Fan response to Shrek's music was even more aroused than the scores for the previous two projects, making it a hot holiday item when it was belatedly released on album. Why exactly that response was so wild, however, has always been something of a mystery. Powell and Gregson-Williams had secured their reputations as orchestral comedy professionals, and this music fits its film well enough to suffice. But divorced from the visuals, Shrek is a significantly weaker score than Antz and Chicken Run, mostly due to the obvious lack of originality in its constructs. All three of these popular scores by the duo are alluring because of their personalities of creativity and spunk, and in all three you can easily hear parody-style inspiration. But for Shrek the composers did little to extend those unoriginal concepts into the cohesive whole that the previous two had formed, leaving you with a score filled with chopped up cues of limited development because of the short length of each scene in the story. It's a score that serves its film well enough because you don't notice the haphazard methodology in an equally frenetic pace of on-screen action. On album, however, it becomes clear that the slapstick narrative deals a heavy blow to the flow of the music; in the time it takes the full ensemble to develop a theme or rhythm of worth, the cue ends and the next one sets a different pace. Even more problematic in regards to Shrek is the striking connection between it and half a dozen other film scores. Both Antz and Chicken Run owed much to existing stylistic mechanisms, poking fun at generalized sounds (partially in a historical sense) instead of making specific references. Powell and Gregson-Williams still do pull at the general inspiration throughout Shrek, but along that journey are several direct quotations from existing film scores from not only their own careers, but a variety of others' as well.

The most famous and controversial of these unoriginal moments in the score comes in "Escape from the Dragon," a wildly popular piece that explodes with rhythm, percussion, and synthetic sounds taken shamelessly and obviously from the pages of David Arnold's The World is Not Enough (down to even the corny echoing effect). The cue works brilliantly for its scene in the film, but the sheer contrast between that sound and the rest of the score cuts to the heart of the album's problems with cohesiveness, too. What casual fans may not realize, however, is that the theme for the dragon heard in "Escape from the Dragon," "Ride the Dragon," and "I Object" (reportedly the work of Powell) is extremely derivative of Trevor Rabin's theme for Deep Blue Sea (which itself wasn't an entirely original piece for that terrible 1999 film). Other parts of the score are suspect as well. The theme for Fiona, also representing the fairy tale as a whole, is an extremely blatant merging of Mark Knopfler's cult favorite The Princess Bride and these composers' own Chicken Run. Some fans even point to Golden and Silver Age cross references. From the soft tones of this theme (immediately heard in "Fairytale") to especially the performances on acoustic guitar in "Friends Journey to Duloc," the score for Shrek owes much of its appeal to The Princess Bride. In the final few tracks, this wondrous fantasy theme is allowed to hold the film's musical center stage, exaggerating the feeling that this music has been heard before in other places. For those of you who ponder why Kermit the Frog comes to mind when listening to the last cue in the film, it's because the dragon and fairy tale ideas combine to form a theme with a first few measures that are a close cousin to Kermit's "Rainbow Connection" Muppet song. These "liftings" may not be noticeable while the film is playing, but on album, they stick out like a sore thumb. For those without these musical references in your memory, then perhaps the Shrek score will play better on album, and then the music may simply turn out to be a less rambunctious version of Chicken Run for you.

As to be expected in any comedy score with visions of turning puns with various established musical concepts, there are sudden cuts and manipulations of gain that accompany the haphazard nature of the film's script. Among other parody elements in the score exist the two most famous pseudo-songs in the Shrek film and on album. While both "Welcome to Duloc" and "Merry Men" (a nod in a sense to Mel Brooks) were hailed as major selling points of the album, it is exactly this kind of unlistenable wailing (in South Park-like voices, no less) that turns most veteran film music collectors away from scores like this. Cute parody scores such as Shrek raise generational questions as well, the early collaborations between Powell and Gregson-Williams continuing to appeal to a somewhat younger crowd. Another sticky point with the Shrek recording is its sound quality; it is no secret that Chicken Run exhibited incredibly dynamic range, both in resonance and clarity. But Shrek's fidelity is closer to that of Antz, lacking the tangy edge of crisp sound that made Chicken Run a specimen to enjoy simply for its sound. As for the contents of the music, Shrek contains no cue that comes even close to matching the length and robust construction of a track like "Building the Crate" from Chicken Run. So, in the end, beyond all the hype, the music doesn't translate particularly well from film to album anyway. A mish-mash of short rhythmic bursts, thematic rip-offs, and a few nearly unlistenable comedy tracks form a whole that is far less cohesive than the second score in the franchise. Gregson-Williams took the reigns for Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third, the former often considered the strongest of the three. Undoubtedly, for the casual film music collector with a limited budget, Shrek 2 is the place to start in the franchise, with better sustained structures for the full ensemble to perform. All of these scores, however, remain lightweights by necessity.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download