CD Reviews: Ballistic and Casino Royale

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever * (generously given)

DON DAVIS

Varèse Sarabande 302 066 420 2

23 tracks - 68:52

How does a guy write The Matrix and then get stuck with Ballistic? Maybe on the surface, an adult, Bond-style action picture with Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu had some appeal. Underneath it was nothing, and turned out to be a complete waste of time for everyone involved. No doubt it was intended for the "young fu" audience. This older "fu" wisely decided to skip it.

The opening "Main Title" is basically a rock number filled with electronic tricks of the trade, and driven by a lousy vocal. [Is it just me or has everyone begun to ask for these female wordless, plaintive vocals since Gladiator?] The hard rock approach becomes what passes as action music for the film. This works fine when you at least have a thematic reference as in David Arnold's three Bond scores. Here it's just noisy filler. Four minutes into the disc and it wears thin. "Severcam" provides a brief respite with a little over a minute of atmospheric electronic sounds -- this turns out to be the second "trick" of the score. But soon the female vocals return...at this point I started hoping they'd just put the poor woman out of her misery.

As the album is quite long, I held out hope that something interesting would come along. And...well, at least several tracks are in different keys. Actual variety is evident only in the aforementioned cues based on more ambient electronic sounds. "Ecks is Mobile" is the standout cue on the disc -- if there has to be a standout cue, that is. More orchestral, with little of the "techno-plague" of the previous tracks, it even has what might be considered a love theme. The same thematic idea recurs in the very next track, and it's too bad this wasn't a bigger factor in the score.

This disc does show Davis' versatility as a composer, but I hope this is not a direction he takes very often. In all, the music sounds like stylized but uninteresting video game music. Davis fans are advised to skip this one. Sometimes bad music is as bad as it sounds.  -- Steven A. Kennedy
 
 
 
 
 

Casino Royale (2002) *** 1/2

BURT BACHARACH

Varèse Sarabande 302 066 409 2

13 tracks - 34:22

In 1965, a movie producer named Charles Feldman decided to bring Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, to the silver screen. Unable to recruit Sean Connery (who had already starred in Dr. No and Goldfinger) Feldman, rather perversely, decided to cast several actors as her majesty's favorite spy, including Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and David Niven. In addition, he also asked his screenwriters to create "a parody script, spoofing Bond and the generation that spawned and adored him," as Paul Tonks explains in the liner notes for the picture's soundtrack album.

Needless to say, this unusual approach alienated audiences when the film premiered in 1967, and, for decades, Casino Royale has been condemned and overlooked by critics and Bond aficionados alike. In 2002, however, M-G-M released a DVD of the movie, trying to capitalize, perhaps, on the popularity of Mike Myers' Austin Powers movies, a series which is deeply indebted to the earlier film's themes, art design and sense of humor. Also available again is Casino Royale's splashy score.

A feast for fans of lounge music and bachelor pad exotica, this frequently surreal opus from Burt Bacharach opens with "Casino Royale Theme (Main Title)," a pouncing swing piece which spotlights Herb Alpert's mariachi-inflected trumpet. Galloping along on drum beats and darting strings, the track blends together the silkiness of muzak and the speed of surf music to create a sound that is simultaneously weird and beautiful. The next track, an Oscar-nominated showcase for Dusty Springfield called "The Look of Love," introduces the score's other major theme, a restrained bossa nova riff coupled with floating piano and purring horns that curl around the singer's husky voice like smoke.

Bacharach regularly revisits these melodies throughout the score, sometimes treating them separately and sometimes conflating them, as he does in "Dream on James, You're Winning." And on tracks like "The Big Cowboys and Indians Fight at Casino Royale" and "Sir James' Trip to Find Mata," the composer splices the themes together with cues built with familiar figures he's lifted from sources as diverse as American vaudeville, Scottish bagpipe music and French bal musette. The score often moves along unpredictably because of this crazy quilt construction, much like the plot of the movie for which it was written. Fortunately, complete chaos is averted because of the almost ubiquitous presence of Alpert's optimistic horn, which links together the disparate sounds like the cars on a runaway train.

With clean recordings, helpful liner notes and a gorgeous day-glo orange cover, Varèse Sarabande's re-release certainly calls into question the claim that the only composer gifted enough to score Bond is Barry. Maybe this is an overstatement. Nevertheless, the new edition of this old soundtrack should remind many of us, at least, that -- when it comes to creating compelling kitsch -- nobody does it better than Bacharach.  -- Stephen Armstrong

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