[Closed] Now Playing XLV

It's bloody magnificent and is a perfect late-night listen. It's beautifully constructed, elegant, intimate, and unusually restrained for a Williams/Spielberg collaboration. I love it!

-Erik-

Restrained....ugh!

So am I.

Volker

When it comes to John Williams' Holy Trinity of score albums, namely Jaws, Close Encounters and ET, I'm in the minority in preferring the expanded original score versions of each. I can certainly appreciate the more album-inclined presentations, and they do make for technically better albums, but I find I prefer the experience of the full musical narrative, so to speak. Truly great, truly classic scores.

Restrained rocks!

RESTRAINED 4-EVER!

It is a very interesting (and very good!) interpretation!
I enjoy hearing it, even if I think it's too long (contrary to STeven, I am indeed in the majority that prefers the album cut ).

And I believe you.

The calmer, the better.

I want calm and smooth and delicious and soothing.

CALM, CALM, CALM!

With notable exceptions (The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life and some other scores), I generally agree, but I'll say this:

To me the perfect scores, especially recently, are the scores that build from a very small scale, restrained emotions to an unrestrained explosion featuring the same small scale ensemble, or not so small, but still using the same devices. While it can be argued that Tarawa is the centerpiece of the score from the emotional intensity side of things, to me the best part of the Snow Falling on Cedars experience is how the music, which is basically a complete and chronological program with some minor changes at the beginning of the album lets to the beauty called Can I Hold You Now?, which is an emotional explosion that is very soothing as well as intense, just because you feel that it comes from the heart of the soundscape. It's unrestrained, but comes from the same heart and the same convention.

Another score where I would say that's the approach is Beyond Rangoon - again the final suite comes directly from the inner soundscape of the score (ironically composed first though). Christopher Young's rejected An Unfinished Life is such an example, too (I rediscovered this one recently), a lot of European scores work that way (which is also very good because of its sparse scoring).

While In Country to me is also a perfect and poignant example of the same approach, I beg to differ with Erik's praise of James Horner's To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. It's a beautiful and underrated score, but while the French horn IS present in the Main Title, the final track takes me out of a very intimate (piano and synth-led) experience, because it's like I went from a beautiful close-up to a vista long shot in seconds, which just leaves the internal world that Horner created. It's still a very good and forgotten work, I just disagree with this choice. How it works in the film, I must confess, I don't know how it is in the film, but that cue singularly told me not to watch it.

For fans of the approach I'd also recommend The Magic of Marciano, a very overlooked Harry Gregson-Williams score.

Except Saturdays, of course. Then it's RAVE all night long!

Yeah, what he said.

NP: Prisoners - Jóhann Jóhannsson

This has to be one of the best scores I have heard this year so far.

A very low-key and sombre score, one that definitely gets under your skin. There's no great themes but there's a feel and a texture to it that I find very appealing. It's an example of a score that I would worry about seeing the film after hearing the music because I would not want the music-only experience to be influenced by the images.

Seems a bit of the wrong way round, but there you go!

I fucking hate HATE!!!! It's A Long Road and only like it in it's action form! FACT! And when I hear the song sung by that sorry-arsed singer it just makes me feel like stretching puppies to breaking point

it doesn't help that I've just eaten a Cadbury's double decker chocolate bar for the first time in decades, who invented this shit? just awful glue-like muck, they should call it the Sticky Tar coated fused road gravel topped with magma bar.

Really?
I positively love it. It's a really powerful, poignant theme.
Even as a song.