By Tyler Bates

Watertower Music, out now

Tyler Bates returns to deliver another slice of orchestral accompaniment to our favourite bunch of galactic rogues. Difficult second album or masterpiece?

I’m a huge fan of the score to the first Guardians of the Galaxy. From the slow, mournful opening bars of Morag to the bombastic beats of Guardians United, via the haunting melodies of We All Got Dead People, it’s an epic piece of work with such range and depth that I still hear it used in TV shows and as ambient music in all sorts of places. That said, much like the Awesome Mix Vol. 2, this album had a lot to live up to.

The first thing to note is that this album is substantially shorter than the first, despite accompanying a longer movie. The original score ran to 29 tracks and 65 minutes for a 2 hour movie. This clocks in at a slimline 19 tracks and 44 minutes for a nearly 2 and a half hour movie.

Size isn’t everything of course, but this arguable paucity is then compounded by another feature of this album – familiarity. The original Guardians theme is a strong one, and its riff appeared multiple times throughout the first score. Here, we start out with it, slightly re-worked but unmistakeable, before plunging into a gentler melody reminiscent of the very end of the first movie. In a way, it serves musically to emphasise the temporal closeness of the two films in-universe – it’s a musical mirror, linking the closing scenes of the last film with the opening of this.

However, that familiarity then branches out in other ways. The Mantis Touch (track 3) is reminiscent of themes from Murray Gold’s music for Matt Smith’s first series as the Doctor; other influences include Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings and even the occasional echo of Ramin Djawadi’s unmistakeable style in there.

The nice thing is that this soundtrack is one of those pitched to perfection in terms of enhancing the story without ever interfering with it. Never at any point in watching the movie did the soundtrack feel intrusive or at odds with the action on screen. There are moments listening to this soundtrack where the scene they accompanied instantly springs to life in your minds eye – Dad being a notable example. Unfortunately so many other parts are recycled from the first film or feel overly familiar from other sources, that different and unrelated images are conjured instead. This has the tendency of making the whole thing feel a little disjointed, as you skip mentally from an image of the first film to one of the second via entirely unrelated properties.

It all adds up to make the soundtrack feel schizophrenic in a way that its predecessor didn’t, and makes this album feel like a poor relation of the first, in a way that ironically, its accompanying movie did not. Nothing here is bad – the soaring chords, grand orchestral feel and epic voice choirs are all still present – it all just feels a little too disjointed to have the same impact as the first time around.

Verdict: Maybe not the follow up that fans of the first movie’s score may have hoped for. It isn’t bad, by any means, but it lacks its own identity, playing safe and suffering as a result. 6/10

Greg D. Smith