Battlestar Galactica: Season Three
Reviewed by Justin Bielawa
March 03, 2009

Battlestar Galactica is probably the dumbest show on television. There, I said it.

I dislike its smarmy self-assured intelligence. I hate how its fan base is full of self-actualized group-thinkers who all agree on how smart they are that the show they like is so intellectually brilliant. I loathe the middle school know-nothing plot devices, the Melrose Place drama set-pieces, the smart-for-stupids religious quandaries that were solved nearly two thousand years ago and are now smash-your-fingers-with-a-slammed-door subtle.

But the music is pretty good.

If there is a single criticism I can put on Bear McCreary its that I don't like how the show makes his music function. Its stodgy and manipulative to the viewer without it making sense on the show - why are people not from Earth being scored with specifically cultural music? More over - didn't the original series (with whom this show attempts to connect its self to) have more of an Egyptian cultural leaning? So why the Irish pipes and taiko drums? Theres gotta be a really tasteless joke in here somewhere about how Richard Wagner would have a Bernard Herrmann sized fit if he saw a show about mass exodus... scored with ethnic music.

Putting aside the cultural shock aspect of the music married to images, McCreary is a very talented composer and even though I may hate the show more than I hate most things - his music is tremendous on disc. Away from the show, free from its association to the program - Bear's music is sublime. It drifts between genres easily and more often than not in a musical dream state. It goes from thundering power to introverted string ensembles, wild vocals and, yes, even an ill-placed and confusing pop song placement.

The carefully crafted disc to Season Three continues to straddle ambient synth to world music and the orchestral. The first four tracks alone jump from Armenian vocals, guitar-and-bass, uilleann pipes and Asian drums versus string orchestra and bagpipes. The concept alone is enough musical food to feed five feature films alone. However, McCreary excels at making an exceptionally tight compilation album - each one seems to be better than the last - and every new idea or musical instrument introduced gels very well with the whole. Its a monumental task to even consider, never mind execute with any form of class.

Season Three finds its self a little more aggressive than the previous two - both in forms of volume and experimentation. "Storming New Caprica" is eight minutes of utterly teeth-gnashing action music for the whole ensemble while "Dirty Hands" (in a very tasteful nod to the late Shirley Walker) has a blue-collar blues swagger to it. Add to the mix a wild Irish jig ("The Dance") and a powerful solo piano work ("Battlestar Sonatica") and you have a rich mix of ideas, styles and moods that span a long range of emotions and scale.

The album's highlight is most assuredly "Violence and Variations", a seven minute cue for string orchestra that takes a very simple, almost waltz idea and changes the musical intonations and permutations in a dazzling display of color and proportion. The strength of this cue alone should speak volumes of the quality of the material against the flabbergasting and inappropriate use on the show. Backhanded as it might sound - Bear's music is so damned good, its a shame to box it up with the show its featured on.

The disc closes off with a cover of the classic Bob Dylan song "All Along the Watchtower". There is an essay to write about how bad an idea this was in terms of dramatic context, but as music its not a bad cover. Brendan McCreary does a fair job belting out the song with some not-quite-gritty pop flavor against violins, sitar and guitar. For what its worth, it works far better on the album than it has any right or reason to.

So there it is. A show I have nothing but outward loathing for has some damn good music on it. Could you think of a higher recommendation? Goldsmith, Bernstein, Williams and all the greats took on some dog projects and wrote some absolutely amazing music as a result. Battlestar Galactica is just that and while I'm all too happy to see this show end finally, I am very interested to see what the next album will have in store for us.

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