Listening Post: Meco - The Complete Star Wars Collection

A guest Listening Post by SamuraiFrog, revolving around Meco Monardo, the guy who disco-ized movie scores.



Meco - The Complete Star Wars Collection - 2000 (not available)

Well, after nearly 20 years, it took another Star Wars movie to get Meco onto another album. And it's all his own production and design.

The title of this collection is pretty accurate; normally I wouldn't mention a compilation, but this does have some new tracks on it that merit its own entry.

The nicest thing about this album, actually, is that it fixes "Themes from Star Wars," from the Ewok Celebration album. That was pretty much a joyless retread of the original 1977 "Star Wars" medley; The Complete Star Wars Collection starts off with a new 2000 remix with more sound effects and vocal snippets that just sounds so much better. If you have to have a truncated version of the '77 version, this just sounds so damn much better than anything else (and it was made for CD).

The next four tracks are the four tracks from The Empire Strikes Back: "The Empire Strikes Back Medley," "Battle in the Snow," "The Force Theme," and "The Asteroid Field/Finale" minus "The Asteroid Field." The first two tracks have been remixed but sound basically the same (although I think there are more sound effects and they end a little earlier). "The Force Theme" sounds a little bolder, but still real cool, except that it cuts about 40 seconds off at the end. "The Asteroid Field/Finale" is cut by four minutes and ten seconds, lopping off the great "Asteroid Field" theme and becoming merely "The Finale." That's just a shame; it has new instrumentation over the Han/Leia theme. Meco's also added a long voiceover of Yoda's speech about the Force, except that whomever is delivering the speech (Meco himself? I don't know for sure) just can't pull off the voice and sounds like an old man trying not to belch.

After this, we revisit Ewok Celebration with "Lapti Nek" and that album's title track. "Lapti Nek" has been remixed; it sounds fuller but is still pointless. "Ewok Celebration" is totally truncated. Something like the first two minutes are lopped off, which is the main theme of the damn song, so that it goes right into the rap. The rap vocals have been spaced out across the remaining three minutes, too, instead of having all at once. The effect is terrible. It just makes the whole thing mindless and incredibly repetitive. It's just kind of cynical. I get it that Meco's unhappy with the original track, but it sounded better than this.

The last three tracks are new, based on themes and characters from The Phantom Menace. That's an important distinction. "The Duel of the Fates/Augie's Municipal Band" is based on themes from the movie, and is a pretty good, if almost totally inconsequential and by now overfamiliar Meco-ization. It's a very techno groove, but very much in flavor like Meco's 80s sound (electric guitars and electric drums). On the one hand, a longer suite would have been nice, on the other hand there's just nothing distinctive here, anyway.

The other two tracks, "Cousin Jar Jar" and "A Jedi Knight," are merely inspired by characters from the movie. Apparently Meco couldn't find any other themes in the movie's score to be inspired by (and to be fair, the prequel scores are a lot less rich than the others). "Cousin Jar Jar" is a nightmare; it's supposed to be a cousin of Jar Jar's walking into an intergalactic disco and being mistaken for Jar Jar. The character talks/raps/sings in the Gungan style through the whole song, and... well, I'm actually a huge fan of Jar Jar Binks, and this song made me hate that George Lucas had ever created the entire Star Wars universe in the first place. It's just not cute anymore.

"Jedi Knight," sung by a lady called Yamira that Meco and Harold Wheeler were working with on her own album, has a nice arrangement but sounds like the end credits song for something based on a video game or a live action version of an anime. It's not terrible, there's just no reason for it to exist.

Grade C
A Side: "Themes from Star Wars (2000 Remix)"
BlindSide: None; everything else worth having was already on The Empire Strikes Back
DownSides: "Cousin Jar Jar," the "Ewok Celebration" remix