Awesome Music of the Week #1

Composer- Henry Jackman

Album- X-Men: First Class

Songs: “Frankenstein’s Monster”, “Magneto”, “First Class”, “Not That Sort of Bank”

I first got this album a few months after I saw X-Men: First Class in theaters. I liked the movie and I especially liked the music, particularly the music from the suspenseful parts, notably during the scene where Erik Lensherr confronts some former Nazis at the Villa Gessel. The song at that point “Frankenstein’s Monster” is similar to “In The House – In a Heartbeat” from 28 Days Later, but the orchestra part was more prominent and it has some cool Spanish guitar in the beginning. Not only that, but it makes good music to play foosball and ping-pong too if the games are really intense.

The eponymous song from the album, “First Class” is another one of my favorites. It is rather triumphant, and it makes great music to wake up to. It builds rather nicely and at one point the electric part of the ensemble drops to nearly nothing and leaves the melody with the strings; that’s the kind of music I would like to listen to (and play) much more often.

“Magneto” and “Not That Sort of Bank” both utilized the theme present in “Frankenstein’s Monster” although “Magneto” was much faster and “Not That Sort of Bank” was less intense overall. The four songs are, in my opinion, the best on the album.

Henry Jackman has written numerous other film scores as well, including the scores for Puss in Boots (“The Puss Suite” is fantastic by the way) and Kick-Ass (I haven’t gotten the film score yet, but certainly want the piece from the ending). He also worked with Hans Zimmer on the film score for The Dark Knight, which is another one of my favorites.

For the past two months or so, I’ve listened to these songs a lot, often while on a bus ride, walking around, or playing computer games. I look forward to the next film score that Henry Jackman composes; it’ll probably be as good as or better than this one.