The Beat Surrender

Soundtracks and more importantly the people that buy them on a regular basis have always been something of a mystery to me. Just about every film has a spin off CD for sale to try and cream a little bit more money out of the coffers of the movie/music fan, yet very few are that noteworthy that they actually deserve a release.

The best of them seem to go down two different routes for me and where possible will avoid the option of including snippets of the actual film itself on the CD (who really wants to listen to them bits anyway?) The first route is the increasing popular option of collecting together a vast array of obscure and popular tracks together, at least one of them should be a fotrgotten classic that will give the Director the ego boost of introducing it to the public (Tarrantino springs to mind on this one).

For me though the most skilful approach to the soundtrack and the one that subsequently deserves the most respect is when a composer or artist is commissioned to come up with music that will match particular scenes in the film and where possible actually enhance the viewing experience. This has produced some greats likew David Arnold, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, A.R., Rahman, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Max Steinman, Danny Elfman and Henry Mancini.

I know i’ve missed off hundreds of great composers from that list but they are particular favourites of mine, two people who i’ve far less knowledge of though are Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, both of which have teamed up here to soundtrack the new Batman film The Dark Knight.

Reviewing a soundtrack as a seperate entity to a film isn’t easy, as i’ve said earlier, more often than not a score is set to the action and when lifted away from that it can sometimes lose it’s context and it’s appeal at the same time. That is what makes this such an impressive album, the music is so good on tracks like Why So Serious?, I’m Not A Hero and Like A Dog Chasing Cars, that not only are you gripped by the emotion of the pieces, you can actually visualise what is likely to be happening in the film at this point (I haven’t seen it yet i’m afraid).

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