The Triangle

The problem with The Triangle might be that it overstates its welcome. Twenty-five minutes into the album, the wind falls and our little ship is left to drift... and drift... and drift.

It\'s a shame because the first few tracks are promising. Joseph LoDuca was chosen to helm the musical ship on this six-hour Sci-Fi Channel mini-series about the Bermuda Triangle and the fact that his name was attached to the score piqued my curiosity. This is the composer behind countless years of Hercules and Xena and I must admit to enjoying the music he composed for those series, especially their rousing main titles (and, after all these years, I still cannot for the life of me understand the meter in the Xena main title theme). A peculiar talent he developed on those shows was how to make the most out of a small ensemble. He could take a very small group of instruments and orchestrate the music in such a way that the end result was always dynamic, heroic, and impressive. For The Triangle, he musters a decent orchestral ensemble which he complements by a few electronic tricks, mainly an insistent bass beat which rears its head whenever the main theme is uttered. It brought back memories, both good and bad, of Randy Miller\'s main title to Firestarter: Rekindled. Good because that theme was energetic, bad because it somewhat reeks of television scoring.

Music for television movies and mini-series have generally achieved this unique degree of quality halfway between cheap, disposable audio tricks and full-on movie scores. They constitute a good breeding ground for composers to dig their talons in and get some decent experience, but they sometimes fail the test of listenability when released on their own. The Triangle is good, with its strange, cavernous effects and low cello lines, its brass clusters (which sometimes reminded me of Batman Begins) and its modern beats, but it\'s missing a key ingredient. It\'s that little something more that distinguishes a Danny Elfman from a Joseph LoDuca. Maybe personality and talent aren\'t the only distinguishing factors; maybe time availability and project interest have a lot to do with the differences in quality in the end products. Regardless of the reason, while a score like Spider-Man, which does feature a combination of orchestral might and electronic drive, is great, a score like The Triangle is merely good. The first few tracks assemble the players and get us in a great mood, but the rest of the album is a let down, filled with, well, filler. The grand, major-key finale feels tacked on and didn\'t raise a single hair on my arm. The aftermath of listening to this score is similar to stepping into the Bermuda Triangle. A slow curtain of fog descends and then it\'s all gone.