Tales From The Score Keeper: Black Friday After-Action Report

Howdy all, the Score Keeper is back – remember how I told you just a few days ago that another wave of soundtrack releases was probably about to crash over us like a wave? It’s here. I hope the undertow doesn’t grab your swim trunks – or your wallet – because there are some really exciting releases in La-La Land Records’ big Black Friday batch…for which pre-orders will be taken Tuesday, December 1st.

I can’t even pick out one heavy hitter here – these are all eagerly awaited releases. Bear McCreary’s score from the Blumhouse comedy-horror opus Freaky gets a physical release of 1,000 copies for starters – and that release is no slouch, but it just gets bigger and better from there.

X-Files fans can eagerly wait by their mailboxes for a new four-disc, over-five-hour box set of newly selected highlights from throughout the series. New, previously unreleased season one highlights include music from the 1993 pilot episode, “Deep Throat”, “The Jersey Devil”, “Shadows”, “Ice”, and “Darkness Falls”. From season two, there’s previously unreleased music from “Duane Barry”, “Ascenscion”, “Firewalker”, “Død Kalm”, and “Anasazi”. Season three is represented by unreleased tracks from “Apocrypha”, “Pusher”, “Avatar”, “Oubliette”, and “Talitha Cumi”. Season four tracks include “Never Again”, “Memento Mori”, “Max”, and “Gethsemane”. There’s a healthy slice of season five music too, including “Redux II”, “Chinga”, “Kill Switch”, and “Mind’s Eye”. Sixth season tracks include “Triangle”, “The Rain King”, and “Tithonus”, and there are selections from season seven (“Rush”, “Orison”, “En Ami”), eight (“Invocation”, “Empedocles”), and nine (“Nothing Important Happened Today” parts 1 & 2, “This Is Not Happening”, “Per Manum”). And if that’s not enough, there’s “Smoking Telegram”, the track from the finale of the movie The X-Files: Fight The Future. Only 2000 copies of The X-Files: Volume Four have been pressed, and then this release is even further out there than the truth that we keep hearing so much about.

There are two – count them, two! – volumes of a new series of Jerry Goldsmith At 20th Century Fox releases, each gathering two of Goldsmith’s classic scores from films produced by that studio. Again, each is being produced in an edition of only 2,000 copies; volume one includes the scores from The Flim-Flam Man and The Detective, while volume two gathers music from Von Ryan’s Express and The Blue Max. While some of these scores have been partially available before, these new releases are remastered and include previously unreleased material.

And then there’s the world premiere of the original score from 1990’s Tremors – only thirty years after the movie came out! This 2-CD release combines contributions from two composers: Ernest Troost’s music one disc one, and Robert Folk’s music on disc two. The liner notes booklet will no doubt explain the story of how both of them came to work on the movie, and how their music was combined into the finished product. 3,000 copies of the Tremors score will be available.

Also getting a 3,000-copy release is Bill Conti’s score from 1989’s The Karate Kid III, expanded and remastered here to include not just Conti’s own contributions, but pan flute tracks from Zamfir (remember how you couldn’t swing a commercial break in the late ’80s without hitting a 1-800 ad for “Zamfir, master of the pan flute”?).

Does your wallet need a break now? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.