The Muppets are coming! The Muppets are coming!

This holiday season the Muppets are back in the aptly titled movie, The Muppets. I am a second generation Muppet fan, I grew up on the Muppet Babies and my first cinematic exposure to Jim Henson’s genius was A Muppet Christmas Carol. So, for me, the classic era of the Muppets was discovered after the fact, meaning that most of this music I love but don’t have that same childhood bond with it that most fans possess. I like to feel this gives me a more objective look on this album.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney has released an album collection of classic songs, covered by hots bands of today. This actually happened twice for Nightmare and was splendid both times. The Muppets seemed like a natural next step for this trend with a new movie coming out and a stable of classic songs to choose from.

The collection isn’t as strong as the Nightmare release, but it does have some excellent versions of some of my personal favorite songs. This concept excels when you have a perfect blend of franchise and band, Marylyn Manson and Jack Skeleton are perfect together, unfortunately The Green Album doesn’t offer enough of that kind of perfect mix.

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PIXAR began taking the cinematic world by storm in 1995 with the original Toy Story. Part of what made that film so good was the songs and score by Randy Newman, who would go on to write music for the next three PIXAR films. For the fifth film by the studio, Randy’s cousin Thomas Newman stepped up to the plate for the Finding Nemo score. It began to look like the Newman scoring dynasty had the monopoly on Disney’s golden goose.

That was until PIXAR brought in an outsider to direct their sixth film, The Incredibles. Brad Bird brought on young TV composer Michael Giacchino to write the Bond-tastic music and the rest is history. Giacchino has since won an Oscar, and was nominated for another, for his work with PIXAR and now has come full circle with another international spy influenced score for Cars 2.

There are few things that are a certainty in life, and it is starting to become obvious that one of them is Giacchino’s PIXAR scores are some of the greatest pieces of music written in the last decade. Cars 2 is absolutely not an exception to that rule. The music is fun, exciting and catchy as all hell, I instantly find myself whistling and humming along with the tracks. I have only been with the CD for a week and I already count it as being as good as the best scores from last year.

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There is a fantastic new trend in the world of film music, more and more main stream artists are bringing their talents to feature films.  These artists are crafting music that serves to make the films better and stand on their own. Last year two of the best scores were written by Trent Reznor for The Social Network and Daft Punk for Tron Legacy, the line between film composing and main stream music is blending, and we all win for that.

The latest established act to venture into the cinematic music world is the Chemical Brothers. The long standing electronica duo lend their considerable expertise to the film Hanna, an action adventure movie that is high on adrenaline, and they deliver a score to match.

The music sounds very much like The Chemical Brothers would make. That is to say that we don’t get an orchestral hybrid, or their best impressions of John Williams. What we do get is music that pumps and flows with all the frenzy and furry expected from a standard Chemical Brothers album.

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