Tag: Raya Yarbrough

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2021 B Battlestar Galactica Music Reviews Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Tribute / Reinterpretation Year

So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica Live

3 min read

Order this CDWe’re now 20 years out from the launch of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, and us old salts are having to remind people that such was the allure of Bear McCreary’s music for this series that he actually took a combined orchestra and band on the road, and played concert dates of nothing but Battlestar Galactica soundtrack music, and people ate that up. McCreary’s genre-bending Celtic-but-also-Middle-Eastern musical melting pot encompassed everything from the straightforward orchestral treatment expected of the genre to heavy metal to multi-ethnic-flavored covers of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”. It was dizzying, bordering on intoxicating. And the good news is that it’s finally been captured in recorded form.

It’s important to note that this is real deal: many of the performers head in the recordings were the same musicians who played on the original studio recordings, and it’s not a small ensemble, nor is the music scaled down. There’s a lot of thunder and immediacy captured from the stage performances here, with enough electricity in the air to fry the nearest Toaster. Even pieces that I didn’t care much for in the show itself are given new life here. Things are rearranged and moved around, disparate pieces are glued together, but not reduced in power or volume. The only thing better would be to have seen one of the live shows in person, but this is a great consolation prize for those of us who couldn’t make it to those shows, captured in wonderfully crisp recordings best played loud. (Major rock acts could learn a lot from how these recordings were engineered before releasing their own live albums.)

“Something Dark Is Coming” is expanded into a hard rock epic, while “Apocalypse” (a brutally hard-rocking expansion of the series theme tune from the TV movie The Plan) is blown up as big as the ensemble can make it. Quieter pieces such as “Roslin and Adama” and “Wander My Friends” are given no less attention, though, and are played beautifully – it’s not all eardrum-splitting maximum volume. Other pieces, such as “Lords of Kobol” and “Fight Night” (the latter hailing from, admittedly, one of my least favorite hours of the show), strike a good middle ground and made me worry less about the heart rates of the percussionists.

4 out of 4My favorite track, however, may be an obvious case of saving the best for last: the rocked-out rendition of Stu Phillips’ original 1970s that segues into a piece of music that was already a favorite in its studio incarnation. The double-whammy of “Heeding The Call” and “All Along The Watchtower” runs a very close second, almost a tie for my favorite on the album. Your favorites will probably skew heavily in favor of favorite episodes or soundtrack cuts, but it’s lovely to have this little flashback to a time when there were sold-out dates for live concerts of soundtrack music from one series/franchise. It’s wonderful, and in places almost indescribably cathartic, to hear these pieces jammed out properly.

  1. A Distant Sadness (3:59)
  2. Prelude To War (8:10)
  3. Baltar’s Dream (6:02)
  4. Roslin And Adama (2:59)
  5. Apocalypse (5:34)
  6. Fight Night (4:04)
  7. Something Dark Is Coming (6:16)
  8. Wander My Friends (5:43)
  9. Lords Of Kobol (3:55)
  10. Storming New Caprica (8:02)
  11. Heeding The Call (2:45)
  12. All Along The Watchtower (4:22)
  13. Colonial Anthem / Black Market (7:30)

Released by: Sparks & Shadows
Release date: June 4, 2021
Total running time: 1:09:16

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2010 B Battlestar Galactica Soundtracks Television

Battlestar Galactica: Razor / The Plan – music by Bear McCreary

4 min read

Order this CDThe new Battlestar Galactica gets one final hurrah in this soundtrack release covering the two made-for-DVD (and later broadcast on TV as a bit of an afterthought) movies, Razor and The Plan. Unlike earlier “season” soundtracks from the series, which followed a more or less chronological progression, this album becomes a bit more of a concept piece just by the novelty of its sequencing.

I hadn’t thought about it before seeing the CD’s track listing, but Razor and The Plan share a common story element: both show us the flip-side of past events that we’d either witnessed only from the perspective of Galactica’s crew, or heard about second-hand. Both movies’ flashbacks chronicle the Cylon destruction of the Twelve Colonies: The Plan shows it from the ground, Razor shows the destruction of the main Colonial shipyard (and the escape of one solitary battlestar). Composer Bear McCreary therefore took the unconventional approach of sequencing tracks in strict chronological order from inside the story: the tracks from both movies’ scenes of the Colonies’ destruction are grouped together, for example. With Razor and The Plan having been made and released a year apart, you might not expect much cohesion, but thanks to McCreary’s thoughtful approach to scoring the Galactica saga, everything fits together better than you might think.

The chief exception to this chronological ordering scheme is the first track, which is actually the end credit music from The Plan. Starting with a solo vocal version of the show’s main theme, “Apocalypse” quickly gets around to showing off its main feature, a crunchy heavy metal guitar riff by Anthrax axeman (and Galactica fan) Scott Ian. Much has been made of Ian’s contribution, and it’s a fairly unique sound for Galactica; the guitar work in the rest of the series has largely been done by Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek, and has been fairly intricate even when in screaming/searing mode. Ian’s guitar work is, by comparison, less ornamented – but with the unstoppable approach of the Cylons, maybe that’s the point: it’s the musical equivalent of the brutal bootsteps of an invading army. If you like the studio version of “Apocalypse” – which also appears in the extended, two-part version used within The Plan itself – there’s a great live version, performed by McCreary and the BSG Orchestra, that closes the album out.

But “Apocalypse” is an oddball here; much of the music from Razor and The Plan is what we’ve come to expect from McCreary’s nearly-unerring dramatic and musical sensibilities. Highlights include the attack on the Colonial shipyards (from which Pegasus narrowly escapes) in Razor, the whole “[insert planet name here] is burning!” sequence from The Plan, and the reappearance of Stu Phillips’ original Galactica theme in Razor‘s young-Adama-vs.-Cylon-parachutist flashback. Though it probably flies under most people’s radar here, I was also delighted to hear McCreary’s beautiful theme for Caprica from Daybreak resurface toward the end of The Plan‘s “Main Title” track.

For Galactica fans, this release neatly caps off the show’s musical canon; both movies sound like the series of which they are a part, and yet they also sound unique in their own right. But the inventive 4 out of 4sequencing which mixes-and-matches moments from both movies (though it never puts cues from both movies in the same track) reminds us that the similarities are greater than the differences – if there was a message to the whole show by the time The Plan‘s end credits rolled, I think that was it. As always, highly recommended.

By the way, if the live track at the end is a taster for a potential BSG Orchestra live album, I think that’d be a dandy thing to hear. Just sayin’.

  1. Apocalypse featuring Raya Yarbrough (4:07)
  2. Razor Main Title (2:13)
  3. Arriving At Pegasus (2:26)
  4. The Plan Main Title (4:34)
  5. Attack On The Scorpion Shipyards (3:37)
  6. Apocalypse, Part I (6:37)
  7. Apocalypse, Part II (2:36)
  8. Pegasus Aftermath (4:10)
  9. Kendra’s Memories (2:43)
  10. Mayhem On The Colonies (3:28)
  11. Civilian Standoff On The Scylla (2:57)
  12. Husker In Combat (1:54)
  13. Major Kendra Shaw (5:02)
  14. Cavil Kills and Cavil Spares featuring Raya Yarbrough (2:13)
  15. The Hybrid Awaits (2:43)
  16. Kendra And The Hybrid (6:06)
  17. Princes Of The Universe (3:57)
  18. Starbuck’s Destiny (0:41)
  19. Apocalypse (Live) (6:23)

Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: 2010
Total running time: 68:27

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