Cordavision Music Reviews

If you wanna know my thoughts on the movie itself, click here ! If you anything about director Baz Luhrmann, he’s always used music in his movies in relatively weird ways, whether you like it or not. A prominent example is his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , which has heavy involvement from Jay-Z, serving as an executive producer for the film and its soundtrack. Oddly enough, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a movie recently is Tobey Maguire narrating over “No Church in the Wild” from Watch the Throne . We now have a similar soundtrack for Luhrmann’s latest film, a biopic of music icon Elvis Presley. The movie’s fantastic, but since the music is so tied to it, it’s gotta be judged on its own. Let’s see how the ELVIS soundtrack does. There are a few distinct categories for the tracks: 1. Recordings of Elvis repurposed for the movie, 2. Austin Butler actually singing Elvis songs taken from the movie, and 3. Existing Elvis tracks being remixed by artist...

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...

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 ...

Well, well. My first video game OST. Let’s see how this goes… Okay, this is a brand new world for me. I don’t know that much about video game music, but since my friend made a massive playlist of video game music on YouTube and sent it to me, I decided to try and give my shot at a review of a video game OST. Might as well be something big, right? So, Undertale creator and composer Toby Fox has been working on the kinda-sorta sequel to that game, Deltarune . It’s divided up into chapters, and this is the original score to the second chapter of the game. That’s really all I got as the intro. Let’s get into the score for Deltarune Chapter 2 . Compared to the Undertale OST, this is much shorter. Apparently, 46 songs and 50 minutes is short for a soundtrack like this. I mean, I can safely say that I do like this more than the Undertale soundtrack, mainly because I just think that this would just be that soundtrack but cutting out all of the fat. I guess the biggest problem I have with th...

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 ...

If you wanna watch my review of the movie, click this link ! You know how Top Dawg Entertainment did a soundtrack to Black Panther and it was a massive hit? Well, Marvel is seeing if lightning can strike twice with their newest film (and one of their best yet), Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings . This time around, Marvel has tapped 88Rising, a label that has many Asian American and Asian artists. They have a good lineup like Rich Brian, NIKI, Warren Hue, and the Higher Brothers, but the label’s biggest star, Joji, is oddly absent from this album. There are also the non-label artists here and a star-studded lineup from Swae Lee, Jhene Aiko, 21 Savage, Anderson .Paak, Guapdad 4000, Earthgang, Rick Ross, DJ Snake, and Saweetie. Even the lead actor of the film, Simu Liu, has an appearance and a song on his own. So, is this album even worth listening to? Does my MCU bias get the best of me? Let’s get into it and find out. Alright, this is gonna be a shorter review for a couple reas...

(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’...

At least the art’s pretty cool, I like all the colors. Well, uh, I believe this is the first new soundtrack I’ve reviewed, and I’ll keep it straightforward here. F9 is the newest film in the Fast and Furious franchise, and each film in the series has a soundtrack like this. I’m not overly excited about this, or most movie soundtracks in this vein in general, but I always tend to look at it as some fun collaborations that may or may not happen outside of it. This time around, we got some decent names on here. Don Toliver, Lil Durk, Latto, Skepta, Pop Smoke, A$AP Rocky, Juicy J, Project Pat, Offset, Trippie Redd, Kevin Gates, King Von, Ty Dolla Sign, Jack Harlow, 24kGoldn, Amenazzy, Farruko, Myke Towers, Rochy RD, Liam H, René LaVice Re-Amp, The Prodigy, RZA, Justin Quiles, Dalex, Konshens, Lil Tecca, Anitta, Polo G, Teejay3k, Good Gas, JP the Wavy, NLE Choppa, Rico Nasty, Jarina De Marco, Murci, Sean Paul, and Dixson Waz are all here. Is anything from the F9 soundtrack worth listenin...

Something feels… off. Alright, there’s gonna have to be a disclaimer with this one: I haven’t seen Inside . Oddly enough, I might be one of the only people in my age range that doesn’t have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Roku, or whatever fits under that category. Except for Disney+, we MCU fans have been eating recently. Why do I say this? Well, again in my age range, Bo Burnham is a bit of an icon. He started on YouTube and jumped to stand-up comedy, where he only grew. After a bout with anxiety, he disappeared from live performances for a while. In that time, he wrote and directed a fantastic movie called Eighth Grade , directed Chris Rock’s most recent stand-up special, and starred in a critically acclaimed movie, Promising Young Woman . Now, he returns to what made him a superstar with Inside , a Netflix special that was created entirely by Burnham during the beginning of the pandemic. Everything was done by him: writing, direction, lighting, cinematography, editing, etc. All of it....

Slaughter Gang doing a horror movie soundtrack is so perfect, it’s unbelievable it hasn’t happened sooner. For those that don’t know, I’m a bit of a film buff. Since I’m fully vaccinated and theaters are starting to open back up where I live, I’ve been to the theaters a little more. I saw Mortal Kombat and I thought it was just okay, and at the time of me writing this, I’m actually going to see Army of the Dead tonight. A few days ago, I also saw Spiral , the new SAW film with Chris Rock. Once it came out that 21 Savage is executive producing a soundtrack to the film, my excitement for the movie just went through the roof. Admittedly, I was disappointed to see that it was just an EP, but maybe this could mean that it’s the best of the best. Not only is 21 Savage heavily involved, his group Slaughter Gang have a posse track too. How did this little side-project for 21 go? Let’s find out. Now, let me just come right out of the gate and say that this is no Black Panther soundtrack. It...

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...

 

 

Minecraft is one of the most popular and iconic video games of all time. This week, Minecraft Dungeons , the first new game in the franchise made by the original developers, Mojang Studios, released. I personally haven’t played it yet, but I’ve heard great things from my friends that have it. So, I decided to take it back a couple years to the first volume of the Minecraft soundtrack, titled Volume Alpha . Like the Beta album and upcoming untitled third (!!!) album, Alpha was created by electronic producer Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. He has made other music under the C418 moniker, but his work for Minecraft is his highest-profile work by far. So, how does Minecraft ’s music affect the game? Is Alpha any good? Let’s see… Alpha is the first volume in the Minecraft soundtrack, and it could be considered an ambient album. Most of it sets a mood or an atmosphere. None of it is really intense or action-oriented, just background music to your gameplay. Alpha tells the stor...