OCTOPUSSY (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK LP, 1983)

The OCTOPUSSY soundtrack seems a bit truncated but it is still a good John Barry - James Bond CD. The soundtrack to OCTOPUSSY seems not so much a mixture of styles but rather the ambiguous culmination of those styles. The suspense, exotic and romantic elements of the score are impressive. "That's My Little Octopussy" and "Bond Meets Octopussy" are very beautiful love pieces based on the main title: "All Time High" that are reminiscent to the true nature of "We Have All the Time In the World" from ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. The character of Octopussy, played against formula, in this film seems like a genuine love interest of James Bond as is reflected in these pieces. Impressive too are "Bond At the Monsoon Palace" and "The Chase-Bomb Theme" reminiscent of Barry's scoring of some of his "cold war" films from the 1960s. In other parts of the score Barry seems to be tiring. His passion and penchant for scoring action scenes seems to be on the wane here. "Yo Yo Fight" and parts of "The Palace Fight" seem unimaginative and lackluster. Still, this soundtrack contains many tracks with elements of "The James Bond Theme" and this is where Barry seems to have compensated himself. "Bond Look-Alike" is a tour de force of the 007 mystique. "Bond Look-Alike" is a rich composition based on "The James Bond Theme" and is one of the best tracks to be found on any of the James Bond soundtracks. It is good to see that the original artwork was restored with Roger Moore in the traditional 007-tuxedo gun pose for this re-issue.

While the Bond films may have varied in quality and tone, John Barry's scores never waivered. The great films had stupendous music and the lesser entries seemed to bring out the best in Barry to push them closer to seeming up to par. His score for this one is an absolute delight and benefits from deft remastering. Some very exciting action cues interpersed with lush, lovely melodies.

After Diamonds Are Forever (which is my personal favorite John Barry Bond score), Barry's reportoire became more melodical with less of the hard edged horn sections but Barry almost never disapoints with the lush exotic sound that Octopussy has. My beef with this soundtrack is there are no extra musical tracks in it, the reason for this is the producer of the re-mastered library ofBond soundtracks had not enough budget allocated by the record company to include extra tracks on all the remastered Bond music, so therefore he picked the ones that he thought were most deserved to have extra tracks. Unfortunately, Octopussy was not one of the ones budgeted for extra tracks. Thank the stars above that Diamonds are Forever was allocated extra tracks, but alas, it was not to be for Octopussy.

Great bond score. Highly enjoyable to listen to.

Great product...great service! Would use again.

A great soundtrack

collecting all the James Bond soundtrack to the movies is what I'm doing

As Described