Soundtracks: 2010 Holds Up As A Great Year!!!

When I jokingly titled my soundtrack posts of the last year to the effect of "keep it coming" 2010, I didn't expect the trend to hold up!?! While overall the movies of 2010 haven't been fantastic (no wonder Hollywood is complaining of losses this year for the first time in 3 years), the few I see also all seem to have amazing music (or my default composers deliver, in the case of Airbender... I'm not touching that one without Rifftracks!).


So here we are at the close of the year, and once again another round of amazing scores bombards us! Admittedly I've only seen/heard one of these, but all accounts I'm hearing is both are highlights of the year, and it has been a year full of highlights score-wise so far!

TRON Legacy by Daft Punk

First up is the new TRON. Having watched the movie a mere day and a half ago, you might be surprised to hear I'm ranting and raving about the music from it already, but I assure you it is rant worthy.

To start off with TRON was such a mediocre movie (it was fun, but nothing I'm desperate to see again soon) that any and all good components leapt out to bored little me in the theatre. The visuals were all very slick and pretty (I must also say the lack of any shaky cams was such a relief!), but after a while especially in non action sequences, they got old. Fortunately the movie was never completely losing me as the music was constantly there to remind me what a wondrous and interesting concept I was watching.

The TRON score by movie music rookies Daft Punk is an 80's nostalgic video game rock opera of unbelievable awesomeness!

For me the most appealing part of the score is the homage to 80's synth music. Best of all it is a homage, and not a direct use. This retro element is still very listenable within a modern context, but invokes a sense of loving memory for when synthesisers were THE thing (where as listening to those old 80's scores now, while enjoyable, all have a cheese factor that is very inescapable).

I'll be covering TRON in full in my year end review of all the scores of 2010...

Though a quick note if you're looking to buy this score beware that with every means and vendor you'll get different music. While you'll always get the base 22 tracks of the score, all the different products have different bonus "exclusive" tracks not available on the other vendors version (Itunes, Amazon, the CDs, etc.)

Narnia 3 by David Arnold

Having not watched the movie or listened to this soundtrack, I can not directly comment. However the majority of the soundtrack community is rather energized about the new Narnia score.

I am intrigued as David Arnold, a composer I rather liked in my teens for his work in the 90's, has since dropped off my radar apart from his excellent music for the new Bond films, replaces one of my current favourites Harry Gregoson-Williams. In all honesty Gregoson-William's Narnia scores are not my all time favourites of his work. They have some great battle music, and Ashlan's theme is awesome, but otherwise the majority of it is meh.

I hear Arnold returns to his prime of ID4 and Stargate with the new Narnia. So hopefully I can track this down and have an opinion for the review of all of 2010.