Shadows of the Night Falling Silently (Dark Shadows - Soundtrack)

Member Name: berlioz II

Product:	Dark Shadows - Soundtrack
Date:	31/05/09 (56 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The most complete library of music from the cult TV series

Disadvantages: An archival release that isn't really one for simple pleasurable listening

Incoming message: Jani is about to review something again that 99% of the people reading it won't care two ounces about. By definition, this would be a futile exercise, but he doesn't seem to care. What a self-indulgent b*******! Well, maybe the 1% will find something to like. Transmission ends... now.


Well, thank you so very much, Computer...Your opinion has been noted and summarily disregarded! Stupid bucket of wires and fans and... plastic casing...

Anyway, I suppose my able assistant has a point and if you're a member on this site and are reading this, I can pretty much guarantee that I'm the only one of us who actually owns and will ever own The Complete Dark Shadows Soundtrack Music Collection. Why? Because this is as overtly fan-crazy as you can get when it comes to material of this ilk.

So what is this collection I hear you ask? Well, to put it succinctly, it is nearly eight hours of spooky ghost music from the supernatural soap Dark Shadows that ran from 1966 to 1971, busting open a niche for unique daytime drama as we followed the rich Collins family of Collinsport, Maine living in their gothic mansion and facing just about every kind of possible supernatural event from vampires, ghosts, werewolves, time travel, and I ching, to possession, artificial Frankensteins, witches, a phoenix, paintings coming to life, and even a little roundabout way to hell once... and that's just numerating a few. It was campy and at times humorous, where each episode was filmed basically live in that the first take was always going to be the only take, and the actors had to soldier on even if they forgot their lines or some other technical problems came in the way, such as the film crew getting into the shot with them, or doors that refused to close, or those pesky flies buzzing around the set and landing on peoples' faces... Yet the series managed to at the same time be extremely intriguing and absorbing, with wonderful characters and actors playing them, often spooky stories, and it certainly offered something different from your basic "boohoo, I love you, but that guy loves me instead, and I don't know what to do" contemporary soap operas. In a way, the series was kind of like Passions, only not focusing really on love triangles and the like, but just good ol' fashioned ghost mayhem.

Personally I was taken in completely by the series. Sure it wasn't technically the best ever, but a lot of the things that took place in the series were so very compelling that it was easy to forget the mistakes, and continuity errors, and cheap sets, and the equally fake special effects. And most certainly if there was one thing that really helped immensely to set the tone to the series was by far the creepy and haunting music of Robert Cobert (wonder if his parents thought it'd be a funny joke to have a child with a riming name only to end up kicking themselves when the joke got old...). Cobert's music was all orchestral - unusual for the time when most soap accompaniment was on organ solos - and he also incorporated some early synthesisers to the mix to add sounds you'd otherwise not get traditionally. Throughout the five years of the series run, Cobert would write a large library of music that could be used when ever needed, and through a lot of repeats would slowly get engrained in the memories of the fans. Well, at least to mine.

So, getting back to the point "why wouldn't you buy this" question. Well, are you seriously going to pay over £80 for a set of TV music for a series you may not even know of? And even if you do, are you that die-hard to get eight hours of music written and recorded in the 1960s for a campy TV series? Well, yes I know I did, but I could not possibly pass up on this, now could I? And I got a decent discount, too. The best qualities you can have if you are titillated about this release is that 1) you're a film/TV music fan, and 2) you are a fan of Dark Shadows. Me being both made this a no-brainer, and certainly you get value for your money, but otherwise you'd probably be better off buying cheese or something. Or paper for the... printer...

However, if you're still reading this, well let's get down to it then! Here's a track by track review of what's in this box, going through every piece of music. I mean, it's only 490 tracks, so no biggie right? Right? ...right...? No? You... you don't want that? Bah! You people are always so fickle! Very well, I won't do a track by track then... jeez!

Computer: Dumb human.

Shut up!

