• Composed by Brian Tyler
• Lakeshore Records / 2012 / 72:25

A popular animated tv show, Transformers Prime concerns the ongoing battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons.  The transformers are, let us not forget, robots in disguise.  The Michael Bay films might have not met with exactly universal acclaim (the second and third ones in particular) but have been hugely successful, so it’s not surprising to see Hasbro trying to milk money out of their property in other ways.  Those films received scores credited to Steve Jablonsky which are not without their entertainment value; surprisingly, the tv show hasn’t got music by some even lesser lights from Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control studio, but instead Brian Tyler has scored all the episodes, with assistance from Matthew Margeson.  This album from Lakeshore Records features music from the show’s first season.

As noted, the music is not written by Zimmer underlings, but frankly it sounds like it was.  The best feature is the main theme and that sounds like a Zimmer power anthem of the 1990s – it’s a highly entertaining theme – and that’s a good job, because it is repeated endlessly over the course of the very long album.  A large proportion of the cues are based on variations of the same theme and it would be a stretch to suggest that very much is done with it.  Fortunately there are just about enough standalone action cues (and one or two other decent – if less memorable – themes) that the album doesn’t get completely bogged down in the repetition, but it does push things to the limit.  Despite the presence of an orchestra (the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra) much of it sounds a bit cheap, but really the biggest problem is that there isn’t enough variety to justify a 73-minute album.  I’m sure that at half that length then something really enjoyable could have been produced, but I can’t imagine many people sitting through this from start to finish very often.  ** 1/2

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