Set It Off Soundtrack

June Soundtrack Picks

What is it?: When Film Score Monthly ventures into the golden age of soundtracks, it’s usually for likes of Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, composers who underscored manly heroes with no time to break into song, let alone dance. Yet few leading men in the studio halcyon of Hollywood carried the grace of Fred Astaire, who often was busier practicing fancy footwork than exercising his equally glorious voice. That let a number of Astaire’s movies play only music during his routines, few with more beauty than THE BELLE OF NEW YORK, the release of this 1952 soundtrack a rare, and welcome excursion for FSM into MGM musical territory. Why should you buy it?: MGM was the studio to beat when it came to upbeat production gloss, its numbers, sets and songs all the height of class. These confections transported audiences into a melodic fantasy land- all with the kind of fun, instantly memorable rhyming lyrics that got wonderfully stuck in one’s head. For a BELLE that sees Astaire’s ne’er do well playboy romancing an upstanding social worker in turn-of-the-century NYC, the music and lyricist duet of Harry Warren (“Lullaby of Broadway”) and Johnny Mercer (“Moon River”) conjured any number of charming toe-tappers, from the jaunty “Bachelor Dinner Song” to the playfully romantic “Baby Doll.” With just as much instrumental goodness as noteworthy tunes, BELLE OF NEW YORK works in the same way as any great non-musical underscore would, with sparkling orchestral performances all swinging around great thematic hooks. Here, it’s the kind of effervescent energy that causes grown people to dance in top hats and gowns, let alone the listener to sway.

Extra Special: The longer a dance sequence in a musical, the more chance for the “incidental” composers to strut their instrumental stuff. And while the prancing at the Currier and Ives Studio might not hit the lengths of Gershwin’s ballet from AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, this eight-minute album highlight is a real charmer, the song’s themes spinning about with every pirouette to expertly communicate the moves we’re not seeing Though it’s tag line might be an unforeseen double-entendre now, BELLE’s statement of being “MGM’s Gay Technicolor Musical!” is truly about the feeling of elation that great musical movie scoring can provide. What is it?: In the olden days of gargantuan Network miniseries, you’d often find historical stories like SHOGUN and ROOTS, whose production values and dramatic importance matched their big screen rivals. And few of those hours-long productions literally hit the towering heights of MASADA, ABC’s eight-hour, 25 million dollar epic about the legendary Jewish defenders of a mountaintop fortress, who ultimately chose death above the dishonor of Roman re-enslavement. And who better to tackle TV’s answer to SPARTACUS than a composer with legend-making symphonic sweep of Jerry Goldsmith?

Motion City Soundtrack To Play 4 Albums On 2 ... - Driven Far Off

, From start to finish, over the course of two nights in seven cities across the U.S. this August and September as part of the LG Ones to Watch tour. The band originally staged a similar performance of the then three albums in three nights in Chicago in 2009 and wanted to expand on the idea. This series of shows kicks off in Los Angeles, tickets are available on Friday, June 24th at livenation.com and locally at all Ticketmaster outlets, charge by phone, and tickemaster.com and all stops are…

August 19th & 20th House of Blues Los Angeles, CA Sept. 23rd & 24th St. Andrews Hall Detroit, MI

With the “4 Albums. 2 Nights. 7 Cities.” Tour, Motion City Soundtrack is taking a look back before they take a look forward with their fifth as-yet-untitled full-length studio album, which they recently recorded. Co-produced in their hometown of Minneapolis MN with producer Ed Ackerson at his Flowers Studio, the band took an organic approach to writing and recording the fifth record – from trading emails of song ideas, to locking themselves up in a rehearsal space woodshedding, to ultimately letting the ideas take shape and develop in the studio, song by song. The band is aiming for a Spring 2012 release with more details to come later.

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