Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 - music by Bear McCreary
Like the television episodes that it accompanied, the soundtrack from the third season of Battlestar Galactica is an even more haunted, somber affair than its predecessors. The third season saw the characters’ bad decisions, bad personal judgement, and all-around character flaws come back to bite them on the butt in a big way. Opening with most of the surviving human race enslaved by the Cylons on a bleak world, the show got off of that planet in four episodes, but then proceeded to spend the bulk of its remaining shows reflecting on what had happened during that time. A side strand about Baltar trying to get his bearings among the Cylons offered some rather nebulous developments, until he fell once more into the hands of his fellow humans (who blamed him for their captivity). The pace suddenly picked up at the end of the season with the apparent death of Starbuck, the revelation that several key characters may actually be Cylons, and what at least appeared to be the return of Starbuck…with a tantalizing peek at Earth, just around the cosmic corner from Galactica.
Quite a bit of the soundtrack’s running time is spent with the Exodus two-parter, which saw Adama and the fleet return to liberate humanity from New Caprica, and with Unfinished Business, a segment that centered around a series of boxing matches to help the crew blow off steam. I’ll admit that Unfinished Business resides in the same “blind spot” I mentioned in an earlier review of the Doctor Who Series 3 soundtrack - there was an awful lot of music generated for the episode, but since I didn’t really count that episode among my favorites, I hadn’t paid close attention to its music. It turns out that, like the Who episode Human Nature, Unfinished Business had some fine music that I had overlooked.
The gem of the Exodus tracks is a mammoth (nearly 8 minute) cue that accompanied Galactica’s all-or-nothing struggle to rescue the trapped colonists. The show’s relentless percussion of the star of “Storming New Caprica”, but when low strings start to add a guttural urgency to the walls of percussion, things really get cooking. This may well be the best reason to get the soundtrack to begin with. Well, that and “All Along The Watchtower”. As odd as it may seem, a Bob Dylan song became central to the season finale, lyrics and all, though it’s a wildly different interpretation than just about anything you’ve heard before. It leans a little bit on the Jimi Hendrix version of “Watchtower”, but with the ethnic instrumentation and percussion that screams “Galactica” layered onto it. This is a cover of “Watchtower” that rocks, and rocks hard. It’s best listened to in conjunction with “Heeding The Call”, a piece of music heard on radios, in the launch bay, and “in the frakking ship!” as certain key characters began to suspect something was even more wrong than they had suspected. It leads into “Watchtower” nicely.
Maelstrom is another episode represented by a healthy sampling of music, including the final moments of the episode in which we’re led to believe that Starbuck has flown her final mission. The music from the episode Dirty Hands is fun too, with a swampy, slithery, bluesy guitar part that gives it a pretty unique sound. While the soundtrack from Galactica’s second season was markedly different from the first, bringing new elements and instruments into the mix, this CD almost sounds like a continuation of the previous season’s sound, dovetailing seamlessly in spots with the second season’s soundtrack.
A strong listen, but it took a little more time to grow on me than previous music collections from the new Battlestar Galactica. As with the episodes themselves, the season 3 soundtrack spends some time in introspective space, rather than blowing everything to bits. Those looking for action music won’t be disappointed, but there’s much more to the season 3 music than that.
