Lunar Hypnosis Review of Del Rey & The Sun Kings

Del Rey & The Sun Kings - Battleship Potemkin
Trakwerx Records - 2006
1. Main Title
2. The Men & The Maggots (Extended Version)
3. The Soup
4. Drama in The Harbor (Excerpt of Alternative Version)
5. Vakulinchuk Acts
6. The Death of Valulinchuk
7. A Dead Man Calls for Justice
8. All For One And One For All: The Rebellion Begins
9. The Odessa Staircase
10. A Happy Day In The City
11. Suddenly The Czarist Soldiers
12. The Ships Guns Roared (Extended Version)
13. Meeting With The Squadron
14. Squadron Sighted: Prepare For Action (Excerpt)
15. Join Us...Brothers!
16. Bonus Track: Original Piano Theme (Solo)

As with the film after which it is named, this music beautifully projects montages of sorrow, hope, and joy. Because I have seen and studied the movie at length at one point in my life, I cannot help but hear this music in black and white, with every tone of grey ablaze in between. This CD is a glorious exercise in just how painterly sound can be.

The music typically placed with the film (which was originally silent in 1925,) tends to be overtly dramatic and almost cumbersome in its desire to over-represent the film sonically. Which is a shame. What Potemkin needs least is bombast. What it gets most often is music that states the obvious. Loudly. From Edmund Meisel's glorious but hurried repetition to the Pet Shop Boys' interesting albeit somewhat sterile exercise, the music rendered for The Battleship Potemkin most often leaves me wishing to hear the film in silence and let the images sing for themselves.

Del Rey and the Sun Kings have achieved a rare feat; love of music, film and painting have interwoven to create a highly emotional juxtaposition of both traditional and contemporary audio articulations for Eisenstein's masterpiece. The accomplishment neither competes with the film nor becomes overbearing. Instead, the music seems to shimmer through the film; not an accompaniment but another facet of the montage. Exquisite.

Like the film, the music progresses in five well-constructed episodes; "Men and Maggots", "Drama at the Harbor", "A Dead Man Calls for Justice", "The Odessa Staircase" and "The RendezVous with a Squadron". This is typical of other soundtracks for the movie. What is not typical is the depth of consideration for the prose of the film itself in relation to the music. It is as if the lighting and atmosphere of the movie have been captured and remanufactured audibly. They seem inseparable; 'probably the truest mark of whether or not a soundtrack "works" for a movie.

It's nice to hear music expressed in so many layers and with such texture. Del Rey and the Sun Kings are masterful at painting sound like Anselm Kiefer's dark hopeful landscapes and Dali's endless bright horizons; Potemkin's images are a perfect fit for the heavy daubs and dashes of light at which Jackson Del Rey excels. The profound agony and the roaring aspiration of Eisenstein's masterpiece are represented here with great tenderness and respect; to have heard these recordings is to have seen the movie again with new eyes. Highly, highly recommended.

February 20, 2007
By Ginnie Moon
10 of 10