Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Linwood Riley - Gotham Raid/Who Is The Brain?

Hear The Track Here

Dung dunga dunga dunga BATMAN!! God, didn't you just love those old (ie mid 1960's) Batman TV series? However, THIS Gotham City doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Caped Crusader. Gotham Raid/Who Is The Brain is in fact about Suicide Squad, apparently a YouBoob show, which inspired Linwood Riley to write some (gulp) film music about it. Now if you are new here and have noticed people moving rapidly away, you will be blissfully unaware that the words f*** m**** are the same to me as the colour red to an enraged bovine rottweiler. Those people are just getting out of the explosion area, and they would be right to do so, but they don't yet know that although Linwood Riley might be a new name to us - the musical face behind it is very familiar. You might know him, in fact as Byte 19 (at least in SC 'personal' section and in forums.

The man's main band, The Muse Machine, seems to contain a whole clutch of accomplished solo musicians, as the releases by fellow bandmate Rasmael (aka The Rascal Theorist) testify. See? Nothing to be scared of. While its true I have no time whatsoever for the genre, in the right pair of hands I can maintain my sanity and hopefully speak less gibberish than normal. Byte's taste and style have long won him friends on Soundclick in all his endeavours, and I approached this track with less apprehension than normal too. If you tied me up and force-fed this track to me, I'd still come out saying this is nothing like as bland as film music usually is.

Put simply, Gotham Raid etc is a well put together and sonically very pleasing piece of music - whatever label you may want to attach to it. Basically, its an instrumental based around a piano figure but drawn out to infinity by some of the longest orchestral sweeps known to man. It's quite a long track (for a film anyway) but - for me - that is part of the charm, but its almost six minutes of life will pass far quicker than it would seem. There is a middle section that is so well put together, you'll have to listen to it twice just to be sure. Me, I'm a sucker for a great snare sound and this track features a beauty. Excellent instrumental, whatever you want to call it.

Highly Recommended film score.

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