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If ever there was a case of musically “playing against type,” the score for 2003’s Battlestar Galactica miniseries is it. The music of the original series had such a foothold in the collective memory of the viewers that it’d be hard to avoid comparisons. And yet, as fitting as Stu Phillips’ exercise in sounding like John Williams was for the original 1978 miniseries and series, Richard Gibbs’ and Bear McCreary’s score for the new version is equally fitting. It’s a visceral, almost mournful, score for a new take on the series that seems to be, more than any SF project of the past few years, informed by the 9/11 experience and its attendant emotions.

There’s not a lot of orchestral writing, but contrary to some reports, there is some. Rather than going for a full-on western orchestral approach, Gibbs and McCreary mix orchestra with ethnic percussion and vocalizations. In the CD liner notes, Gibbs talks about how several scenes of the movie had been temp-tracked by director Michael Rymer with music from Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack for The Last Temptation Of Christ, and that’s a fairly good analogy for what the new Galactica wound up with. Gibbs and McCreary reined things in just a little bit, with a more traditional western feel than the aforementioned film score, but the Gabriel influence is clearly there: battle scenes tend to be tracked with Japanese taiko drums and a thunderous mix of other percussion. The scenes associated with the plight of the Colonials tend to be treated with wistful Middle Eastern vocals, a little bit of orchestra, and occasionally a bit of tuned percussion - Gabriel would be proud.

And it would seem that the composers took as many hints from Christopher Franke as they did from Peter Gabriel; the cue “Seal The Bulkheads” is given an epic-but-elegiac sound, as Commander Adama makes the decision to seal off a critically damaged portion of the ship, sacrificing the lives of several crewmembers still trapped inside. There’s no thundering action here (though the fast-cutting editing of that sequence and the show as a whole would have lent itself to that), but more of a funeral dirge for those lost.

When Gibbs arrived to work on Galactica, a scene had already been temp-tracked with a Sanskrit mantra loaned to the director by Edward James Olmos; Gibbs found that it was so hard to top that he phonetically transcribed the mantra and included it as a vocal for the track “To Kiss Or Not To Kiss”, which is easily the soundtrack’s most sensual cue; “The Lottery Ticket” and “The Storm And The Dead” tie for a close second in that department. I also liked some of the cues that are heard early in the miniseries, which build a sense of anticipation without really being specific about the end result of that anticipation being good or bad. (That “anticipation” motif shows up again in the final scenes, and the effect is altogether different - in that context, it’s almost like a musical demand for a series order.) My one regret is that the expansive main title for the miniseries seems to have been replaced with a more mournful piece to cover the main titles of the weekly series - but again, it fits with the tone of the series, whereas’ the miniseries’ main titles occurred before the real jeopardy of the story kicked in.

I’m a little torn on recommending the Battlestar Galactica miniseries soundtrack as an all-in-one-sitting listening experience - if you have it playing in the background and you’re not listening for the intricacies of the music, it all blurs together a bit. But a close listen makes it clear why this approach was chosen for the new Galactica - and it’s no surprise that the early episodes of the hourly series sound as though they may have been tracked with this same material (fittingly enough, as the original Galactica was tracked from a limited library of music composed for a small handful of specific episodes).

Good stuff - let’s hope that the series is around long enough to get some more music, and maybe another CD or two, out of the composers.

1. Are You Alive? / Battlestar Galactica Main Title (5:28)
2. Goodbye, Baby (2:24)
3. Starbuck Buck Buck (1:49)
4. To Kiss Or Not To Kiss (2:42)
5. Six Sex (1:48)
6. Deep Sixed (1:59)
7. The Day Comes (1:08)
8. Counterattack (2:40)
9. Cylons Fire (1:34)
10. A Call To Arms (1:03)
11. Apollo To The Rescue (1:56)
12. Launch Vipers (4:26)
13. Seal The Bulkheads (2:10)
14. The Lottery Ticket (3:06)
15. Eighty-Five Dead (1:23)
16. Inbound (1:23)
17. Apollo Is Gone / Starbuck Returns (2:19)
18. The Storm And The Dead (2:40)
19. Thousands Left Behind (2:09)
20. Silica Pathways (3:32)
21. Reunited (1:56)
22. The Sense Of Six (3:01)
23. Starbuck’s Recon (1:11)
24. Battle (7:40)
25. Good Night (2:38)
26. By Your Command (1:56)

Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 67:04

The first single from Tim & Neil Finn’s recent Everyone Is Here album, “Won’t Give In” is accompanied on this CD single by a couple of songs that, perhaps, lend a little bit of insight into why that album was essentially recorded twice.

