Everything bold is new again.

For the first time in a long time, I got a full night's sleep on the eve of a Varese Sarabande CD Club announcement. Did I just forget about it, or was my subconscious protecting me from bad news? It's hard to forget about it when a specialty label announces seven new titles in one day, so the answer is obviously the latter.

In my "film music of 2011" post, I mentioned that the "Varese CD Club was, for the most part, swimming in a circle". This morning, that tradition continued.

Picking up the likes of Eye of the Needle and Amazing Grace and Chuck seems an inevitability as, respectively, I've grown fond of late-period Rozsa and ondes Martenot-heavy Bernstein scores are like crack cocaine.

Still, who said that we really need The Karate Kid Part III or The Clan of the Cave Bear?

The former points to a problem I've seen amongst film music labels: constant recycling of releases. I mean, sure, good for those who missed out on the box set pressed a few years ago (the main reason that these individual releases don't blow my skirt up), but there are scads more film scores to be released. I (and many others, I'm sure) was expecting the likes of The List of Adrian Messenger or Cape Fear...and by all logic, those titles should've already been released by Varese (save a cocktease that is as massive as it is pointless, why else would the last few years see Club releases of early-60s Goldsmith titles from Universal Studios?*).

Sadly, this disease is not exclusive to Varese. Intrada has truly raised the bar on specialty releases in the last few years, but did we really need two releases of Silvestri's Predator?! And the buzz has been deafening on a re-release of La La Land's out-of-print Star Trek V for tonight.

Is it too much to seek out different paths instead of trodding over the same ones?

* - Just so it's clear, I'm not some plebe who thinks that Goldsmith scored Cape Fear; I couldn't think of a better way to phrase the whole 'Universal'/'early 60s' thing.