A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Roland Emmerich seems curiously eclectic when it comes to choosing composers to score his massive budget B movies.  After plucking David Arnold out of obscurity for Stargate and using him again on his next two movies, Emmerich caused surprise when he chose film music megastar John Williams for the horrible The Patriot (a fairly undistinguished score by Williams standards).  Four years later, he's plucked another largely unknown composer from obscurity in Harald Kloser, whose only particularly noteworthy previous credit was for the Emmerich-produced The Thirteenth Floor.  

Many film music fans, myself included, were particularly excited about hearing what Kloser might come up with for The Day After Tomorrow despite having never before heard a note of his music.  Sadly, the results are somewhat disappointing, and certainly can't hold a candle to the scores for Emmerich's other movies from Stargate onwards.  Sadly, despite much having been made about the orchestra being one of the largest ever assembled for a film score (130 players), and despite there being no fewer than eight credited orchestrators and an "additional music" credit for Thomas Wanker (not the only Wanker in Hollywood, I'm sure), the orchestration is very bland, and the orchestra sounds smaller than what some composers could have made one half its size sound like.

Much of the first half of the album is of the brooding, "impending doom" variety.  It's all entirely appropriate, but hardly thrilling.  The opening track is actually quite stirring and certainly promises much, but that promise is never seen through.  "Tidal Wave" is the solitary action inclusion amongst the more gentle tension-building material, which is all well and good but doesn't do much for the album listener.  "Blizzard" introduces a brief wave of action towards the end and is followed by the score's highlight, "Superfreeze", a driving and propulsive piece of action music.  Genuinely impressive is "President's Speech", which is elegiac, beautiful and rousing.

Sadly, The Day After Tomorrow is a very anonymous blockbuster score without much of a hook at all.  The action music is impressive enough without exactly raising the temperature very high, and the score is hurt by not having anything resembling a memorable theme.  It's just all too simplistic to be particularly satisfying and, despite there undoubtedly being signs of quality sprinkled throughout, whenever it seems to be going somewhere interesting the music steps back and seems to almost clam up.  Has to go down as a disappointment. 

Tracks

1. The Day After Tomorrow (3:27)
2. Tornado Warning (2:00)
3. Sam! (1:20)
4. Tidal Wave (3:14)
5. Body Heat (1:50)
6. Russian Ghost Ship (1:24)
7. Hall's Plan (:53)
8. Rio Grande (1:11)
9. Bedtime Story (2:03)
10. Blizzard (2:18)
11. Superfreeze (3:04)
12. Cutting the Rope (3:29)
13. Because of You (2:29)
14. President's Speech (4:19)
15. The Human Spirit (3:36)
16. Burning Books (1:42)