Harry Gregson-Williams has spent a lot of time (and made a lot of fans) over the last few years in scoring animations for Dreamworks Pictures, often in collaboration with John Powell.  Finally allowed to go it alone, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is his latest one.  There are two main differences from scores such as Shrek and Chicken Run: on the positive, it is far more coherent, with several surprisingly long tracks and very little of the rather schizophrenic nature that usually afflicts music for animation; on the negative, this added coherence means that perhaps there just aren't so many stand-out moments, so many bits to make you sit up and take notice.

The story of Sinbad has of course been filmed on many occasions in the past, with the most notable contributions (from a musical perspective) being Bernard Herrmann's The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Miklos Rozsa's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad - obviously we are now in a very different era of film music, so Gregson-Williams was never going to write anything along either of those lines.  Something closer to John Debney's Cutthroat Island was probably the best we could hope for, and I guess we're not really too far away.  There's a big, swashbuckling main theme for one thing (though it's not nearly so memorable as Debney's) and the orchestration is clearly designed to evoke grand, romantic seafaring voyages of days gone by (and it does).

There's actually an innovation (in a modern score!? - note the time and date) - Gregson-Williams makes brilliant use of an unusual and unexpected device, a staccato female voice (or sometimes, voices) that on paper seems like it shouldn't work, but it actually works very well indeed.  Heard repeatedly, it doesn't really outstay its welcome.  Unfortunately, what does rather outstay its welcome is the main theme.  It's not individual or memorable enough to be used as frequently as it is (and I would imagine it's heard in the majority of the 22 tracks at least once).  Given that Gregson-Williams didn't seem especially interested in giving us much variation in the orchestration (I'm sure the film didn't really call for it), perhaps at least a couple of other, similar themes would have made the album interesting enough to justify its rather grand length.  Another misfire is the occasional incorporation of synth percussion which seems entirely out of place.

Anyway, that's not a major complaint, because this is a most enjoyable album that presents one of the summer's most easily appealing scores.  Completely unchallenging, completely entertaining stuff.

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