By Michael Giacchino

Disney, out now

 

The score for Jack Russell’s debut in the MCU.

That Michael Giacchino has scored Marvel’s first Halloween special on Disney+ isn’t nearly as surprising as the fact that he directed it as well.

Opening with a loud and rambunctious “Marvel Special Presentation” logo track, the TV Special and the score both claim to try to evoke the era of the 1940s Universal Monsters kind of pictures, but using 1970s Marvel comics characters and concepts, and modern effects. Musically, the efficacy of the attempts to evoke these nostalgic eras has rather mixed results. “Mane Title” gives us a fairly typical Giacchino fast and pounding theme with plenty of strings and swoops, but too fast and loud to catch the 40s vibe, and too much just a typical – if fun – Giacchino track to bring something new, even after it switches to the violin and female voice elements in its second half.

“Hall Of Shame” is a lower key pause flowing into “Ulysses’s Rant” but really the latter feels like the former just dropped an octave and switched voices; they may as well have been one track, and doubtless this is a product of squeezing the whole thing into an hour-long TV special. Once the album is past “There Can Be No Peace Without Tuba” we’re into a middle section run of plucked strings and percussion in a spate of signature Giacchino action stylings, played loud, and with less melody than we might expect from him, barring the occasional orchestration of scenes in which characters pause for breath, or the idea of lycanthropy being a curse to be suffered is addressed, such as in “Cryptic Messages” and the slow time-marking of “Tales From The Crypt.”

As so often, yet more Giacchino by the numbers happens, with the volume turned up, and while Giacchino is always good and enjoyable – so it’s not that any of this is bad, really – none of it is his best form, or anything noteworthy, and some of it is too loud for what it’s trying to be, particularly “Elsa’s TED Talk” and “Where’s Wolf” (sadly he resists the second line, with no “There Wolf”). And that’s how this album goes.

Until the last three tracks, which are proper on-form Giacchino giving the audience what they want. “Mane On Ends” goes full modern dance along with the main theme redone for bouncy electric violins with a faux-”gypsy”, Gogol Bordello kind of vibe, and then “End Shredits” gives us a great atmospheric and hypnotic Latin guitar take. The album is rounded off with a gorgeous and evocative piano  version of the “Mane Theme” and so it does all go out on a high.

It’s disappointing to a degree that we don’t hear a good 1940s Universal Monsters music pastiche, or even a 70s style 40s pastiche (which is what needs doing if they ever do a proper MCU movie for the character), but that’s probably more a flaw with the expectations created by the marketing than with the scoring itself.

Verdict: You’re always in safe hands with Giacchino and this is no exception, but for the most part it is workmanlike Giacchino, just doing the thing and not testing himself by fighting his best game to reach the highest musical peaks that he so often can. Not actually bad, but could have been much better, and the last three tracks, well worth waiting for, prove it. 7/10

David A McIntee