The lead single itself is, naturally, the same as what appears on the album, no surprises there. The real gem of this three-track CD is “Way Back Down”, a Neil-heavy number with some fun lyrics and interesting musical structure that just begs for a singalong. “Way Back Down” was produced by Mitchell Froom, the Crowded House producer who worked with the Finns to rerecord all but one of the tracks for Everyone Is Here almost from scratch. As catchy as it is, I’m surprised that this song didn’t make the cut for the album itself; I could actually nominate a song or two whose place it could’ve taken.

“Almost” means that some elements, especially the occasional orchestral backing arrangement, was salvaged from the original sessions produced by the legendary Tony Visconti. The second non-album B-side featured here, “Sunset Swim”, is a survivor of those original sessions, and it’s a laid-back, folky number with some interesting, singing-in-the-round elements to it. Interestingly, the one Visconti-produced track to survive on the album itself was the slickly-produced “Disembodied Voices”, which didn’t sound out of step with the Froom-produced tracks. “Sunset Swim”, on the other hand, is loose enough that it almost hearkens back to the original Finn Brothers album - and whether the artists or their label made the decision, one gets the feeling that someone wanted to avoid that comparison.

An interesting trio of songs, this one - it’s worth it just to hear “Way Back Down”.

1. Won’t Give In (4:18)
2. Way Back Down (4:12)
3. Sunset Swim (3:50)

Released by: Parlophone / EMI
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 12:22

If anyone were to ask me what elements from the first season of Space: 1999 were most sorely missed in the show’s second year (and trust me, I get asked this a lot…well, not really), I’d give them two names: Barry Gray and Barry Morse. Barry Morse’s character mysteriously disappeared between seasons with no explanation, never to be even so much as mentioned again. And Barry Gray’s music, which had done more to define the show’s setting and tone than anything else that could be seen or heard on screen, was swapped out for Derek Wadsworth’s more rock/disco-driven scores in the second season.

No disrespect is intended toward Wadsworth here, but I always felt that was a bad move (though I learned from this CD’s extensively detailed liner notes that it was Mr. Gray who decided to bow out at that stage). The plight of Moonbase Alpha’s crew, to put it mildly, is a hopeless one, at least so long as they’re pining for Earth. And Barry Gray’s music reflects that almost too well; it’s somber, almost tragic in places, and even in epilogue scenes that would seem to be trying to tack some kind of hopeful or light-hearted moment onto the show, the music is a reminder that these people are so screwed. Continued use of Gray’s small library of music throughout the first season reinforced that better than anything that the writers and actors did. In a show where the cast occasionally served overbaked ham to the audience, where the special effects sometimes jarringly reminded one of producer Gerry Anderson’s string of puppet series, and where the plots sometimes took sharp turns right through the guard railing and off the road, Barry Gray’s music was the dramatic anchor.

Finally back in commercial release after nearly 30 years, this collection of music from Space: 1999 is pared down from an extensive 2-CD archive of every cue recorded for the show’s first season that was given an extremely limited release by the Gerry Anderson fan club, Fanderson. That double CD collection included “library” tracks not composed by Gray (i.e. Holst’s “Mars: Bringer Of War” was used to track the episode Space Brain), as well as early demos of the music Gray played for the show’s producers; a similar double CD release through Fanderson similarly chronicled Derek Wadsworth’s music for season two. Prior to the Fanderson release, whose value has skyrocketed on the collector’s market, there was an LP of music from the series released in the 1970s. Therefore, not only is this CD the first time that the Space: 1999 music has gotten a general release since the show’s heyday, but at its budget price…well, it’s nice to not have to worry about chasing down the Fanderson CDs on eBay and watching them escalate beyond the price of my next house payment. Eight pounds sterling beats a few hundred dollars anyday, and Silva Screen has my immense gratitude for that. It’s also worth noting that this CD adds material that had been unavailable during the Fanderson CD production, so completists, you still have to get this.

Things kick off with Gray’s energetic, starts-out-heroic-and-gets-downright-funky main theme for Space: 1999, co-written with Vic Elms (of The Prisoner incidental music fame). While a recent marathon review of the series on DVD brought into sharp relief how diluted my childhood memories were of the quality of the show itself, my fond memories of this theme music remain intact. I loved how the thundering tympani roll would actually start in the episode teaser itself before you actually saw the titles (shades of the build-up to the revised main theme from Farscape season 3 and 4!), and that fanfare…wow. Most of the fanfare didn’t even include the words “Space: 1999″ on the screen. No, that heroic fanfare was there to tell you, prior to identifying the show, that MARTIN LANDAU and BARBARA BAIN were starring in this series! After the final blast of brass, Gray kicks into dramatic-but-funky mode with a jammin’ guitar solo (played by Elms himself) covering the highlights from “This Week’s Episode” and the recap of the fateful events of September 13th, 1999. Yes, it’s dated - very dated. But in its day, this was one of the coolest intros ever for an action-adventure show.

