Let's start 2026 with Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. The 890th
Soundtrack of the Week is Jerrold Immel's
music for their movie Death Hunt.
Angie Dickinson and Carl Weathers are in it too. I bet it's pretty good! The score is solid. "Main Title/Dog Fight" starts off with some swirling
strings that would suit a horror movie, soon balanced by a heroic theme
for brass and martial snare drum. Pastoral Americana comes next in "Man's Best Friend/The Cabin", which features
harmonica and flute. The main title music is reprised and some other suspense/horror moods
added for "Millen's Posse/Shoot Low", with the horror feel continued in
"Thawing Out/Dynamite/He's Gone". The first half of "Would It Make Any Difference/In Pursuit" returns to the
harmonica-led Americana territory before veering off again into tense action/terror
music. A pensive sound that also suggests the wide-open spaces of the western
is the main ingredient of "Millen and Johnson Spot Each Other" and then it's
back to unsettling, sharp, dangerous sonorities for "Hazel and Alvin Fight/Running
with the Caribou". More aggravated, often dissonant sustained tones, jagged staccato phrases
and ominour low swells keep everything on edge for "Aerial Pursuit"
and then things settle down a bit for the tense but lower key "Another Hard
Choice/Across the Ice Peaks" and "One Last Chance/Now You're in Charge". The "End Credits from Death Hunt" reprise the hopeful Americana theme, and then there are
four pieces of source music, three of them fiddle and piano music with the fourth,
a rendition of "My Darling Clementine" played on accordion or similar instrument. Fans of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith are likely to enjoy this one.
2026 January 02 • Friday
One of the most exciting record labels around right now is
Riding Easy.
My favorite releases from them tend to be these rescues of long lost,
sometimes never before released recordings of heavy psych/prog/rock
music from the early 1970s though they also release recordings by
current bands. For an example of something brought back from the distant past,
check out thie Granicus LP!
It starts strong with the aggressive "You're in America" and "Bad Talk",
both loud, fast and hard-hitting songs in a Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin. Then strings come in for a mellow instrumental called "Twilight"—think the intro
to "Collage" by James Gang—followed by a monstrous 11-minute song called
"Prayer", which is also very pretty mellow several minutes before the fuzz box
gets stomped and the drums come crashing in. They were originally from Cleveland but moved to New York, where they recorded
this album and the song "Cleveland, Ohio" has a repeated line "I'm getting
out of Cleveland, Ohio". "Nightmare" starts as a trippy, spacey, laidback number before picking
up speed, followed by the headbanging, Zeppy "When You're Movin'". The last song, "Paradise", is another long one, at a little over seven minutes,
and is an intense, mostly up-tempo rocker that has trace elements of Hendrix
as well as the stirrings of hard core and metal. Seriously, this record is great.
Check it out!
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