Review by Paul Cote

Rating: ****

I’d never have predicted that simply writing a review for an Indiana Jones score would send me into an existential crisis, but it’s hard to review a soundtrack that everyone’s already purchased and formed an opinion on without wondering why you’re bothering. My usual formula - here are the themes, here are the word-a-day-calendar superlatives to describe what they sound like, here’s what I like, here’s what I don’t like, here are some awkward jokes stuffed in the parenthesis, etcetera - seems more pointless than usual right now. I can’t imagine there’s a single person left at this point who’s going to be swayed into buying or declining on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull based on what I write right here. I could write anything. What did you have for lunch today? Yeah, was it good? With olives? Yuck, I hate olives. Even in martinis. Really limits your options on martinis, hating olives. All you can really buy are the girly martinis, and then you look, you know … yikes that was a tangent. I had a point, but I’ve lost it. Anyway, pointless as they may be, here are my thoughts on this new John Williams score. I mean, you’re already here reading the review, so I might as well, right?

John Williams

That said: I like it. Not as much as I’ve liked the best things John Williams has been writing in the past decade and not as much as I liked any of the 1980s Indiana Jones scores, but I like it. It has fun concert suites, bouncy adventure scherzos, thick and dissonant action music, and a few great set-pieces. I like all of these things, so I like the score. A lot of people don’t. I can understand that. I didn’t like it at first - I thought it was boring, and I thought it lacked a hook. I thought that all of the major ideas came from previous John Williams scores, and I thought that none of the new themes had the emotional oomph that made me like those previous John Williams scores so much. And on some level, I guess that’s still true. But you know, so what? The music is still extremely entertaining and technically accomplished - Williams can still write airy fluff with more substance than other composers’ thickest peanut butter. Even the frothiest stuff like “The Adventure of Mutt” and “The Snake Pit” is so painstakingly detailed and orchestrated that I nearly forget how cheesy or it all sounds. And the best moments, like the awe-inspiring storm of counterpoint at the end of “Hidden Treasure and the City of Gold,” and the massive cacophony of “The Return” give me goosebumps. That’s right folks, the bumps, their goosing. All for John Williams. Because in the end, while the score may not sound exactly like the music he was writing in the 1980s, it still sounds like John Williams - all things considered, his style really hasn’t changed that much. He still knows how to have fun, and after three years of silence from the man, that’s worth a few goosebumps.

A few things make me like the CD a little less though. The album sequencing, for one. It’s the worst. Williams’ album sequences tend to be hit (like The Fury) and miss (like The Phantom Menace), and this one is definitely a miss. I understand that he wants to spread the excitement around the album, but you lose the dramatic momentum when your hear part of the climax at the beginning of the score and part of the climax in the middle of the score. With some variation, I generally want my scores to flow from beginning to middle to end, not beginning to part of the end to part of the middle to more of the end to more of the beginning to more of the middle to the rest of the end. It just doesn’t feel like it flows naturally that way. I want a great big near-climatic cue like “Hidden Treasure and the City of Gold” to build into the even bigger and grander climatic cue like “The Return” the way it’s supposed to. I don’t want the two pieces separated by several tracks of minimal underscore from 30 minutes earlier in the story. I know that this is a problem that I could fix by reprogramming the tracks in movie order, but then I’d have to watch that awful movie over and over again just to figure out the movie order. Sitting through the movie again would make me cranky, and I’d probably blame the music for making me see the movie again, so I’d end up liking the music less instead of more. Is that what you want, Mr. Williams? I know it’s not that big a deal, but I think a lot of people would like this score more if the listening experience wasn’t so disjointed.

Though part of that weird sequencing might have something to do with the concert-suite happy nature of the album. With all of Williams concert suites, you’re about 15 minutes into the album before the score’s actually started. I’m not really complaining, because the suites are extremely entertaining and they let Williams do things he can’t do in the score itself, but it does make you wonder about the connection between the album and the film it shares a title with. Because with the exception of the “Call of the Crystal Skull,” the material in these suites has very little to do with the rest of the score. “The Adventures of Mutt” is really just an extremely gussied-up arrangement of a brief moment in “The Jungle Chase” cue, and we never hear anything more than the first two brief phrases of “Irina’s Theme” in the rest of the score. But what’s strangest is that while titles of these suites imply that they’re tone poems of the characters in the film, the suites don’t seem that connected to the characters in the film at all. I mean, is there really any gothic romanticism in Cate Blanchett’s Soviet cartoon character, or any swashbuckling Korngold in Shia Laboef’s greasy-haired James Dean impression. Again, these suites don’t hurt the film, and they make for great entertainment on the album, but they do make you wonder what’s going on inside John Williams head when he writes his concert suites.

But look at that, two paragraphs of complaints after I started by saying that I really like the album. Sorry about that - it’s so much easier to write bitchy criticism, even when it’s about something that you really like on the whole. Not that it matters - in all likelihood, you already have Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and you’ve already made up your mind on it. That being that, the only thing I can offer is that if you’ve purchased it and were disappointed, I’d recommend listening to it a few more times in the next couple of months. It will probably grow on you. If you already really like it, well, good. Me too. Yeah. Wow. This is the weirdest review I’ve ever written.

Music Composed and Conducted by John Williams; Recorded and Mixed by Shawn Murphy; Produced by John Williams; Label: Concord Records, (CRE-30825-02); Availability: In-print; U.S. Release Date: May 20, 2008.

01. Raiders March (5:06)
02. Call of The Crystal (3:50)
03. The Adventures of Mutt (3:12)
04. Irina’s Theme (2:26)
05. The Snake Pit (3:15)
06. The Spell of The Skull (4:24)
07. The Journey to Akator (3:08)
08. A Whirl Through Academe (3:34)
09. “Return” (3:12)
10. The Jungle Chase (4:23)
11. Orellana’s Cradle (4:22)
12. Grave Robbers (2:29)
13. Hidden Treasure and The City of Gold (5:14)
14. Secret Doors and Scorpians (2:17)
15. Oxley’s Dilemma (4:46)
16. Ants! (4:14)
17. Temple Ruins and The Secret Revealed (5:51)
18. The Departure (2:27)
19. Finale (9:14)

Total Playing Time: 77:15