The film music of 2024.

So many scores, so little patience.

Well, may as well get this back from memory.

My favorite scores of 2024:

      

      (Michael Abels - Back Lot)
Abels brilliantly (and appropriately) channeled Thomas Newman for the underrated Adjustment Bureau variant.

Favorite tracks: "Main Title", "White Tears Meter", "Run to Destiny"

      (Jeymes Samuel - Milan)
Samuel‘s lush score for his own biblical epic harkens back to the music of the Golden Age.
Favorite tracks: "Mary Magdalene", "Those Who Are About to Die Salute You", "Walking on Water"

      (Daniel Pemberton - Platoon)
Pemberton‘s music is delightful; a spirited accompaniment to the 60s-set romcom.
Favorite tracks: "Kelly Jones, Creative Director", "Sketchbook", "Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins"

      (Alan Silvestri - Sony Classical)
Silvestri’s heart-on-sleeve music once again achieves the sincerity that Zemeckis’s movie strived for.
Favorite tracks: "Extinction", "God Help Me", "End Credits"

      (Andrea Datzman - Walt Disney)
Datzman follows up Giacchino’s original with style, highlighted by a wry motif for Anxiety.
Favorite tracks: "Riley Protection System", "To Protect and Disserve", "Done Track Mind"

      (Marco Beltrami - Back Lot)
A great improvement over his pallid Silent Night, Beltrami’s music for John Woo‘s remake is nicely colorful.
Favorite tracks: "Candles for the Dead", "Morgue Shootout", "Zee's Reckoning"

      (Stephen Gallagher - WaterTower)
Almost like Basil Poledouris and Frederic Talgorn had a secret love child and he grew up to write this exceptional score.
Favorite tracks: "The Witan", "Edoras Burns", "A Shield-Maiden of Rohan"

      (Chris Benstead - Atlantic)
Benstead tipped his cap to Morricone with his lively score to the enjoyable World War II caper.
Favorite tracks: "A Team of Misfits", "Beer Bossa", "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"

      (Dave Metzger - Walt Disney)
Metzger‘s history as an orchestrator served him well, Zimmer‘s original melodies given a new coat of paint.
Favorite tracks: "The Race", "Elephant Stampede", "The Earth Will Shake"

      (John Powell - Netflix)
Perhaps, Powell‘s most purely entertaining score of the year; tuneful and bursting with energy.
Favorite tracks: "Washington By-the-Sea", "The Twins' Christmas", "Boxing Day"

      (Kris Bowers - Back Lot)
Bowers’s multifaceted music is far closer to perfection than the film for which it was written.
Favorite tracks: "System Breach", "Rockmouth", "Robots vs. the Wild"


(Amelia Warner - Walt Disney)
Warner’s driving music hints at a deservedly promising future in film scoring.
Favorite tracks: "Sisters", "We Go to England or Die Trying", "Beach Celebration"

Other good scores: 

Bolt from the Blue (Xander Rodzinski), Drive-Away Dolls (Carter Burwell), Forever Mine (Anne-Kathrin Dern), The 4:30 Movie (Bear McCreary), Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Dario Marianelli), IF (Michael Giacchino), Megalopolis (Osvaldo Golijov), No Time to Spy: A Loud House Movie (Jonathan Hylander), Saturday Night (Jon Batiste), Space: the New Frontier (Alan Williams), Treasure Trackers (Robin Hoffmann), Twisters (Benjamin Wallfisch) and Unfrosted (Christophe Beck)

My favorite CDs of 2024:

Arsene Lupin (Debbie Wiseman - Music Box) - The absence of the theme song is a minor complaint against an otherwise complete presentation of one of the most exciting and colorful scores of the 21st-century.

“Bond, James Bond.” (John Barry/George Martin - La La Land) - It’s not much of a stretch to say that the label outdid themselves with these releases from the funk of Martin’s Live and Let Die to the interstellar thrills of Moonraker and the brassy fun of Goldfinger.

