Cordavision Music Reviews

If you want to see my *spoiler-free* thoughts on The Batman , click right here ! If there were any movie releasing this year, I’d have to cover the score for this one. For those that don’t know, The Batman is a movie I’ve been excited for on the level of Spider-Man: No Way Home . By the time this review releases, I will have seen the movie itself and will most likely have loved it. Now, though, we focus on what surely will be a highlight from the movie. I’ve covered Michael Giacchino’s work before, specifically his score for No Way Home , and ever since the middle of the pandemic, the four notes that he created for Matt Reeves’s new film has been an earworm. Two years after the first trailer for the film, we finally have Giacchino’s work for The Batman . Let’s get into my thoughts on it. Giacchino has already created an amazing theme for both Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, but they were due for something new like this. Batman isn’t. Even if Hans Zimmer’s score is known by most, Danny ...

You know, we might as well close out the year with an Alchemist film score. Why not? As I said above, this just came out of nowhere for me. The Alchemist, arguably one of the most prolific producers in music right now, has been on an insane hot streak in 2021 alone. Only one week after his second album with Boldy James this year, he released his first film score to accompany Jason Goldwatch’s short film of the same name, Cycles . Let's get into my thoughts of Alc’s score. I actually really enjoy how unsettling this album is. I watched the short film that this score is a part of, and it’s pretty surreal. The score reminds me a lot of the video game Subnautica’s score, in a very weird way. I don’t know how I made those connections, and I honestly can’t even provide a good example from the game to bolster that point, but it just reminds me of it. The film itself seems like a cult initiation, and Alc’s score seems fit to do that. Yes, it’s a shorter review because it’s a shorter album,...

If you want to see my spoiler-free review of the movie Candyman , click right here ! Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has been working under the Lichens name since 2004, but this is the first I had heard of him. After doing some research, I had found that he had worked with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson and the composer for Joker’s score, Hildur Guðnadóttir on an entire album. After seeing what I think is one of the best horror movies of 2021, Nia DaCosta’s brilliant Candyman sequel, I just had to review Lowe’s score. Granted, I saw the movie when it first released and haven’t seen it yet, but right when I saw the menacing cover art for it, I was entranced (heh). So, let’s get into Lowe’s Candyman score. Like another score this year, Jonny Greenwood’s contributions to Spencer , Lowe does a masterful job at personifying absolute dread throughout the album. Hints of original composer Philip Glass’s material are here too, but they’re typically drowned by noise in spine-chilling fashion. In the film...

If you want to see my spoiler-free review of the movie The Matrix Resurrections , click right here ! Okay, I’ve never been that giant of a Matrix fan. My thoughts above will showcase my thoughts on Resurrections on its own, but it never really clicked with me as a franchise. The music, however, really has. The first three films were scored by Don Davis and are beloved by fans, myself included. However, he didn’t return for this. Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer ended up scoring this instead. While Klimek is a newcomer to the Lana Wachowski camp, Tykwer has been working with Wachowski since the early 2000s. So, let’s not waste any more time and get into the score for The Matrix Resurrections . Look, I have to admit. Hearing the opening chime in high quality was exciting, Matrix fan or not. Although, it does seem pretty odd why Don Davis wasn’t asked back, similar to why Laurence Fishburne wasn’t asked back to be in the movie itself. They were both available, so why not? I will say that Kli...

If you want to see my spoiler-free review of the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home , click right here ! Really? At this point, was I not going to cover this? Either way, Michael Giacchino has been one of the most in-demand film composers working right now. He’s had his handprints on nearly every modern franchise still going today like Star Wars , Mission: Impossible , Jurassic Park , Planet of the Apes , and Star Trek , along with Pixar’s most memorable movies like Up and The Incredibles . Most of all, he’s been very involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even composing the fanfare that has opened every installment since 2016’s Doctor Strange , which he composed as well. Hell, the bits of his upcoming score for The Batman is already memorable. Giacchino has composed the other Spider-Man films in the MCU, so let’s just say he has the experience. Let’s not waste any more time and get into the score for No Way Home . A constant theme in all of Giacchino’s scores is that the titles are...

I got a couple links for you. So, click here for my review of the movie Dune , and click here for my review of Hans Zimmer’s official score . If you haven’t watched my review of the Dune movie, I’ll just keep it at this: It’s my favorite movie of the year so far. It’s incredible, and since the sequel isn’t confirmed at the time of me writing this, please go support it any way you can. Either way, watch it, it’s great. Behind the scenes, though, one of the most intriguing things is happening right now. There’s an art book called The Art and Soul of Dune available to buy, and since composer Hans Zimmer is such a huge fan of the Dune series, he’s decided to create three separate scores for the new movie. The first was based on concept art sketches he got, called The Dune Sketchbook , the second is the one you’ll hear in the movie when you watch it, and the third and final is the score to the official art book. Let’s get into the companion music for The Art and Soul of Dune . Now, this ...

