Do you have a conservativeneighbor or two who are part of the anti-Halloween camp and are trying to recruit people to their cause? On October 31, show those opponents of Halloween how much you feel about their hatred of fun by paying them a visit and then taking out your phone and blasting A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score" block in their faces.
From 5pm to 11pm on Halloween, AFOS will be streaming for the second Halloween in a row original music written for the horror, thriller and paranormal genres. The playlist--which is full of Goblin tracks, cues from Elmer Bernstein's out-of-print score to Ghostbusters and original music from either non-glittery vampire flicks (The Omega Man, From Dusk Till Dawn) or supernatural genre shows (Buffy, Angel)--will be joined this year by selections from Alan Howarth and Larry Hopkins' new re-recording of the mostly synthesized cues Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter separately composed for the 1982 version of The Thing.
Howarth, who collaborated with the filmmaker/composer on the scores to such classic Carpenter flicks as Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, recreated with Hopkins the tracks from the long-out-of-print Thing soundtrack album (with some help from the Digital Orchestra Toolbox) and re-sequenced them so that they're in the chronological order of the 1982 film. The re-recording is being released by the record label wing of BuySoundtrax (a site I once had such a lousy mail-order experience with--and I'm relieved to see I'm not alone--that every time I receive an e-mail from BuySoundtrax, I angrily delete it without reading it).
Also added to "Buckets of Score" this year are selections from Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's terrific, if-Carpenter-were-a-dubstepper score to the recent inner city-vs.-outer space thriller Attack the Block, a film that's now on Blu-ray (I disagree with the opinion that Attack the Block loses much of its entertainment value on the small screen and is a less interesting film if you don't watch it with an amped-up crowd in the theater--I saw Attack the Block in an empty theater and still enjoyed it).
"If you like your beats on the monstrous side, you've come to the right place," wrote Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the Attack the Block soundtrack liner notes. "We wanted the Attack the Block score to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."
Price and the Jaxx duo's score lives up to Cornish's intentions. As the hoodies in Attack the Block would say, believe it, bruv.
Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.
(*) It's AFOS. No bloodyFOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.
Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.
Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.
Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.
Same thing with the movie Wild Things...
... or the end credits music from Thor.
Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...
... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)
Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!
Shuffle mode sometimes results in nifty unintentional double shots or triple shots like:
Brian Tyler Fast and the Furious sequel theme double shots.
Pam Grier movie theme double shots.
Jim Kelly movie theme double shots.
Themes from movies about Bruce Lee movies getting streamed in the same hour.
Christopher Nolan/Hans Zimmer collabo double shots.
End credits music quadruple shots.
"Movies with Run in the title" double shots.
"Unexpectedly gory L.A. movies" double shots.
Live365 once caused a weird pattern in which a theme from a Spike Lee Joint ended up getting followed by a Cowboy Bebop track--twice in a row. I hope someone on Deviantart was listening to AFOS during that hour and thought about drawing a Spike Lee/Spike Spiegel mash-up someday. Make it happen, Internet!
Back in March, I said, "Add The Chemical Brothers' richly written and often dance floor-friendly original score from the teenage assassin thriller Hanna to the list of awesome scores by electronica or rock musicians who never scored for film before." It's time to add another one.
Set in a rough South London neighborhood attacked by "gorilla wolf muthafuckas" from outer space, the British cult favorite Attack the Block is the best popcorn movie this summer. Beleedat. (Most American moviegoers still haven't heard of Attack the Block, but Screen Gems has been hoping to change that by expanding Attack the Block's release to six more cities last week.) One of the movie's most enjoyable elements is the original score, the first ever written by the British dance act Basement Jaxx, whose tunes have often popped up in advertising (my first exposure to Basement Jaxx was an early '00s Coke ad that featured a group of svelte campfire partiers and an isolated and not-as-svelte nerd dancing in the woods to the catchy "Red Alert," while "Do Your Thing" was all over Disney's ads for Ratatouille).
