"...This is adult music more akin to David Arnold's |
JAMES BOND 007 film scores..." |
I have to admit that of the 26 TORCHWOOD episodes broadcast on BBC THREE; I must have only watched four (perhaps five, at a forced push).
Unlike many of the homicides in the series, it never grabbed me around the neck, drawing me into the dark, rain soaked (with a hint of congealing haemoglobin), and Argon tinted streets of Cardiff. SERIES 1 was misbalanced and lacked a key direction - what was TORCHWOOD trying to be? Indeed, in the "notes" for this OST, Executive Producer, Julie Gardner, asserts that TORCHWOOD is everything and nothing (".is action adventure, love story, horror flick, ghost flick and sci-fi.cheeky, modern and little bit rock and roll") aimed at everyone and anyone. And that is a problem.
However, the OST seems, once taken out of context, to be the aural glue that held TORCHWOOD together. It is impressive.
A greenhouse-gas pumping score that drives relentlessly through the UK's potentially most dangerous City. Surely, Cardiff is challenging "Midsomer" as one of television's leading homicidal places in the UK.
If you are expecting a watered-down version of Murray Gold's epic music score of DOCTOR WHO then you will be disappointed. This is adult music more akin to David Arnold's JAMES BOND 007 film scores. If SILVA SCREEN were to re-package this release as BOND you would be hard pressed to deny that it wasn't.
Passionate & compassionate themes juxtaposed with satanic & unworldly stings that has created a truly original (interestingly, and may be wrong, but there is hint of THE BEATLES' "Strawberry Fields Forever" within track six's INTO THE HUB) legacy. Unsurprisingly so as its very DNA is a collaborative hybrid of Gold and Ben Foster.
JACK'S LOVE THEME is, like Harkness himself, an ambiguous haunting journey of rasping strings set against a punctuation of searching drum.
THE DEATH OF DR OWEN HARPER is an orchestral "memorial" masterpiece that, without any fussiness, mirrors that character's love for life & cynicism.
The titular TORCHWOOD theme/sting of high-pitched reverberated-rewound screech (sparingly) infiltrates a number of tracks in the same fashion as the DOCTOR WHO theme/sting ("Dang Da Dang Whoa Whoa") or JAMES BOND 007 theme/sting ("Ding Da De Ding Da Ding"), and in doing so it consolidates the 32 tracks into its own distinctive "brand". Simple but very clever.
It is testament of Gold's & Foster's skill and vision that TORCHWOOD OST is not a poor cousin of their collaboration for DOCTOR WHO (Foster conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for the drama series) but a new, kinetically driven and heart-felt progression that will be consolidated with the 2009 broadcast of TORCHWOOD SERIES 3, "CHILDREN OF EARTH".
Released 22 September 2008.
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