Milan Records releases Jupiter Legacy: Music from the Netflix Series. The album features score music written by Stephanie Economou for the superhero series based on the graphic novels by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely. Also featured throughout the score are experimental and choral-style vocals with lyrics sourced from Mark Millar’s original comic book text, which Economou translated into Latin. After nearly a century of keeping mankind safe, the world's first generation of superheroes must look to their children to continue the legacy. But tensions rise as the young superheroes, hungry to prove their worth, struggle to live up to their parents' legendary public reputations - and exacting personal standards...

Whatever your personal thoughts on Stephanie Economou's score for Jupiter's Legacy, you can't dispute the fact that she researched the project's source material and created a technically brilliant idea to take some of the comicbook's original text and translate it into Latin for some of the choral segments. Let's be perfectly honest, the choir could have been singing the text from a Mr. Man book, no one would know. But going the extra mile on this little detail makes you realise how committed to the project she was.

Of the soundtrack, Economou says: This first season of Jupiter’s Legacy offers staggering diversity in style, scale, emotion and time period, so I set out to create a musical landscape through which the score could expand and contract; kind of like a kaleidoscope. This afforded me the opportunity to explore varied stylistic sound worlds, from hybrid orchestral to industrial rock to contemporary electronic. At a critical moment in the season, I composed a large-scale choral piece using two of the main musical themes: the heroic ‘Union’ theme and what I call the ‘quest germ,’ which is a cyclical sequence of notes that emerges as our adventure unfolds ('Jupiter's Legacy'). For the chorale, I decided to source the lyrics from the original comic series by Mark Millar and translated the text into Latin. In order to make this pinnacle moment feel purposeful and impactful, I chose to unwind the choral idea by recording small modules of detuned, experimental vocals with the masterfully innovative singer, Ari Mason. My objective was to have these fragmented vocal elements serve as a kind of musical breadcrumb trail, slowly and abstractly weaving itself into the fibers of the score, culminating in a grand declaration of our main Union theme with full choir at the climax."

For the most part, the music is mainly your standard superhero score. Packed with epic, action packed set pieces there's little here to distinguish it from many other projects. But as with every other movie / TV show that has tended to revolve around superhero stories, I suppose if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

For what it is, it works incredibly well, and there are some impressive themes and set pieces. Just don't be expecting too much in the way of originality and you'll enjoy what's on offer here.

7

Darren Rea