Basement Jaxx (a.k.a. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe) co-composed the score with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World music editor Steven Price, and their score accomplishes well what it set out to do, which, according to Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the score album's liner notes, was "to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."
Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 theme is so beloved by beatmakers that its influence can be felt in many of their instrumentals, including Buxton, Ratcliffe and Price's cues in Attack the Block. Starting this week, my favorite Attack the Block cues attack three blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks: "Assorted Fistful," "New Cue Revue" and "The Street." One of these selections that I've added to rotation is the bagpipes-filled, dubstep-style end title theme "The Ends."
Attack the Block is inventive sci-fi with a youth of color as the lead for a change, as well as an inspired critique of the demonization of the working class in the U.K. A one-time mugging victim who wanted to better understand his muggers and their lives instead of being resentful and fearful of them, Cornish takes working-class kids like Moses (John Boyega) and the bespectacled and brainy Jerome (Leeon Jones) (their mugging of Jodie Whittaker's nurse/neighbor character Sam at the start of the film was based on the incident Cornish experienced) and fleshes out those characters to prove the irrationality of demonizing the underclass.
"At the beginning of the film these kids are masked, they're hooded, you don't know how old they are, you have no sense of their humanity or identity and indeed, with their language, you're confused, you're alienated from them," said Cornish to RopeofSilicon. "Then the purpose of the story is to strip away all those barriers and to make you understand they're human beings. Not perfectly good, squeaky clean human beings, flawed human beings like all of us."
On Twitter, I've seen people say they refuse to give Attack the Block the time of day because its ads' imagery of South London "hoodies" violently defending their council estate from alien invaders either reminds them too much of the U.K. riots (which erupted a few weeks after the movie hit American theaters) or appears to condone those riots. They're inanely passing judgment on a movie they haven't seen. Attack the Block is hardly as one-dimensional as they think. It's a story about the consequences of thuggish behavior, whether it's the hoodies' mugging of Sam and Moses' killing of the alien at the start of the film or the looting that went down in the U.K. riots.
"People really suggested the riots in my home town were linked to the movie? Unbelievable," tweeted BBC journalist Ben Fell to an Attack the Block fan after he saw Twitterers denounce the movie before watching it.
To borrow the title and chorus of one of Basement Jaxx's biggest hits, I'd like to say to the haters, "Where's your head at?!"
• Titles of songs, album tracks, short stories, TV series episodes, DVD or Blu-ray featurettes and cable channel or radio station programming blocks are always contained within quotation marks. Example from July 29, 2011:The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon. (However, even though Adult Swim is still technically a Cartoon Network programming block, the name isn't contained within quotes because Adult Swim evolved from a single-night block to a larger entity that Nielsen officially recognized as distinct from Cartoon Network in 2005, much like what happened to Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite.)
• Occupations or descriptive adjectives and nouns that appear before people's names are never capitalized. Example:constant self-recycler James Horner.
• Terms like "Filipino American," "Asian American" or "African American," which some writers prefer to hyphenate, are not hyphenated.
• The interpunct that used to be part of the Frito-Lay product name "Chee·tos" is absent whenever Cheetos is mentioned because of Frito-Lay's current official spelling, which removed the interpunct. Example: Why the hell does John Malkovich look like a human Cheeto during Transformers: Dark of the Moon?
• Numbers from one to nine are spelled out. Numbers above nine are written as figures (10, 11, 12, etc.) but are spelled out whenever they're the first words in sentences.
• The movie title Se7en and the procedural title Numb3rs maintain their unique spelling even though it looks stup1d.
• If a person is a Jr. or Sr., there is no comma between the name and Jr. or Sr. Example from January 13, 2009:Downey Jr. never drops character until the commentary is over.
• An ellipsis indicates a hammy pause. Example: "Dammit, Bones... this girdle you gave me for... my birthday... is too... constricting."
• Titles of movies, TV series, radio programs, podcasts, books, comic book series, magazines and newspapers are always italicized.