Death Hunt (Jerrold Immel - Dragon’s Domain) - The almost forgotten outdoor adventure received an appropriately sweeping score courtesy of “Dallas” composer Immel.

Death of a Gunfighter/Skullduggery (Oliver Nelson - La La Land) - Nelson is not very well known even amongst film music fans (even I am barely familiar with his work), though this double header of his inventive scores should change that.

Dinosaur (James Newton Howard - Intrada) - The first of Howard’s animated scores is exciting and rich in African flavor.

Edge of Sanity (Frederic Talgorn - Intrada) - Talgorn‘s albums are all too scarce and I have no doubt that this score for the forgotten Jekyll and Hyde variant is just as exceptional as you’d expect.

Fear (Carter Burwell - Intrada) - Though the film was little more than junior league Fatal Attraction, Burwell’s music skillfully dug at the psychological layers hinted at by the script.

The Godfather, Part II (Nino Rota & Carmine Coppola - La La Land) - Rota returned for the sequel and, aided by the director’s father, rode this comeback to Oscar glory.

Nightbreed (Danny Elfman - Intrada) - It took a little time, but Elfman‘s beautiful music for the uneven Clive Barker thriller is here in full.

Torn Curtain (Bernard Herrmann/John Addison - La La Land) - It’s always a treat when a replacement score and a rejected score share the same disk space and it’s nice to have a deluxe presentation for one of the most infamous examples of all time.


Other great CDs of 2024:

Backdraft (Hans Zimmer - Intrada)

Backstairs at the White House (Morton Stevens - Dragon's Domain)

Blade II (Marco Beltrami - Varese CD Club)

Eye of the Needle (Miklos Rozsa - Varese CD Club)

The Joe Kraemer Collection - Vol. 1 (Dragon's Domain)

The John Ottman Collection - Vol. 1 (Dragon's Domain)

Out of Africa (John Barry - Intrada)
 
Resurrection (Maurice Jarre - Intrada)

Spider-Man 2 (Danny Elfman - La La Land)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Gabriel Yared - Music Box)


Random thoughts:

The r/soundtracks sub-Reddit gave me a lot to chew on this past year. A thread wondered if film soundtracks as a medium are dying as a number of scores - such as The Crow, Y2K and The Killer's Game - didn’t even see release from their respective studios' soundtrack shingles. This was my response almost verbatim: "As a film score collector for the last 25 years, this is depressing beyond reason. It was bad enough when studios stopped licensing their scores to labels like Varese Sarabande and Milan for physical releases and decided 'who needs to bother with all of that noise when we can just throw digital files of them on Spotify and call it a day?'. Unacceptable.

You would really think that, with movies costing upwards of nine figures these days, they could carve out a quarter (or half) of $1 million and get a quality score recorded and put on a physical disc. Nowadays, one in ten scores for movies in current release end up getting a physical CD, but quite often, that particular score is not worth the expense, but that is a conversation for another time.

I truly don’t know what else to say about this other than to hope that studios get their shit together and realize that film scores have as much value to a movie production as every other element and that they should be preserved as such."

Even more, with rare exceptions, themes seem to be on their way out too. r/soundtracks also had a thread recently where people offered unpopular opinions on film music. One stated that "the reason leitmotif and melody are missing from modern films is because, whether we like it or not, people are tired of it and find it childish and annoying. Also, producers are afraid of any sort of feedback from focus groups that the music was distracting or too on-the-nose, so they go for safer choices which don’t draw as much attention to themselves, which feeds into a cycle of audiences being less accustomed to hearing them and reacting negatively if they do”. Not helping matters, as far as I’m concerned, are filmmakers that won’t try to push back against this. I’ll tell you this much for free: if I was a film maker - and God willing, I will someday be - I would sooner drink battery acid than tell a composer to not write themes for their scores.