Anyway! If you are thinking on getting this regardless, considering the above, then Power of Grayskull to you. Now let's make one thing very clear here. This is not a release that treats you to a pleasant listening experience. Throughout the eight CDs you will get every ounce of music written and collected for this TV series. What this means is you get every stinger, every atmospheric mood setter track, every possible variation and mix on everything that Cobert did for the series, no matter how small the differences. This is purely an archival release, its purpose to preserve this music for posterity before the master tapes deteriorate into uselessness. It is a treasure trove for the fan or the musicologist wanting to study the music or the composition methods of TV scoring. And as such this is as good as you can get. By not leaving anything out, you have a complete library of Dark Shadows music so that you'll never ever need another Dark Shadows music release ever. And what's best, it has all been remastered to perfection. All the music is in mono (you seriously weren't expecting stereo were you?), but it is clean, crisp and sounds as pristine as when it was recorded, which is certainly a wonderful thing considering the conditions and time of the recording (1960s TV). So certainly you don't have to be settled with scratchy archival sound by any means, and it certainly shows that you're not putting your money on whatever haphazard botch job.

As you might expect (or not), the tracks are all labelled very professionally and technically. So you do get a lot of "Cue 20: Wall to Wall Neutral - Happy in Feeling", "Cue 51: Descending Poignant Wall to Wall Neutral", "Cue 61: Mystery, Ascending Pyramidic to Chords", etc... In fact, only very few of the tracks actually have anything that resembles really a "name", with only a few tracks being blessed with a little descriptive nickname like "Woodwind Worries", "Oh, Oh", "I've Been Bitten", and the like. The music itself is almost across the board haunting and creepy and ghostly, with a dose of some more neutral background pieces for conversations of the non-ghostly kind. All of this is brilliant for background mood setting, but because its main purpose was that the music could be reused from episode to episode editorially, very little is specifically descriptive of any one particular scene, and indeed Cobert was charged in creating a pre-existing library of music for use to which he added a piece here and a piece there when ever something new was required. However, this is not to say that the music doesn't offer any specific themes for its protagonists as there indeed is some music specifically linked to certain characters either through design or simply through consequence of application.

The most notable such themes come from various sources. First we have Josette's theme (I'm not going to bother telling you who these people are for complexity reasons), whose music is heard on a music box Barnabas gave to her. It is a very cute little jingle that is soft and feminine... and maybe a touch of GHOSTLY!!! Ha! Scared you didn't I? ...Oh, shut up... The original main protagonist Victoria Winters gets her own "Vicky's Theme" (more through association than design) which is a fairly dissonant woodwind dirge, straddling between softness and uneasiness much because of its very dissonant nature. Titled as "Barnabas Music", the music associated with the venerable vampire Barnabas Collins is suitably dark and slow, meandering in the low ranges of the basses and cellos like Dracula in his rose garden. In the second time travel arc to 1897 (and its preceding possession arc), we are introduced to "Quentin's Theme", an old phonograph recording for violin and piano that is profusely used by Quentin Collins (both alive and dead). It incidentally remains the most popular piece of music to have ever originated from daytime TV, staying high on the charts for weeks on end (funny considering it's a decidedly old-fashioned piece made to sound like something coming out of the 1890s!).

The song for Pansy Faye is pure vaudeville, and makes you want to put a foot in front of the other and swirl. Okay, not really, but its still fun to do. The popular "Ode to Angelique" originally appeared during the parallel time arc and became kind of like an Angelique theme over the older theremin based wailing ghostly theme, this one being considerably more skippety skoo than woo-ooo-ooo-ooo. Then we have the "Dead of the Night" theme for the eye-bulging hypnotist head that is crashingly weird really. Very much like horror music when you first see the murdered running after you. And of course one can't forget the very romantic music for Joanna from the final arc of the series, that at times sounds almost Rachmaninovian and just as beautiful. And certainly one can not forget the haunting Main Title theme that sets the tone of the series wonderfully with its theremin sounds (though incidentally it was actually performed by a Yamaha synthesiser). This title theme is certainly the epitome of what ghost music is like, and Cobert hit the ball straight out of the park and straight into somebody's soup where it mixes those little alphabet noodles around.

