (very much like the characters aboard the aforementioned luxurious spaceship), and rapid-fire rhythms that remind me of some of Kronos Quartet’s more offbeat experiments. (I actually found myself thinking of Kronos Quartet a lot on the first listen; this is a compliment.) Some tracks start out as traditional pieces of dramatic scoring before oddball elements creep in and things get weird, such as “It’s All Gonna Be Fine” and “Orbiting”. Some tracks, like “Mmm Ba Deep” and “Newton’s… Third Law”, start weird and stay weird, in some cases pouring on additional weird. It all fits the show perfectly, but the surprising thing is how well it stands up as music. It helps if you’re an Avenue 5 fan going in, but it’s a fascinating set of musical experiments designed to tell the listener “something’s going wrong here, and it’s about to start going even wronger.”

4 out of 4As a soundtrack, Avenue 5 is as quirky, unconventional, and weird as the show this music accompanied – and that’s kind of a beautiful thing. It makes for a surprisingly effective standalone listen.

  1. The Continuing Journey (01:45)
  2. Mmm Ba Deep (02:19)
  3. Go Up There And Smile (00:54)
  4. Newton’s… Third Law (01:04)
  5. The Key Word Is Walk (01:59)
  6. Your Ears Are Beautiful, To Me (01:55)
  7. Inside (01:31)
  8. Bearing (02:27)
  9. It Stands For Visual Effects (01:03)
  10. Aaargh (01:20)
  11. Back On Earth (01:58)
  12. Big Yellow (01:17)
  13. It’s All Gonna Be Fine (01:10)
  14. Tense Is My Middle Name (01:36)
  15. I Don’t Want To Use My Sweet Moves (03:12)
  16. Oh Oh Oh Five (01:35)
  17. Walk With Me (02:37)
  18. Unclench Me (02:19)
  19. Knotted Bedsheets (01:58)
  20. Orbiting (03:39)
  21. Like Psychosis But With None Of The Benefits (01:16)

Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: November 3, 2022
Total running time: 38:36

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