Featuring the very best of close to 70 years of Western music from both the cinema and TV screen, the set includes music from the greatest screen composers such as Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Dimitri Tiomkin, Maurice Jarre and many more. Represented here are many iconic and easily recognisable themes from spaghetti westerns (A Fistful Of Dollars), modern-day (Brokeback Mountain), TV (The Lone Ranger) and epic (The Alamo)...

100 Greatest Westerns is a six CD collection of covers of the most well known (and plenty of obscure) Western themes. As we only received 10 tracks out of the 100 to listen to, this review can only comment on the flavour of the collection from the tracks included.

None appear to be the original recordings and the result is a bit of a mixed bag. Some tracks are poor versions of the original whilst others are better produced. For example, the theme for Unforgiven is crisper and the guitar playing more polished than the original track on the official soundtrack album. However, whilst this version sounds cleaner (on the original you could hear the sound of the fingers moving on the guitar fretboard) it also lacks any emotion or feeling behind the playing.

The biggest problem with this collection is that most people, if asked, would find it hard to think of more than about 20 western themes (let alone truly memorable ones) so 100 sort of stretches the idea to breaking point. Looking through the list of the tracks included there were numerous movie's I'd never heard of.

On the whole, for me personally, this sort of collection only serves to introduce me to a composers work. From this I'd probably go on to buy a number of albums from the original recordings. For example I may decide that I enjoyed Gustavo Santoalalla's theme to Brokeback Mountain so much that I'd seek out the original recording. But as a collection, it's not something I'd really listen to.

Still, the price is cheap enough and I'm sure fans of Westerns will probably find something of merit here.

4

Darren Rea