Music Composed by Klaus Badelt
Rating: ***

Media Ventures wants you to hate them. Or at least they’re trying their best to make that happen. There are two factions of film music afficionado, “Group A”: those who salivate at the sound of slick MV synth and “Group B”: those who loathe anything that comes from the studio and it’s merry band of odd-named composers. “Group A” will love Pirates of The Caribbean, a swashbuckling score credited to Klaus Badelt that contains little swash and even less buckle. If this score is any indication, it apparently takes eight composers and nine orchestrators to write music for a two-hour and twenty-minute feature film. This score crew size is probably a first, and is a rallying cry for “Group B”, who are no doubt lamenting Alan Silvestri’s much ballyhooed exit from Pirates, a scant few weeks before the film’s theatrical release. You can imagine Silvestri had fashioned a big, blow-hard epic in the vein of his highly successful The Mummy Returns, but one look at Pirates of The Caribbean will tell you that a thundering action score would have probably added excess fromage to an already bubbling muck of cheese. Pirates of The Caribbean is not merely a pirate movie. It’s a goofy contemporary adventure, dressed up with boats, costumes, corsets and dredlocks. What better way to accentuate the serious lack of lofty goals this picture has then a by-the-numbers cruise missle of a film score? The wonky vibe running through Pirates is not lost on Badelt and Co. As Captain Jack Sparrow brings his sinking ship into port, standing aloof atop the mast (as the rest of the boat is now submerged), Badelt blasts out his testosterone-fueled Sparrow theme with everything he’s got. It’s now obvious that this is one score not to be taken seriously — and for the purposes of this review, I won’t.

Klaus Badelt

If you rocked to The Rock and got into the zone with Drop Zone, then Pirates will be a familiar trip through memory lane. It reprises not only highlights from those two scores — particularly the heroic theme for Capt. Jack Sparrow (”The Medallion Calls”), which is a thinly disguised variation on the “Hummel” theme from The Rock, the main action motif is a beefed up spin on the infamous “Two Many Notes, Not Enough Rests” from Zimmer’s Drop Zone — but it also pillages Gladiator (”The Black Pearl”) and plunders bits from Shrek (”One Last Shot”) of all scores. Other ahem, cases of deja vu, include the intense “Swords Crossed”, as the curse of the Black Pearl’s crew is revealed. It’s similar to size, shape and color to a cue from Black Hawk Down (”Chant”). Much-whined about too is a variation on Wojciech Kilar’s Dracula (co-incidentally, like Drop Zone, was also used in a Pirates trailer), which actually makes a more blatent appearance in the film, but only a brief glimpse of it can be heard in “Bootstraps’ Bootstraps”.

What’s here: typical Media Ventures power anthems (”Barbossa Is Hungry”, “Skull and Crossbones”), with orchestra and synths blasting away in complete unison with almost zero counterpoint or texture (”Underwater March”, you name it), with chorus samples and flittery percussion straight outta’ The Rock (”Swords Crossed”, “Blood Ritual” — mainly used for the baddie pirates). This all sounds like a hull-fulla-fun, but there is a distinct lack of originality here. It’s almost defiantly unoriginal, which is a major problem. Pirates is a textbook case of an average Media Ventures score that despite it being a bit of brief n’ brainless joy, it results in a guilty conscience. I can’t possibly feel good about liking this album, but I do.

Pirates of The Caribbean is a big-budget summer blockbuster, but without the dazzling visuals, a lot of the pure synth music cues sound, well, cheap. MV has always set the course in terms of high-tech composing gadgetry, but there are moments here that sound weak compared to their live orchestra counterparts. This patchy quality is probably due to the number of composers contributing music, some of which could probably not get orchestra session time for their cues, so instead they pumped ‘em out straight from the digital domain. The patchy quality is accentuated all the more by the album’s sequencing (fifteen tracks, most of them around two to three minutes long). A short orchestral/synth cue segues into a 100% synth cue and then it will segue into a mixed cue (”Skull and Crossbones”, and pretty much every track on this album). The worst offender of chintz comes 1:50 into “Underwater March”, an all-synth rendition of the main theme that is truly cringe-inducing.

Where Badelt sits in all of this isn’t always easy to tell. The more orchestral moments are probably his contributions, particularly the sections where things slow down considerably, like the first half of “Moonlight Serenade”, and the opening of “Fog Bound”. Unfortunately this score doesn’t showcase Badelt’s abilities like his sensitive The Pledge and Invincible. It’s definitely in the same brethren as The Time Machine, which, now that I think of it, ended up being a temp-reliant adventure score that had me excited, much like Pirates does.

The credits in the booklet read like the 2003 Media Ventures Staff Yearbook. Everyone is in here, and they all get their own pirate-themed nicknames, including gems like orchestrator Conrad “Peg Leg” Pope, engineer Malcolm “Cat o’ Nine Tails” Luker and assistant music editor Melissa “Tortuga Wench” Muik. Fittingly, Jerry Bruckheimer is dubbed “The Hook”. Beware! Track titles do not necessarily refer to the music and it’s placement in the film. Technical credits are okay. The album is mastered at a generous level, but a lot of the synth-heavy sections roll a bit shrill for my tastes. Walt Disney Records’ presentation is attractive, and a solid forty-three minute running time covers the highlights of the score.

By now you’re thinking I’m going to continue to bash on Pirates, but I’m finished. In the end, this album holds a strange allure. It’s not particularly poignant, and there’s certainly no serious emotional connection between music and picture, or any justification behind the musical choices made by Badelt and Co. But the attraction remains. It might be a primal need for those loud, dirge-marches that are the basic ingredient of any Media Ventures score, and Pirates delivers those, but that’s practically all it does deliver. There’s no outstanding love theme. To it’s credit, there is a nice fiddle theme that ties in the period and setting of the film. It’s heard in the opening and closing tracks, but it’s not what’s going to make this album successful. There’s also no incidental cues to balance out the action. There’s just a set of He-Man-like themes and machismo bombast (”He’s A Pirate”), synth or otherwise. This is truly a score for MV fans, anyone else is looking for trouble.

Music Composed by Klaus “Bowsprit” Badelt; Addt’l Music by Ramin Djawadi, James Dooley, Nick Glennie-Smith, Steve Jablonsky, Blake Neely, James McKee Smith, and Geoff Zanelli; Orchestra Conducted by Blake “Blackstone” Neely; Orchestrated by Bruce Fowler, Robert Elhai, Elizabeth Finch, Walt Fowler, Bill Liston, Ladd McIntosh, Suzette Moriarty, Conrad Pope, Brad Warnaar; Recorded & Mixed by Alan Meyerson, Malcolm Luker & Slamm Andrews; Score Overproduced by Hans “Long John” Zimmer; Availability: In print; Label: Walt Disney Records, (60089-7); Release Date: July 22, 2003

01. Fog Bound (2′16)
02. The Medallion Calls (1′52)
03. The Black Pearl (2′16)
04. Will and Elizabeth (2′08)
05. Swords Crossed 3′15)
06. Walk The Plank (1′58)
07. Barbosa Is Hungry (4′06)
08. Blood Ritual (3′32)
09. Moonlight Serenade (2′08)
10. To The Pirates’ Cave! (3′30)
11. Skull and Crossbows (3′23)
12. Bootstraps’ Bootstraps (2′38)
13. Underwater March (4′12)
14. One Last Shot (4′46)
15. He’s A Pirate (1′30)

Total Playing Time: 43′30