Tarzan

As with The Lion King and Mulan, Disney have once again opted to employ the services of different composers for the score and the songs. In this instance, the songs composer of choice is ex-Genesis member Phil Collins. While I'm convinced I read that Phil Collins was the UK's most successful solo male artist, he is apparently not all that well known elsewhere. Anyway, his style is usually quite recognisable and these efforts are no different. Whereas Elton John wrote songs for characters to sing, Collins performs all of the songs as more of a narrator - although the result is that the sequences come out more like a pop video in the film.
Two Worlds is evidently the centre piece song and it (like the others) bounces along at a fair old pace. In fact, all of the songs are very upbeat indeed. Son of Man and Strangers Like Me are favourites, but both are arranged in a very similar fashion. Indeed, those two and Two Worlds are mainly done with close harmony with Collins providing his own backing vocals. They have a very 80's sound to them, which is fine for me since I quite like that kind of thing, but it may put others off. You'll Be in My Heart has a brief bit of Glenn Close singing as well as a small bit of Collins singing, but evidently the film version was designed to be very short. It's rather a shame, as the pop version that Collins sings later on is much longer and certainly turns into a fairly appealing song. Collins' more poppy rendition of Two Worlds is very similar to the film version and is perhaps a little redundent. Trashin' the Camp builds from typewriter keys clicking away with a vocalised scat backing. Difficult to describe well; put it this way, there are no lyrics, just single syllables. There is another version feating N'Synch (whoever they are), which is also redundent. Liking of the songs basically depends on whether you like Phil Collins or not. I do, but I would have liked the songs to have more variable arrangements and there are really too many versions of the same songs and too many reprises. They are all good when taken seperately, but in a row, they end up blurring into one too much.

Although not having many stunningly good projects to work on, Mark Mancina has always done pretty well to produce some decent music for pretty weak movies (Twister has an extremely enjoyable action/Americana score for example). Tarzan gives him a chance to recreate Hans Zimmer's success with his stupendous score to the Lion King. While Mancina's score is by turns primitive (wooden percussion), exciting and introverted, it doesn't really approach Zimmer's in terms of quality. Zimmer's unique grasp of idiomatic African music certainly gave him a head start. Mancina really tries to evoke the jungle with drums and chorus, but to nowhere near the same spectacular level. There are no great set pieces either. The Gorilla's is a thundering action cue in typical pseudo-Zimmer style (although Mancina has enough of his own to just about remain interesting.) The other problem is that there are no very strong themes in the score. Zimmer didn't really use Elton John's themes, but created and used many of his own, Mancina has a motif or two that is always helpful, but nothing that will stick in the mind all that much. I can imagine that with the apparently stunning visuals in the film, it will work superbly well, but on CD it just comes across as a bit more non-descript than it ought to. The very brief running time for the actual score portion doesn't help at all either. Overall, an enjoyable CD as long as you like Phil Collins songs, but for score-only fans, I really don't think there's quite enough to warrant purchasing the entire disc due to the short running time and lack of many memorable moments.