As announced in the On Cue section today, Filmtracks is about to enter a new phase of active coverage. Tomorrow, the site will begin to debut a long-overdue collection of reviews devoted to Jerry Goldsmith's fruitful period of production from the late 1970's to mid-1980's. Older coverage will be updated to reflect recent album re-issues and over twenty all-new reviews of Goldsmith scores will be featured in the On Cue section over the next several weeks.

Already live on the site is coverage for almost all major theatrical releases for the spring and summer of 2009, as well as a handful of updated reviews involving scores for which another album was released after the recent re-write process had already passed those scores. Readers have been frequently requesting a review of Michael Giacchino's "Up," for which no promotional copies (physical or via lossless download) were available. I hesitate to review a score based only on MP3's, even if the loss in quality inherent in this format is minimal for most listeners. The fact that "Up" was released as a download-only album was not the problem; the industry usually distributes lossless review copies of such material regardless of the format of release. That did not happen in this particular case.

After this round of Goldsmith reviews is completed in August, look for similar treatment of John Williams' and James Horner's work during the same period. These three composers remain the most popular at the site and demand for these reviews is high. After this, coverage will likely spread out into the 1000+ promotional items I've received for coverage over the past few years, many of which in the mainstream. There may also be other composer concentrations as well.

Stay tuned over the next few months, because there are both 5-star hidden gems and 1-star thrashings ready to be revealed at Filmtracks.

Christian