Huh. This is not what I expected. Granted, that's been the trend with nearly every intro song this ranking. Still, where is that harmonica coming from?? A choir? What? I'd expect riffs like this, and from the second song, from Planet X, not a Webber Jesus musical and WOW IT'S THE SAME DRUMEMR!
What the fuck!? Tell me what's happening!!
I love leitmotifs. I, however, don't really love how plays tend to use them. Interposing fragments of old songs more-or-less verbatim into later tracks seems a really unnecessarily heavy-handed way to include them, particularly for media where the music *is* the focus. If videogames, where the music is much more incidental to most players, can pull off subtler melody insertions, I'd hope viewers of musicals would be able to handle it too.
The album was very enjoyable, probably one of the better musicals I've heard. Yet it's also just another one of the musicals I've heard. I feel a shortcoming in having a "genre" so dominated at one end by so few names makes self-consistent in a vaguely off-putting way. It loses some originality points by being something I could've been fooled into thinking I'd heard five times before. Compare with the Incubus album, which was a pretty unique synthesis of individual elements I felt familiar with.
As a non-Christian, hearing the story presented this way... god it sounds so stupid. I never realized that DS9 ripped off a scene from the bible so blatantly
Score: jesus/buddha Favorite song: Trial Before Pilate
Glad you liked it! I wasn't aware you were doing the rankings in this topic but glad I saw it. I get your point about it sounding familiar since it is ALW's work, though OTOH I nominated it because I find it one of the musical albums that can relatively be enjoyed from the music alone. And the orchestration is quite...err, rich? rock-ish? Than the usual fare, so to me personally it's actually a standout musical album compared to others.
Also, I Googled and it seems DS9 in Deep Space Nine? What scenes did they take from the Bible?
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Into the woods, but mind the past... Into the woods, but mind the future!