Casino Royale Soundtrack
© Sony Records

Mania Grade: B+
Music by: David Arnold
Label: Sony Classical
Details: 25 tracks, 74 mins.
Buy it now!

Related Links

0

"Casino Royale Soundtrack"

David Arnold’s fourth time behind the baton on a James Bond score, Casino Royale, is another masterful romantic action adventure mixing the distinguishing flavors of John Barry’s traditional 007 sound with the modern textures and vitality of David Arnold’s new-millennium take on James Bond. 

Peculiarly, neither the soundtrack CD nor the 38-track expanded soundtrack available only via download from iTunes, contains the Main Title theme song, “You Know My Name,” co-written by Arnold and Chris Cornell and performed by Cornell (of the bands Soundgarden and Audioslave). It is available for download from iTunes in the film’s mix; a re-arranged version was made for a music video and that one will presumably appear on Cornell’s forthcoming 2007 solo CD. 

Opening with a pure conglomeration of action riffs with “African Rundown,” Arnold starts the score off with appropriate vigor.  Percussion and brasses pound and wail and crash and drive the cue into a frenzied dissonance; the score takes off from there and maintains its ferocity throughout, while accommodating plenty of time for the score’s more romantic and melodically heroic moments to shine through. 

“Blunt Instrument” opens up with the main Casino Royale theme song, instrumentally invoked by Arnold’s orchestra, accentuated by those distinctive John Barryesque trumpets.  “Trip Aces” is another very persuasive track where Arnold lets the more romantic flavorings of his orchestra resound and harmonize very nicely, and sets the stage for the album’s showpiece, the nearly 12-minute “Miami International,” where Arnold really lets loose with a splendid mixture of action and the romantic/heroic main theme.  The album is a mixture of long and short cues; but even short bits like the 27-second “I’m the Money” are valuable in their harmonic intonation of the main theme in a short but commanding restatement.  At 1:03, “Aston Montenegro” and “Dinner Jackets” likewise contains a potent flair as it recapitulates the elegance and sonority of Bond’s musical milieu in powerful brevity, both emphasizing the masculine sensuality of 007.  Arnold’s interpolation of Cornell’s theme song is effective and as melodically-potent as that of Barry’s frequent use of “We Have All the Time in the World” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or “All Time High” in Octopussy. 

The 13 minutes of bonus tracks available via iTunes on the “complete soundtrack” album are likable but non-essential cues.  A nifty hand-played bongos & tom-tom & bass guitar action track (“Mongoose vs. Snake”), a number of very short bridging tracks that weight in at right around 30-seconds apiece (“I’m Yours” is an especially poignant rendition of the film’s Love Theme – introduced on the CD version in “Solange,” a gorgeously lyrical and airy theme for French horn, flutes, and violin).  If you’re a completist, downloading the complete score isn’t terribly expensive and you get a few more tracks; but if you just want the essentials (less the Main Title Song), the CD release is satisfactory. 

The album is pure David Arnold, containing none of the famous John Barry themes until it’s concluding track, “The Name’s Bond, James Bond,” wherein Arnold ends his score with an affectionate and full-blown version of the James Bond Theme, closing the movie in splendidly traditional fashion.  Even listening to the CD apart from the film, the moment those twanging electric guitars begin sounding the famous theme, you want to cheer.