But as with any such collection of music, the archival benefits obviously tax the actual listening experience part very badly. This is not a set you just pick out for some nice little listening on the side, and as an archival edition you are continuously hampered by tens of short tracks, some not lasting for more than a few seconds at a time, such as the various stingers and commercial break curtains. Some of the tracks aren't even unique and are actually just shorter edits of longer tracks. Barely nothing runs for more than three minutes and many tracks feature little mixing differences or little tweaks in orchestration which can lead up to even five or six different versions of essentially the same piece of music. In the latter stages of the series Cobert also started integrating certain percussive effects into the music to make them more "spooky" and which are more or less just random rattles, shakes and plings overlaid existing tracks, also having a tendency to go up to several versions where those bonks are just placed in slightly different places, but sounds just the same regardless. This can go to the extremes of having like 23 versions of "London Bridge" on disc 6, which can easily get on the nerves of even the more patient fellow. And who really wants to listen to "Quentin's Theme" or "Pansy's Song" mangled through distortion filters and tape-shakers? Not me at least. Or when "Pansy's Song" is overlaid "2 Stings to Alto Flute - After 45 sec. Weird String Movement on Top - Sad Tension", it just doesn't sound very listenable as the two don't mix in any way at all.

However, there are a few breaks to the generally spooky ghost music through the discs, though they are not numerous. The Blue Whale fisherman bar has a jukebox, and Cobert wrote some undeniably silly little "popular" dance tunes to be heard in the background, these being all centred on Disc 2. Dated, but funky fun. There's also a collection of percussion rhythms on Disc 5 that go through a gamut of different percussive bits, one track going on a full nine minutes. Disc 8 is only about 15 minutes long and contains various alternates of the main title theme and some outtakes of "Ode to Angelique" where the pianist is continuously messing up. We even get the vocal version of Pansy's theme on Disc 7, called "I Wanna Dance With You" as performed by the actors David Selby and Nancy Barrett in the best cheesy tradition. And, of course, Disc 6 also includes the popular, "best-selling" vocal version of Quentin's Theme called "Shadows of the Night", which is actually rather nice, and is again recited by Quentin himself, David Selby. To complement the box, the liner notes are splashed across the discs with a lengthy interview with the composer himself, talking on his inspirations, the work he did, how he ended up becoming a composer, etc. This is all very insightful and makes for a very nice bonus to the fans (+ of course the pictures). All discs are packed in four, double-sided jewel cases housed in a cardboard box and the whole thing looks good, if slightly cheap thanks mostly to the rather odd font and picture frames.

So, I guess that's about it. This is a real treat for the fans, but like I said, it most likely will only appeal to (dumb) fans (like Jani) who (don't go out the house)... STOP INTERFERING! ...Dumb computer...

...Deep breaths... Its major attraction is the archival value, not the listening value. If you want a listening experience, then you better make a CD-R or something... which is exactly what I did, compiling my favourite tracks on a single disc for listening purposes and it's great. Or then you may try to hunt down one of those single disc releases that have been out for some time, but personally those seem to be a bit of a mixed bag in terms of original and re-recorded content. With the box at least you can be sure you get all you want. So, if you have an urge to buy it, knock yourself out. Just be sure you know what you're getting: a full library of music with every bit and bob you can ever want, designed as a storage collection, not a listening experience. And it is most likely going to be expensive, too.


RECOMMENDED USAGE: Halloween parties as background listening, and at drug raves for the added surreal element. By the time you reach the end of the eight hours, you'll be so wasted that you'll want to start all over again.

And you're not getting a track list. Find it yourself.


...I'm not getting a crown for this review, am I?

© berlioz, 2009 (steal any of this and I'll go Pompeii on you!)

Summary: Eight hours of creepy and ghostly music.