• Cardassians are whores for fascism. Kardashians are whores for attention.
• Names of online magazines like Salon and Slate are italicized. Names of blogs like DISGRASIAN, Burnt Lumpia and MovieMorlocks are not italicized.
• A Corolla is a car I damaged while driving it when I was a teen. A Carolla is a racistdouchebag whose ass will get damaged by a gang of Pinoy teens if he ever sets foot in Daly City.
• Names of races and nationalities like African, Latino and Filipino are capitalized, but racial adjectives like "black," "white" and "brown" are not.
• "Sit for Baines" is a Back to the Future prequel fanfic about teenage George McFly's bumbling attempts to get to better know his crush Lorraine Baines by babysitting her younger brothers. "Shit for brains" is Fox News whenever it refers to Common as a gangsta rapper.
• Though this is an American blog and the word "license" is always spelled with just one "c," the British spelling of the 007 movie title Licence to Kill is left unchanged.
• "Michele Bachmann" is spelled with just one glassy "i."
Song: "The Big Bamboozle" by imaginary soundtrack producer Barry Adamson Released: 1995 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Adamson's "Big Bamboozle" crime-jazz instrumental is so seamy-sounding it would have been perfect as music during Kiss Me Deadly (a classic noir that, by the way, finally got the Criterion treatment on Blu-ray and DVD this summer).
I like "The Big Bamboozle" so much that when I edited together episodes of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series, I frequently used it as an instrumental bed for segments where I spoke.
Thanks to the High Fidelity scene in which Jack Black disses the sappy and overplayed Woman in Red theme "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Stevie Wonder's Woman in Red soundtrack has become a punchline, much like Prince's Batman song soundtrack, which was the subject of a similar gag in Shaun of the Dead. Another thing that both those '80s song soundtracks have in common is that though those albums aren't exactly career highlights for either artist, they aren't exactly awful either. They're redeemed by two or three underappreciated tracks.
"Love Light in Flight" is one of those tracks, and it's a song I hadn't heard since 1984 or 1985--until I recently stumbled into it during DJ Jazzy Jeff and Mick Boogie's Summertime 2 mixtape and instantly smiled, which is why I just added "Love Light in Flight" to A Fistful of Soundtracks' '80s block "Soda and Pie" (Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon).
"Drums, please!"
"Oh man," I thought to myself while bumping Summertime 2, "I remember 'Love Light in Flight.' It so takes me back to when I was a Ghostbusters-loving kid in '84!" It's such a damn smooth track--plus it's full of aviation imagery, which would have made it perfect for the flight-themed "Up, Up and Away" episode of the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks that I aired on July 22, 2001.
Suddenly, Gene Wilder is faced with a crippling decision: Kelly LeBrock or the sheep that's waiting for him at home?
"Love Light in Flight" is the one hit song from The Woman in Red that's neither overplayed nor preachy (that would be the well-meaning but clunkily written "Don't Drive Drunk"). Camille Paglia may be a pretentious, SarahPalin-loving weirdo (her Salon Oscar telecast recaps were always worthy of an Onion parody), but she's right that "Love Light in Flight" is a sublime tune.
Although Facebook has its moments (like the girl's reaction to her mom's adult-contemporary ambush on the troops in the above snapshot), it can also be an aggravating place to be, as Kimberly from Cinebeats and TCM has astutely noted a few times on her Twitter. I think Jeannie Gaffigan, the wife of comedian Jim Gaffigan, put it best when she tweeted, "Facebook is like a big high school yearbook that never stops being signed."
I may find Facebook to be annoying for various reasons, but I know there are a few people on that site who listen to A Fistful of Soundtracks, so after about a year of hesitating, I launched a Facebook page for AFOS on July 1.
Drop by the new page and hit the "Like" button and maybe say hola. But don't go to the wall just to tell me I should remove a track you hate from an AFOS playlist. I'm not a fan of requests for me to delete a piece of music and I always ignore those requests. It's part of the playlist because I goddamn like it. I'm not going to yank it from rotation just because only poor little you can't stand it.
