by Panpardus » August 12th, 2017, 9:56 am
My biggest problem with this song (that I feel qualified to really critique) is how bare bones the arrangement and orchestration is. I personally think there's plenty of good elements here that Beau Black doesn't expand upon in his arrangement; kind of how I feel about most things on this show in the first place.
If it were up to me to arrange it - which I'm going to do anyway for my own edification, so I'm partly just writing this to establish for myself what I want to do - I'd start with adding musical references to "Be Prepared" and "The Madness of King Scar", like a rhythmic intro and outro. Black doesn't really let his songs build toward a climax; most times the songs themselves don't have a proper opening and time to establish themselves before the opening lyrics. Granted, it's not always necessary, and I don't know if it's his songwriting style or just time restrictions the show places on him tokeep songs as brief as possible, but it would definitely help in this case.
The verse section isn't bad at all, but the chorus section definitely falls short to me; I haven't yet figured out why this is, but most of the choruses end up disappointing me. In this case, I think it's just because the chorus is its own short section, so we the listeners end up feeling underwhelmed by the buildup of the verse section. Plus, the lyrics are just too repetitive; I hate how there's very little lyrical variation even though Scar is a pretty eloquent character.
Finally, the orchestration is pretty barebones - I think a lot of his stuff is done using synthesizers instead of actual instruments and voices - so I'd definitely expand on that to give it more variety for each verse and chorus. The song isn't too dynamic, it pretty much just stays at the same volume and energy level throughout ('loud and scary') so we get dulled to it pretty easily. It has just enough to sound 'big', but it reinforces my idea that Black and Chris Willis don't really work together on the musical numbers; at most Willis just hears what Black does and writes his score around the song proper. You can tell where the score ends and the song begins, and vice versa, and Black never uses big orchestration in the show's version of his songs, and I really wonder what would happen if he just didn't do that and let Willis do the actual music in the same way Zimmer and Lebo M. worked on Elton John's songs.