SoundCast Episode 17 - Flash Over Substance

Episode 17: Flash Over Substance

Recorded August 3, 2010

Published August 6, 2010

Flash Over Substance:  the crew gets back into compilations, Inception, Tron: Legacy, Predators, and the trend of big, Hollywood films focusing on flashy visuals at possibly the expense of everything else...including the music.

Episode Highlights

00:30 - Intro and Google Voice invasion

01:44 - Expecting the Expendables

04:00 - Compilation continuation

10:30 - Torchwood Talk + eMusic

14:00 - Inception reception

25:20 - Tron: Pre-Legacy

34:33 - Predator:  The Return of Helen San

41:59 - Pillars and Schmuks

43:59 - Flash Over Substance

Music Clips (Select music clips contained in this podcast)

10:35 - "What's Occuring" (Torchwood: Children of Men) Ben Foster

15:56 - "Half-Remembered Dream" (Inception) by Hans Zimmer

32:56 - "Predator Attack"

34:33 - "Hanzo's Last Stand" (Predators) by John Debney

42:38 - "Preluce to a Schmuk" (Dinner for Schmucks) by Theodore Shapiro

45:30 - " " (Prince of Persia) Harry Gregson-Williams

46:12 - "Earthbenders" (The Last Airbender) James Newton Howard

47:31 - "Prologue: Book II..." (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) by John Williams

49:30 - "Autobots" (Transformers) by Steve Jablonsky

54:40 - "There's a God in You" (Clash of the Titans) by Ramin Djawadi

55:38 - "Bioluminescence of the Night" (Avatar) James Horner

Download the episode here

Subscribe and more info here

Predators (Soundtrack) by John Debney - Review

Bittersweet Nostalgia
Review by Marius Masalar

For JOHN DEBNEY, who spent a great part of this year working to produce the score to IRON MAN 2 (the album for which was only recently released), PREDATORS was by his own admission a much more fast-paced and brief scoring project with significantly different challenges. Not the least of which was filling the shoes of the series’ first composer, Alan Silvestri, whose iconic music for the first film still represents one of cinema’s most accomplished action/horror scores.

DEBNEY’s score attempts to do two major and obvious things: serve as a strong homage to Silvestri’s original score, and integrate that with his own sound to reflect the new film’s contemporary feel. Unfortunately, whether because of time pressures or strange directorial initiatives or some other reason, he fails to adequately achieve either of his two goals, which makes the generous 66-minute album drag on unpleasantly. In fact it isn’t so much unpleasant as surprisingly uninteresting given that this is the man who brought us masterpieces of sophistication and musicality like CUTTHROAT ISLAND and, more recently, LAIR.

Read the full review