Movie Music and More #18: "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015)

Ant-Man is now in theaters, so today, guest author Hamlette highlights the soundtrack from Marvel's previous film, Avengers: Age of Ultron. 

I have to admit this first:  I like the soundtrack for The Avengers better.  However!  This one is still loads of fun, and there are quite a few tracks that I enjoy greatly.  There are some that are forgettable, but on a whole, it's a fun CD to listen to when you need some extra energy, like when you're cleaning or trying to psych yourself up for a test.

One of the things that I like best about this score is how they incorporated music from Alan Silvestri's score for the first movie, which adds such lovely continuity.  The rest of the score was composed by Danny Elfman and Brian Tyler.  Danny Elfman has lots of superhero soundtrack cred, since he composed for things like Batman Returns and the first couple of Spider-Man movies, not to mention all three Men in Black movies.  I think my favorite score of his is for the very first Mission:  Impossible, and I'll talk about that one more another time.  Brian Tyler, of course, did the music for Thor:  The Dark World and Iron Man 3, so he knows these characters and this universe pretty well by now.

Okay, so the first selection I'm sharing with you is by Brian Tyler (the CD case actually delineates which track is by which composer, which I found kind of interesting).  It's very frantic at times, but never to the point where I feel like it's too much busy noise.  Definitely conveys the idea that people are fighting furiously.  

This next track isn't even in the movie -- the soundtrack has two such tracks, both by Danny Elfman, and they're both favorites of mine.  This one has a darkness to it, lots of menace and brooding, which then changes to a let's-go-kick-butt machismo, with some lovely determination going on.  (Also, Thor's theme pops up a couple times, so that miiiiiiiiiiight be part of why I like it.)

I said this is an energizing soundtrack, but it does have some nice downtime too.  I like the quiet, pastoral peace to this last piece, also by Danny Elfman.  It's probably my favorite track of all.

That's all for this week, my film-loving friends!  Catch you on the flip side.