The healthy number of cues from the series-launching Breakaway are a reflection of how often that episode’s music turned up in later shows, and with good reason; the first 35 or so minutes of that particular show were so intentionally nervous and heavy with dread that the music does a masterful job, when re-used later, of re-establishing the underlying hopelessness of the characters’ situation. The liner notes, which I can’t say enough nice things about, reveal that Gray only scored four episodes of the show, and the music from those shows was reused in just the right places for the remainder of the season. The score for Another Time, Another Place is another winner, including a tragically sad little cue called “Flowers For Helena” which seemed to play over the epilogue of nearly every installment of the show’s first year.

Now, all of this effusive praise for Gray’s evocative music doesn’t mean that the show’s scoring didn’t occasionally go off the deep end. The cues from Testament Of Arkadia - drawn from library music, not from Gray’s scores, but included here because of that episode’s pivotal place in the show’s history - start out with a very formal classical feel, and then segue into something that sounds like a 70s peace-and-love rock jam (think of something you’d hear if you were actually budgeted to buy the world a Coke). The cue from “The Troubled Spirit” is probably the wildest track on the whole CD, and I love it. It’s an extremely well-performed electric sitar jam which essentially was the only sound hear during the unusually off-format teaser for that episode. Granted, it’s a bit of an Indian music clichè, but for contrast’s sake, I could listen to this track three times in a row easily…and can barely stomach the Beatles’ “Within You, Without You” once.

The Mission Of The Darians was tracked from library music as well, though it’s a very close match for the show’s general musical direction as established by Barry Gray. Ring Around The Moon is represented by a funky guitar/organ track composed by Vic Elms, another frequent Anderson musical collaborator (possibly by virtue of, as the liner notes reveal, being Anderson’s son-in-law).

Even if you’re unfamiliar with this series, I strongly recommend the soundtrack to you if you enjoyed the soundtrack releases for Gatchaman/Battle Of The Planets or Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato. It’s in much the same vein, though more string-oriented where those shows’ scores were brass-heavy, and all of those titles together are an interesting study in television scoring in the 1970s. If you’re more accustomed to the modern-day John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith school of film scoring, there are passages here that will trip your trigger, and just as many that you’ll want to skip. But it’s definitely worth a listen. Barry Gray seemed to know better than anyone what the dramatic thrust of Space: 1999 was, and this CD is the proof.

1. Space: 1999 Main Title (1:10)
2. The Dark Side Of The Moon (2:12)
3. People Are Dying Up Here (4:10)
4. Breakaway (4:29)
5. Human Decision Required (1:42)
6. Alien Attack (”The Astronauts”) composed by Mike Hankinson (4:05)
7. Terra Nova (3:06)
8. Phase Two (1:42)
9. Matter Of Life And Death (4:18)
10. Paradise Lost (0:42)
11. Space: 1999 End Titles - Alternate Version (0:32)
12. The Late Shift / Gwent’s Arrival / Gwent’s Farewell (5:13)
13. The Solarium: “The Latest Fashion” composed by Giampiero Boneschi (1:35)
14. Captives Of Triton / Moonwalk composed by Vic Elms and Alan Willis (1:41)
15. Asteroid (1:50)
16. Black Sun (4:25)
17. Event Horizon (4:25)
18. Home (1:34)
19. Daria: 100 Square Miles composed by Robert Farnon / Macrocosm composed by Frank Cordell (2:13)
20. Atonement composed by Jim Sullivan (2:58)
21. Space: 1999 Main Theme - Extended Alternate Version (1:42)
22. The Origin Of Life: Suite Appassionnata - Andante composed by Paul Bonneau and Serge Lancen / The Miracle: Picture Of Autumn composed by Jack Arel and Pierre Dutout (5:44)
23. Moon Odyssey (3:57)
24. Regina’s World (3:54)
25. Earthbound (1:33)
26. Santa Maria (7:08)
27. Flowers For Helena (1:05)
28. Space: 1999 End Titles (0:34)

Released by: Silva Screen
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 79:52