Friday, February 11, 2011

Murray Gold's Doctor Who: Series 5 score album lands in the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks

The 11th Doctor races to retrieve his much-maligned fez.
I enjoyed Steven Moffat's fifth-season revamp of Doctor Who and composer Murray Gold's new themes for the show, so I'm adding several standout Gold cues from the fifth-season score album to "Assorted Fistful" rotation. The two-disc album from Silva Screen came out in November in the U.K. and finally hit our shores just recently.

Gold's rousing "I Am The Doctor" theme for The 11th Doctor (Matt Smith, who's been a terrific Doctor, despite the Tucker Carlson bow tie) is my favorite theme he's written for any of The Doctor's post-Paul McGann incarnations so far. When I first heard it during the "Eleventh Hour" season premiere, I thought to myself, "Okay, I gotta cop that CD." I like how Gold takes the percussion during the "I Am The Doctor" motif and makes it simulate a ticking clock, like in the "Amy in the TARDIS" cue that concludes "The Eleventh Hour" as The Doctor activates the new TARDIS for the first time.

"I Am The Doctor" and "Amy in the TARDIS" are part of the "Assorted" playlist, along with the season finale cue "The Sad Man with a Box," which includes some nifty electronic effects that represent the "timey-wimey stuff" that goes down during the finale. When I first heard the CD sound as if it were being played back in reverse and then paused, I got worried and thought my CD was skipping, but then I remembered it was an electronic effect from the scene where River Song (Alex Kingston) gets trapped in a time loop.

I'm looking forward to season 6 (finally, an episode shot on location in America, with actual American actors for a change, instead of British actors mangling American accents!), and I'm wondering what Gold has up his sleeve for the theme that will represent "the silence that will fall" in the new season. I'm thinking Gold will take the Pootie Tang approach (no music).

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