Breaking Bad Season 5 music

While checking out the Breaking Bad Reddit thread, I came across links to all the music used on the show. That would have been pretty handy when the show was airing... Guess I'll be doing that when the show returns in July.

Song from Breaking Bad Season 5 Ep 2 - Whitey's "Stay on the Outside"

Breaking Bad continues its streak of stellar integrations of pop songs into the show. There's not much on Whitey's allmusic or Wikipedia pages... Discogs has the best overview of his work. Looks like I'll be losing a few more bucks from my chequing account this week.

Take a listen even if you haven't seen the show... my best comparison would be LCD Soundsystem meets Faithless.

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens today

I'm actually pretty excited about this one. The book was great, and so was the first movie. Of course, the big draw for me is the soundtrack, done by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The movie was originally scheduled to come out Wednesday, but they bumped it up to a day early, I guess so it wouldn't compete with the Tintin flick.

I picked up the soundtrack recently, and the closing track is sort of curious. It's a cover of Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough", which was from the movie Legend by How to Destroy Angels, which is basically the two guys who did the soundtrack plus Mr. Reznor's wife Mariqueen Mandig. I had never heard of Legend or that song before. Given the subject matter and story of the movie, it seems like this would be an odd choice for the closing credits, but I'll reserve judgement til I see it in context.

It's not a great song, but it is a great production and I've been listening to it quite a bit lately.

Also check out this great cover of Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" by Reznor and Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs:

The soundtrack album itself is interesting because its total running time is about three hours. I'll take a wild guess and suggest that the movie itself probably isn't that long. The physical version of the soundtrack album will be spread over three discs, but the download advance copy I have lays out the track sequence as 1 to 39, rather than 3 sets of 13. I like this, because it treats the entire thing as one whole piece of work, a sort of ambient rock opera. Of course, none of this lends itself to casual listening, but that's not really the point. I imagine the whole thing playing out as the Ghosts album set to the movie, which is just fine by me.

Tempered enthusiasm

Might as well give away the whole movie, eh?

As you may know, I'm a bit of a NIN/Trent Reznor geek, so I will probably enjoy this film at least for the score, from the Oscar winning composer... The movie itself - looks decent enough, and I trust Fincher to handle the material well. The thing that bugs me is that it'll be an American crew with largely British actors tackling a story set in Sweden. I think people had their doubts about The Social Network, but that turned out not too shabby...

I would be interested to know if they are in fact adapting the book straight from the book, or in fact re-making the original movie. This trailer looks much more stylized than the original film... much more promising sound track too...

The Dark Knight Rises poster

The Teaser Poster for The Dark Knight Rises!

I'm pretty excited this movie, and especially another score from the genius Hans Zimmer.  Inception and The Dark Knight were amazing films with outstanding soundtracks.

A look inside Trent Reznor's studio

Pretty intense setup he's rocking here, as he and his partner in crime Atticus Ross discuss The Social Network soundtrack:

Trent Reznor's Oscar-Nominated Score

[via Air Users Blog]

I for one, enjoyed the new Tron movie.

Of course my appreciation of it is mostly from the score and sound design, but hey, what would you expect?

Check out this video about the audio production on film:

SoundWorks Collection: The Sound of TRON LEGACY from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

I really dug the soundtrack, electronic minimalism from Daft Punk that recalled at times their own work as well as the scores Philip Glass and Hans Zimmer. The "single" from the soundtrack, "Derezzed" is probably the worst cut on the whole thing so don't judge it by that.

My worry was that with all the eyeballs and approvals that this thing would have to go through that the final product would be so diluted as to be unrecognizable, but it wasn't the case. The film itself wasn't like the greatest thing of all time, but come on, a sequel to Tron is what they promised and a sequel is what we got. The soundtrack however, was certainly worth the price of admission (forget the fact that I paid $0).

Perhaps take a listen to "Outlands" and "End of Line", and "Solar Sailer" from this playlist:

Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy (OST) & Bonus Tracks by SeekSickSound

2010 saw some exceptional soundtracks, Tron: Legacy, Inception, and The Social Network. Could we be entering a renaissance for film scores?

I look forward to seeing what else Daft Punk will come up with on future projects, which I'm sure they will be able to land thanks to the great work on Tron: Legacy.

Social Network vs. Facebook

My brother Jon sends me this link on Facebook fact vs. fiction from G4TV.

When praising the film, the first thing the talking head mentions is the great soundtrack.

There's much more to it than that though... I mean, a Hollywood film that's largely dramatized and practically fictional? Pfft.

Time to remix Phoenix

The band takes the NIN/Radiohead route and releases the multitracks from their latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

And speaking of NIN, Trent Reznor has just announced the release of The Social Network soundtrack (aka Facebook movie), coming out next week. Looks like the Ghosts experiment worked and he got the gig he was after - scoring a major motion picture.

Machines do the work

Check out these two videos over at Synthtopia - Fatboy Slim remixing Raymond Scott's soundtrack to a film that appears to be an avant-garde ad for IBM. Classic stuff. The original film was directed by Jim Henson (!)... Tell me that's not him doing a bit of narration from around 3:56.

Impressions of the French Pavillion

Back in May, on a trip to Disney World, we visited Epcot's French Pavillion. One of the main attractions there is the film Impressions of France, which is shown on a massive screen, and features breathtaking shots of the cites and countryside in the nation.

Also of note is the exceptional soundtrack, with many well known French composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Satie. I was thinking about it today and hoped I could track down a few of the compositions... turns out that the entire soundtrack list for the film is on Wikipedia.

Here's a nice sample:


...aaaand after reading the comments for that clip, I just found out this was used in Twilight. I guess nothing is sacred after all. And the argument that 'at least these kids are listening to good music' holds as much weight as 'Harry Potter will get kids to read more'... it's not the act of listening or reading that's appealing, it's the content.

Kinda reminds me of when people hear a song and don't realize it's a cover... then you try to explain to them that someone else wrote the song. They listen to it... then decide that the version they heard first is superior. Then I sigh. Ah well.

Wait... what? House uses Massive Attack for its theme song?

I may work in television, but it took me a long time to learn that the theme song for the popular television medical mystery drama House is a song from Massive Attack's excellent Mezzanine album, titled "Teardrop". Not sure if I get why it's relevant to the show, maybe the producers just thought it sounded good. Anyway, I'm sure the band doesn't mind, as that one deal can probably allow them to focus on music and not worry too much about selling records, which is definitely a good thing.

Here's a clip of the track that's garnered over three million views, and isn't even an official video... pretty rad. I'm surprised this one hasn't been taken down, but I guess the label people dig it. Neat concept though:

Music of Shutter Island

Good post from Angry Robot about tunes on the Shutter Island soundtrack, which includes a pretty decent mashup, actually.

The movie is worth seeing as well, if you like Scorcese or thrillers... or both.