Speaking of disliking things, why doesn't Facebook have a "Dislike" button? Am I not allowed to dislike things over there? It's like a site run by The Care Bears, for fook's sake.
This is the first in a series of weekday posts about the tracks that are streamed during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block. From today until July 29, each post will give some background on a different track from the block's playlist (and maybe even include a music video that the artist made for the track). "Rome, Italian Style" airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am on AFOS.
Not to be confused with the HBO sword-and-mandals show Rome, producers Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's new Capitol Records release Rome is a concept album inspired by swanky '60s and '70s Italian film scores that were penned by the ingenious likes of Riz Ortolani and Ennio Morricone ("Back in the early '60s, more experimental composition was looked down on, so the movies were a great vehicle to get away with doing all that," said Danger Mouse in a 2010 Guardian article about the making of Rome). The "Rome, Italian Style" playlist was built around the tracks from Rome, but because nine tracks aren't enough to fill a four-day-a-week, one-hour-per-day block, the playlist includes other songs that were influenced by the sounds of '60s and '70s Italian composers or their British and American counterparts (like John Barry and Henry Mancini), as well as covers of themes that Ortolani, Morricone, Barry, Mancini and others wrote during that era.
Song: "Theme of Rome" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi featuring Edda Dell'Orso Released: 2011 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: During the recording of Rome, Danger Mouse and Luppi enlisted several musicians and singers who took part in many of the vintage Italian scores that influenced the project. One of these artists is singer Edda Dell'Orso, whose voice can be heard during Morricone's scores from Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker, Danger: Diabolik, a giallo called The Fifth Cord and Maddalena. Her wordless vocals grace "Theme of Rome," the album's opening track.
Dell'Orso's voice was like a guide through the surreal aural world of Morricone, and it acts as a guide once again as we enter the dark and melancholy Italian movie that Danger Mouse and Luppi have created with just their imaginary soundtrack and without any visuals. I have no idea what language Dell'Orso was singing in during those old Morricone cues (it's a language only she understands--Dell'Orso-ese?), but her voice during "Come Maddalena" is so reassuring and calming that I bet she was singing "And we're walking, we're walking."
Because today marks the centennial of influential composer Bernard Herrmann, CBS News recently assembled a lengthy slideshow/audio clip gallery that's a pretty good overview of Herrmann's career. It's fitting that CBS would be the one to give Herrmann such a thorough and reverent centennial tribute because Herrmann had a long association with the network, from the days when radio was a more dominant medium (Herrmann served as conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and composed score music for countless CBS radio dramas, including Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) to the period when CBS conquered TV in addition to radio (Herrmann provided music for several Twilight Zone episodes and composed the anthology show's somber and lesser-known first-season opening title theme).
These days, Herrmann is best known for his brilliant work with Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Harryhausen, which probably would have irked Herrmann because the famously testy maestro hated being labeled a film composer and wrote for more than just the screen (for instance, he composed an opera based on Wuthering Heights). His final film score, is, to me, his most stunning achievement. Herrmann initially had no interest in working on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the ultimate vision of '70s New York-as-hell, but then he changed his mind because he liked the part of Paul Schrader's script where Travis Bickle poured peach brandy on his Corn Flakes.
Perhaps because Herrmann knew he wasn't long for this world at the time he wrote it (he finished recording it only a few hours before he died in his sleep on December 24, 1975), the Taxi Driver score sounds like the last few gasps of a dying man, with its thunderous, apocalyptic-sounding percussion, a melancholy theme for alto sax that was performed by an uncredited Ronny Lang and a final cue where the last few notes quote at a funereal pace a previous Herrmann theme, the ominous three-note motif that concludes Psycho.
Be sure to check out the mp3 clips of the Taxi Driver title themes and other Herrmann compositions that CBS News has posted--or enjoy Herrmann's cues from Taxi Driver, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, Jason and the Argonauts and Marnie whenever they're streamed during the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
I've been frequently flipping to The Weather Channel lately, and I've noticed the channel's "Local on the 8s" forecast interstitials have ditched most of the smooth jazz instrumentals that would usually accompany the temperature graphics for slightly edgier music like the beat digger favorite "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" from Isaac Hayes' 1969 Hot Buttered Soul album.
When I first heard "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" during "Local on the 8s" a few months ago, I was like, "I have no idea which Weather Channel employee picked 'Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,' but I'd like to buy that person a beer or--and this would be more fitting because of its presence in DJ Quik's 'Born and Raised in Compton'--a 40."
Then last month, I noticed Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy end title theme, the "End of Line" theme for the club of the same name in Legacy and John Williams' "Theme from Jurassic Park" were added to "Local on the 8s" rotation (those three tracks still turn up during the segment even though they're intended for May airplay and it's not May anymore). I thought I was imagining things. I wasn't:
Jurassic Park's stately and warm-toned main theme isn't really surprising as a choice for "Local on the 8s," but the propulsive grooves from Tron: Legacy are a surprise (by the way, the Legacy end title theme, "End of Line" and "Solar Sailer" can also be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" block, along with other Legacy tracks like "C.L.U.," the ubiquitous but still-awesome "Derezzed," "Outlands," "Rinzler" and "The Game Has Changed"). Someone in Atlanta or wherever the "Local on the 8s" updates are produced has great taste in film and TV score albums.
There's an explanation behind the channel's move towards less bland-sounding instrumentals during "Local on the 8s." In a 2009 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about the segment's switch from artists like Spyro Gyra to folks like The Stones, a Weather Channel exec said, "I think we've been doing an injustice to our viewers playing, for the lack of a better word, elevator music on the segments for all these years."
The calming shores of Spyro country were causing "Local on the 8s" viewers to doze off or lose interest.
"People would have it on but they wouldn't be watching and they wouldn't be listening," said the exec. "We wanted music that would get their attention--and this has."
An Idolator blogger who was impressed with the "Local on the 8s" playlist upgrades joked in 2009 that "I never thought, ever, that I would see former Yankees great Bernie Williams and the Smiths on the same playlist--but that's just an amuse for after 8 p.m., when things get really crazy and Phish gets added to the proceedings. Whoa Nelly!"
Hold up. Did he say Phish? Let's look at that May 8pm-1am playlist again:
Unlike that short-lived experiment where The Weather Channel added movies like The Perfect Storm and Misery to its programming last year, this is a change I can agree with.
I love the sounds of Rodrigo y Gabriela. If you're not familiar with this Mexican duo from Ireland, they perform badass instrumentals that fall under the category of "acoustic metal."
So when I discovered the other day while browsing through Best Buy's music section that Hans Zimmer--who frequently collaborates with ace guitarists like Johnny Marr, Michael Brook and Heitor Pereira--enlisted Rodrigo y Gabriela as soloists and co-composers on his Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides score, I had to snap up the On Stranger Tides score CD right away.
All five of the On Stranger Tides album tracks that feature Rod y Gab are as excellent as I expected them to be. The highlight is, of course, when they tackle the Captain Jack Sparrow theme with the same gusto they've brought to their covers of Metallica's "Orion" and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."
I've added those five On Stranger Tides tracks to rotation during the Fistful of Soundtracks blocks "Assorted Fistful" (check listings) and "New Cue Revue" (Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm, Fridays at 11am-noon), along with selections from Alexandre Desplat's lush score to Terrence Malick's Cannes audience polarizer/sensation The Tree of Life and Patrick Doyle's epic score to Please Hammer, Do Hurt 'Em.
Rome, the intriguing Danger Mouse/Daniele Luppi/Jack White/Norah Jones tribute to '60s and '70s Italian film music that Capitol released this week, has inspired me to start a new hour-long block on A Fistful of Soundtracks. "Rome, Italian Style" will stream both film score-inspired tracks like Luppi's tunes from Rome and An Italian Story and covers of '60s and '70s film and TV themes. The mission statement of the block is basically "how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret film and TV music."
