I've always loved the score, but the original album was unsatisfactory - a slightly pinched sound on the most powerful cues (notably the long canoe chase) and a boneheaded fade out on the climactic track (the hypnotically repetitive use of "The Gael") which robbed us of one of the highlights of the score, IMHO. The Varese re-recording pleased a lot of people, but being the anal purist that I am, I was less than enthralled by its concertised sound - it just made me hanker for the original tracks even more. And here they are.

It's all mixed in 5.1, but since I'm not a proud owner of that scrumptious technology, I can't tell you how it sounds. I can tell you how it sounds on a normal stereo system, though, and it doesn't suck. There are minor quibbles - a few cues are dialled down a bit too suddenly on their last notes, and for some reason the interesting little flourishes of percussion that add colour to the opening hunt sequence (including distant Indian chants at one point) are missing from the iso version.

In a dreamy month that's given me a decent-sounding FINAL CONFLICT, Piero Piccioni's dated-but-wonderful PUPPET ON A CHAIN, the announcement of HEARTBEEPS and PROJECT X from the Varese CD Club, season three BUFFY on DVD, and the release of "Shut It! The Music Of The Sweeney" (that's for the middle-aged Brits among us) I'm incredibly happy to have my mitts on this isolated score. Finally I can hear that climactic music without any silly edits.