Alright, I’m reviewing the score of a movie that hasn’t even been released yet. This is my redemption arc. If this is successful, I’ll be in the upper echelon. I gotta admit, I’ve never heard of a concept like this. Legendary composer Hans Zimmer is known for his pretty great track record for his film scores. His work in film has been absolutely stunning, and this is a brand new experiment for him. Denis Villeneuve’s new film, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune , has been in the works for a while now, and it has a massive cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem all star in it. When I heard that Zimmer was going to compose the score, I was so excited. Along with that, word got out that Zimmer had made not one, not two, but three separate scores for the movie. The first ...

(A/N: I’m already apologizing about all the Skylanders jokes I make in this.) If you wanna know my thoughts on the movie itself, here’s my review of that: https://youtu.be/Wf9yeXj1Pwk Some movies didn’t come out last year. It sucked, but we had to understandably wait for some of the bigger films set to release in 2020. Finally, over a year after it was supposed to, the newest Marvel film Black Widow released last week to critical acclaim and box office success. Being connected to the franchise, both personally and quite literally as an actor, I kind of feel obliged for pop culture mediums to collide so I could take a look at the score for the Cate Shortland film. This score’s been composed by Lorne Balfe, who’s done legendary scores like Megamind and every single game in the Skylanders franchise. Outside of that, he scored the latest Mission: Impossible movie, the His Dark Materials series, and even the new sci-fi/action film The Tomorrow War . How did his work for Marvel go? Let’...

CLASSIC ALBUM #2: THESE ALBUMS ARE NOT RANKED OR SCORED BECAUSE THEY’RE, WELL, CLASSIC. Something I did this summer was binge the original run of the legendary Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and its finale movie, The End of Evangelion . It really has been a pretty mind-blowing series, and with the four Rebuild films coming to the U.S. later this month, I decided I somehow had to get some of its music onto here. I’ve thought about reviewing the recent compilation, Evangelion Finally , which is essentially a greatest hits album, but the more I’ve thought about it, The End of Evangelion ’s score/soundtrack really deserves some praise and recognition. They might be the same in this case, but who cares, this is my website. Let’s get into what makes Shiro Sagisu’s score/soundtrack to The End of Evangelion a classic album. Let me just come out on record that this soundtrack has one of my favorite classical pieces of all time. It’s Sagisu’s rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’...

LET FLYLO DO THE BLADE  SCORE PLEASE. I support anything Flying Lotus is involved in. He’s one of my favorite producers of all time, he’s been involved in and has made some of my favorite albums of all time, and he’s really influenced my taste in music. First, let’s give a little context to this project right here. In 2018, Netflix announced that Studio MAPPA, a Japanese animation company behind popular anime like Yuri!!! on Ice , the final season of Attack on Titan , and the upcoming adaptation of popular manga Chainsaw Man , is creating a miniseries for the platform called Yasuke , a story about recorded history’s first black samurai serving under Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga. While there are slightly more fantastical elements in the miniseries, the core story is still there. LaKeith Stanfield voices Yasuke and executive produced the series along with Flying Lotus himself. Flying Lotus also did the score for this project, which is being considered his seventh studio album. Along...

Wow, the second film score I reviewed. Pretty awesome. Should this review come with a disclaimer? I actually haven’t seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League yet. I’ve seen some viral clips of it and I definitely plan on seeing it in the future. I’ve enjoyed a good amount of Tom Holkenborg’s score work, and if you don’t recognize his real name, just look up Junkie XL and see his work. I personally think his work on Batman v. Superman with Hans Zimmer is some of the most underappreciated pieces of music in the past five years. Now, after the fabled Snyder Cut debuted on HBO Max last week, Holkenborg released his score for the cut, which was entirely reworked from the original version. Let’s get into this behemoth. Is it odd to classify this as ‘neoclassical darkwave?’ The music nerd in me kinda jumped out because I was listening to Lingua Ignota while writing this, and I found some similarities when it comes to the sonic tone of this. Some elements from Snyder’s previous DCEU films are here, l...

I’m writing this in the future, and I’m sending it back in time to myself to publish on Thursday. My past self hasn’t even heard the album yet. Wish him luck while he’s listening to it. This is a bit of a first for me. For the ones that don’t know, I’m currently majoring in film in college, and that covers all of the bases. So, I figured, while I’m at it, I might as well review my first film score. You’d think that I’d go for more of a classic soundtrack, maybe a more well-known composer, but Ludwig Göransson has made a very unconventional score for the film TENET . Christopher Nolan’s go-to composer, Hans Zimmer, was busy with scoring the new Dune film, so now, we have a pretty unorthodox film score here. Here are my thoughts! It’s worth noting that Ludwig Göransson has been on an insane run. After working with Childish Gambino on nearly every one of his albums, he’s been making film scores for quite a bit. He first gained recognition for his work on Ryan Coogler’s Rocky sequel, Cree...