If the 9-year-old in your life hasn't alerted you already, consider this your heads up: Not since Hilary Duff has Disney delivered the masses a tween sensation as hot as the double-life-leading Miss Hannah Montana. More important for speaker-blowing second- to seventh-graders and the parents forced to buy them CDs, though, no small-screen sensation transcends the tube more convincingly. Part party ...
James Bond themes tend to be just as memorable as their movie counterparts and, to a certain extent, just as time sensitive. While many fans can remember the Monty Norman Orchestra's steamy Dr. No theme or Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger," how many of us remember Rita Coolidge's dated "All Time High" from Octopussy or A-Ha's theme from The Living Daylights? Yes, just as we all have our ...
Ry Cooder's name has helped bring attention to this session, but it's the veteran Cuban son musicians who make this album really special. Reminiscent of Ellington in its scope and sense of hushed romanticism, Buena Vista Social Club is that rare meld of quietude and intensity; while the players sound laid-back, they're putting forth very alive music, a reminder that aging doesn't mean ...
Back in the Golden Age of the Hollywood epic, composer Miklós Rózsa lavished much scholarly research on his scores for Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961) and others, gracing those movies with music that had as its wellspring authentic (or at least authentic-sounding) melodies from the period. For Ridley Scott's revival of the Roman epic, Gladiator, Hans ...
If film and music fans sometimes wonder why soundtracks are often little more than pastiches of past pop hits and chart flavors of the moment, it's largely due to the blockbuster success of releases like this collection from 1987's surprise Patrick Swayze/Jennifer Grey romantic hit. The film's retro-romantic concerns came shrewdly wrapped in a (largely manufactured) dance craze conceit tailor-made ...
Such is the savvy and ingenuity of the team behind Love Actually, the accompanying soundtrack knows its target demographic and seizes it by the throat. Dido, Norah Jones and Gabrielle in addition to a latter-day makeover of the all-woman anthem "Jump" performed here by Girls Aloud, make this a shrewdly chosen body of great music. In addition to this, who can forget Billy Mack's hark back to ...