captainsolo said:
The Bond scores are my favorites and I feel that David Arnold's modern interpretations leave much to be desired. They lack any of the punch and thematics of John Barry's originals. The best scores are for Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I also adore the score for The Living Daylights.
The expanded Bond film scores released a few years back were a true God send. Like you, "Thunderball" is also one of my all time favorites. I love all the early Barry scores (1963 -1971) the most. The expanded OHMSS, Diamonds, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice get played the most of any of my soundtracks. But still, I wish they would find the lost tracks for "Moonraker", that is a very good latter score. By the late 70's, Barry's scores started to sound very alike from film to film. "Living Daylights" was a truly stand out score that greatly benefited from the expanded release it got a few years ago. The original soundtrack album was not a very good representation of the entire score. Too many of the themes were just repeated after every one or two tracks, and the LP format was much too short anyway.
"View to a Kill" still suffers from that very same problem. The album contains 15 cues, yet we only get 4 new themes repeated again and again on very similarly arranged cues. Just for example, the title "A View to a Kill" is repeated twice in vocal form and twice in almost identical instrumental form. Then we get a action theme that is slightly reminiscent of OHMSS, that is repeated in 3 cues with very little variation in style. The airship theme is also repeated 3 times. And don't forget the obligatory James Bond and 007 themes that sounds as if it could have been lifted right out of "Octopussy" and "Moonraker" sessions.
Well anyway, here is a list of some of the soundtracks I listen to quite a bit:
The "Alien" films (all 4 of them)
Shaft (Anthology / Best of Shaft)
Apocalypse Now (original CD / Redux CD /Rhythm Devils - Sessions CD)
Battlestar Galactica 70's series (The Stu Phillips 4-CD Anthology)
Planet of the Apes series (60's/70's) (All 5 Film soundtracks)
Dune (Lynch Film)
The Final Countdown
Dirty Harry Series (all 5 film soundtracks)
Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts Music (various cues from 1963-1976)
Jaws & Jaws II
Lost In Space (T.V. Show)
Rocky I,II,III
Fist Full of Dollars, For a few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Superman I, II, III, IV
Star Trek T.V. (various soundtracks)
Star Trek Films (All but Star Trek IV)
Star Wars (Episodes IV-VI)