- A Distant Sadness (2:50 - Occupation)
- Precipice (4:52 - Precipice)
- Admiral and Commander (3:16 - Exodus Part 1 & 2)
- Storming New Caprica (7:48 - Exodus Part 2)
- Refugees Return (3:43 - Exodus Part 2)
- Wayward Soldier (4:17 - Hero)
- Violence and Variations (7:42 - Unfinished Business)
- The Dance (2:33 - Unfinished Business)
- Adama Falls (1:43 - Unfinished Business)
- Under the Wing (1:16 - Maelstrom)
- Battlestar Sonatica (4:44 - Torn)
- Fight Night (2:27 - Unfinished Business)
- Kat’s Sacrifice (2:46 - The Passage)
- Someone To Trust (3:09 - Taking A Break From All Your Worries)
- The Temple of Five (2:44 - The Eye Of Jupiter)
- Dirty Hands (3:32 - Dirty Hands)
- Gentle Execution (3:28 - Exodus Part 2)
- Mandala in the Clouds (4:07 - Maelstrom)
- Deathbed and Maelstrom (5:53 - Maelstrom)
- Heeding the Call (2:11 - Crossroads Part 2)
- All Along The Watchtower
(3:33 - Crossroads Part 2)Released by: La-La Land Records
Release date: 2007
Total running time: 79:02
Keen observers may have noticed that I wasn’t as thrilled with the third season of the new Doctor Who as I was with the first two. When the tracklist for the eagerly-anticipated Doctor Who Series 3 CD was revealed, I’ll admit that I was a little underwhelmed there too: half of it seemed to come from the two-parter Human Nature / The Family Of Blood, and those just weren’t my favorite episodes. Apparently I’d forgotten that they sported some of the season’s most distinctive music by a long way.
Produced and overseen by Steven Spielberg from 1985 through ‘87, Amazing Stories was a lighthearted take on the anthology/playhouse series format that hadn’t been seen on television in two decades. There was no recurring cast of characters, and no connected stories - but unlike The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Outer Limits, Amazing Stories was built on one prerequisite set by Spielberg - a sense of wonder and the fantastic, not the fatalistic. To this end, Spielberg - largely on the power of his own name - drew A-list Hollywood writing, acting and directing talent into his orbit for the show’s first season, and an absolutely stellar, unprecedented A-list of composers, a gathering of genius the likes of which - in all honesty, and not intended as hyperbole - we may never see again on one project.
Though the movies themselves have faded into that special pocket of semi-obscure hell reserved for stuff produced by Roger Corman, Battle Beyond The Stars and Humanoids From The Deep hold a special place in the hearts of soundtrack fans as the big-screen debut of a promising new young talent, James Horner. Hired with a mandate to try to duplicate the sound of - ironically - Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture score, Battle is basically the calling card that brought Horner into the Trek fold proper. I know I’ve jumped all over Horner in the past where originality is concerned, but let’s give credit where it’s due and give the guy a break: for this first movie scoring project, he was told to mimic Goldsmith. Say it with me again: Goldsmith. No pressure, eh? And then, on the strength of Battle, Horner was hired by Nicholas Meyer and asked to emulate himself. It’s no wonder Horner used and reused this basic material throughout the 1980s.
newcomer proud. And even if I’m not Horner’s biggest fan in the world, I’m even less of a Corman fan - his greatest contributions have really been in the area of bringing top-notch talent into Hollywood that eventually turns out better material than he himself could ever manage - and these may be among the very finest scores ever to grace a Roger Corman movie (or two).
In the formative days of electronic music, one name stands out because it wasn’t associated only with that genre. Raymond Scott, whose unorthodox jazz pieces were less improvised than they were drilled to perfection (long before they were appropriated by Carl Stalling to serve as the soundtrack to the early Bugs Bunny cartoons), was a major American innovator in electronic music. Now, keep in mind, this is far enough back that “electronic music” meant generating and tweaking sounds electrically, and it often yielded results that tended more toward musical abstraction than precision or perfection. (Which is surprising considering Scott’s don’t-deviate-from-the-program jazz days.) Raymond Scott, however, saw the potential of the studio, and purely electrical devices, as instruments in their own right. (If you need evidence of Scott’s pedigree in electronic music, he once counted Robert Moog as an employee.)
On the surface, it sounds like a neat idea - you ask a celebrity DJ or remixer to assemble a bunch of their formative favorites, those singles that got them interested in the business, and put their own spin on them, literally. That’s the idea behind the Back To Mine series, which has thus far cranked out a couple dozen of these compilations. They’re basically mixtapes on CD, assembled by the likes of Danny Tenaglia, Orbital, an so on. When a Back To Mine CD was announced, with a playlist personally picked out by those Norwegian masters of the downtempo genre, Royksopp, I thought I’d give it a try. 
and there isn’t that much Royksopp in evidence, it smacks of a cheaply licensed throwaway compilation.