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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

CD REVIEW - Tango & Cash


Tango & Cash
Music by Harold Faltermeyer
La-La Land Records LLLCD 1052 (USA)
23 Tracks 60:28 mins

Tango & Cash was a pretty fair buddy cop movie, in the Lethal Weapon mould, from 1989. It had plenty of thrills and not a little comedy, with Sylvester Stallone as the straight man and Kurt Russell the slightly out there partner.
Musically, this was very much in the time of the beat-driven electronic era, started by the likes of Giorgio Moroder with Midnight Express. One of the chief Hollywood movers in this field was Harold Faltermeyer, who worked with Moroder before ploughing his own field, and whose oh-so-catchy theme from Beverly Hills Cop, found renewed popularity as a ring tone quite recently. That theme is undeniably an inspired piece of composition, but he was capable of more, as this score shows and his theme for Tango is also a very catchy, beat-driven mover that I hadn't realised must have been at the back of my mind somewhere all the time, as when I put this disc on I immediately recognised it and had it on my lips for the rest of the day.
The Cash theme is also quite funky, but it's the Tango theme that stands out and none more than in the opening track "Bus Chase." Cash's theme gets it's own workouts of course and none better than in "Dog Explodes." Along the way there in plenty of suspenseful writing, with the villains getting a dark and threatening motif, first heard in "Bad Goys Plot." As if the two cops weren't at odds enough as it was, Tango's sister (played by Desperate Housewives' Teri Hatcher) becomes Cash's love interest and there are two themes representing her involvement, the first, a slow, beat-driven keyboard "Love Theme;" the second, a warm keyboard theme for "Brother & Sister." In addition to the action sequences already mentioned, there is a pretty exciting 5-minute action cue "Off Road Battle" that impresses.
The disc is accompanied by 12-page booklet, a little short on artwork, but featuring a lengthy essay on the composer, the film and its music.
Fans of this entertaining movie will be pleased that at last the music is finally available in this limited edition release of 3000 units.

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