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Soundtrack Review


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The Meg
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

 

Composer: Harry Gregson-Williams
Label: WaterTower Music
watertower-music.com
RRP: £13.99
Release Date: 03 August 2018


Harry Gregson-Williams's score for The Meg is released through WaterTower Music. A deep-sea submersible has been attacked by a massive creature and now lies disabled at the bottom of the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean… with its crew trapped inside. With time running out, former deep-sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor is drawn out of self-imposed exile by a visionary Chinese oceanographer, Dr. Zhang, against the wishes of his daughter, Suyin, who thinks she can rescue the crew on her own. But it will take their combined efforts to save the crew from this seemingly unstoppable threat - a prehistoric 75-foot-long shark known as the Megalodon...

The score to The Meg is packed full of intricate and beautiful themes. The way I review albums, I always have four albums for review on my iPod at any one time. To start with I try to ignore the press information or which composer is involved. This allows me to come to every album, for the first play through, with no preconceptions of what I'm going to hear.

One of the first things I noted with this score was how much like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare the music was. So, it came as no surprise to discover that Harry Gregson-Williams composed the music for both. A lot of the times it's not so much themes that are similar, rather than the sound and the was the instruments/digital elements are used. This is most notable in the tracks 'Even the Score' and 'Shark Cage'. This to me was an added bonus, as I've always loved the soundtrack to Call of Duty 4.

Speaking about the score, Gregson-Williams said: “For The Meg, I set out to create a memorable recognizable sonic motif which follows the mystery of the great Megalodon - something robust in nature, which acted as a kind of warning call and instilled an immediate sense of fear and suspense when signaled. In search of this sound, I stumbled upon the conch as an instrument of musical focus. Its call was both distinctive and ancient, and I felt it offered a voice to the vast terror of a concealed underwater world."

The album contains 18 tracks (51 min, 05 sec) and it works incredibly well as a standalone album of intricate and multi-layered set pieces. I've been playing it on and off for a month now and I know I'll be returning to this again in the future. Another rich and varied album from Gregson-Williams.

9

Darren Rea

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