Get Carter
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Composer: Roy Budd and Paul Fishman
Lable (Release Year): Castle Music (2000) Availability: *** Rating: ***1/2 |
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Jazz pianist Roy Budd launched his 15 years film scoring career with Soldier Blue in 1970. Scored in 1971, Get Carter was only his second effort. Not much (none?) of his film work is available on CD until Cinephile (Castle Music) released many of them in 1999/2000. Get Carter and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger are among the releases. Since I have not heard of any of his scores before, I picked up Get Carter one day just out of curiosity. I was a little disappointed at my first listen. However, the soundtrack has grown on me since. Ger Carter is about Jack Carter's revenge for his dead brother. Roy Budd got only a small budget to score the action thriller. So he used only 4 other musicians to form a small group to perform the jazz/contemporary score. I was not disappointed about the score but rather the among of score presented on the CD (about 20 minutes) and the sound quality. The Main Theme is simple but extremely catchy. It has a great groofy bass rhythm, with a harpsichord and electric piano playing the melody. The main theme track has this annoying train sound effect which makes the music hard to be heard (and the sound quality is not that good at the first place). Fortunately, "Goodbye Carter!" is a reprise without the sound effect. The rest of the score does not stand out very much. Rather, the dialogues and songs by Roy Budd and Paul Fishman take the cake. Dialogues do not usually bother me and it is the same in this case. The songs actually hold the secret of whether you will enjoy this soundtrack or not. I like the soundtrack more each time I listen to it because I like the songs more each time. If you like the sound of the 60s, you probably would like these up-beat catchy songs. Whether one will like this soundtrack or not really depends. But it certainly is not an introductory Roy Budd score. If you like the 60s, give it a shot. | |
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