"Rome, Italian Style" airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am.
Here's one of the covers that will be part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist. It's "La Pantera Mambo," a 2004 cover of the Pink Panther theme by the Colombian band La-33:
We interrupt my work on a drawing of the three members of De La Soul for my currently-in-the-works, to-be-self-published book to bring you this special bulletin.
(*) Speaking of which, Battle of Los Angeles? Really, Syfy? Next time you run out of title ideas for your original movies, how about you take a cue from your own station tagline and imagine greater?
I've seen so many blogs with kind things to say about AFOS--and I always appreciate that--but they always get one or two tidbits about AFOS or me wrong. Crutchfield's review has none of that "every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer" bullshit. The reviewer actually did his homework and took the time to listen closely and note that "they aren't placed at random. If you hear the trailer for Big Trouble in Little China, you can be sure that the next selection will be from the soundtrack of that film." (However, for some odd reason, he never once uses the word "score" in his review to distinguish between "soundtrack" and "score.")
The reviewer wishes my channel had a better-quality bit rate and is probably wondering why it's just 32 kbps. Lengthy answer: I'm broke.
Add The Chemical Brothers' richly written and often dance floor-friendly original score from the teenage assassin thriller Hanna to the list of awesome scores by electronica or rock musicians who never scored for film before. It joins a list that includes 1999's Fight Club score by The Dust Brothers (hey, for a couple of years, The Chemical Brothers recorded under that name as well) and the recent Tron: Legacy score by Daft Punk. The Hanna score, which is available only as a digital download from iTunes starting today, joins another list too: the "Assorted Fistful" playlist on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
I caught The Chembruhs' full album stream of their soundtrack a few days ago and was impressed with cuts like "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" and "Container Park." Hanna, which has the little girl from Atonement going all Hit-Girl on CIA assassins (but only up to a PG-13-level point), was made by Atonement director Joe Wright and is the filmmaker's first foray into Bourne-style mayhem. We won't know until its April 8 release date if Hanna is another Tron: Legacy-like case where the score outshines the movie, but in the meantime, pay a visit to "Container Park" (below) and check out other highlights of the score during the "Assorted Fistful" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on AFOS.
I enjoyed Steven Moffat's fifth-season revamp of Doctor Who and composer Murray Gold's new themes for the show, so I'm adding several standout Gold cues from the fifth-season score album to "Assorted Fistful" rotation. The two-disc album from Silva Screen came out in November in the U.K. and finally hit our shores just recently.
Gold's rousing "I Am The Doctor" theme for The 11th Doctor (Matt Smith, who's been a terrific Doctor, despite the Tucker Carlson bow tie) is my favorite theme he's written for any of The Doctor's post-Paul McGann incarnations so far. When I first heard it during the "Eleventh Hour" season premiere, I thought to myself, "Okay, I gotta cop that CD." I like how Gold takes the percussion during the "I Am The Doctor" motif and makes it simulate a ticking clock, like in the "Amy in the TARDIS" cue that concludes "The Eleventh Hour" as The Doctor activates the new TARDIS for the first time.
"I Am The Doctor" and "Amy in the TARDIS" are part of the "Assorted" playlist, along with the season finale cue "The Sad Man with a Box," which includes some nifty electronic effects that represent the "timey-wimey stuff" that goes down during the finale. When I first heard the CD sound as if it were being played back in reverse and then paused, I got worried and thought my CD was skipping, but then I remembered it was an electronic effect from the scene where River Song (Alex Kingston) gets trapped in a time loop.
I'm looking forward to season 6 (finally, an episode shot on location in America, with actual American actors for a change, instead of British actors mangling American accents!), and I'm wondering what Gold has up his sleeve for the theme that will represent "the silence that will fall" in the new season. I'm thinking Gold will take the Pootie Tang approach (no music).
