The Singles Jukebox

For Game of Thrones fans.

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

Claire Biddles: This is nice enough in the way that all piano soundtrack music is nice enough. I don’t watch Game of Thrones so I don’t know if this soundtracks something particularly significant which elevates it. Is it better when accompanied by dragons? Northern men boffing their cousins? Meandering soundtrack music only really works on its own for me if I can link it to images to heighten it. I listen to Mogwai’s soundtrack to The Returned all the time, despite not liking anything else by Mogwai — to me all their music sounds like soundtrack music, but this one reminds me of the images I have already seen, the connections I already made. The sound conjures the images conjures the emotion. And surely the effectiveness of a soundtrack is measured this way? A bad soundtrack feels invasive; a good one enhances. But I don’t have any images for this, so I can just say it’s fine. Listening makes me feel the same as the half hour in my office on a Tuesday when everyone else talks about Game of Thrones — I can just about keep up with the references but it’s just semantics, no meaning.
[4]

Iain Mew: I recently joined the Twitter-mocking of BBC commentators on Drake’s historic run at UK #1 who suggested he was little-known until recently. Yet here I am only just having my first direct exposure to something culturally massive (and to a track which, even outside of the context of watching Game of Thrones, more people have listened to than a good proportion of the stuff we cover). And my reaction, too, is that I can’t relate to it and it goes on for 15 weeks.
[3]

Katie Gill: I don’t watch Game of Thrones. So what’s the major important scene that this scores? Because a track from a tv show that gets this much attention (specifically #1 on Billboard‘s Spotify Viral 50 chart, what the fuck that’s so weird) has got to be from like, Dany’s dragons setting things on fire or Lena Headey sexing up her brother. Because this is so obviously scored to the climax of some scene–and not knowing what said scene is, I have absolutely no emotional attachment to this whatsoever. And, as such, I’m a lot more critical of it. We all know that the scene a piece of music is featured in can make or break someone’s emotional attachment to said piece: Exhibit A can be found right here. Without that knowledge of what “Light of the Seven” is calling to, I’m left with a very pretty, if way too long, piano piece that weirdly segues into pipe organs and ends with a climax that should have come a minute and a half earlier.
[4]

Will Adams: In the first half of the piece, the biggest motif ends up being the overlong rests between phrases, like an amateur improviser deciding where to go next. In the second half, it’s praying that the boys choir doesn’t come back.
[3]

Madeleine Lee: This strikes me as the kind of song YouTube piano cover aficionados love, for its easily recognizable refrain and apparent challenge level. But when I hear those fifth intervals come back again and again for the first four minutes or so I just think, is someone going to come back from the bathroom to push play on the DVD menu or what?
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Why, I do listen to soundtracks of things other than video games or chick flicks of the ’90s. