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HANS ZIMMER
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Disney/EMI
***

If composer Hans Zimmer "overproduced" (in his own words) his protege Klaus Badelt's The Curse of the Black Pearl, then he certainly over-composes his own score for Dead Man's Chest. Although incorporating some of Badelt's original themes (The Kraken, Wheel of Fortune), Zimmer pushes them to such extremes that he creates a kind of para-music that luxuriates in its very extravagance, combining signature electronic orchestration and acoustic instrumentation with simple melodies and pounding rhythms to achieve a driving musical dynamism that is occasionally subtle and brooding but mostly exuberant and unrelenting. Simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting, Dead Man's Chest teeters dangerously between parody and pastiche as Zimmer proves himself once again the scorer of high-end Hollywood action movies. Nothing succeeds like excess. www.disney.go.com/disneyrecords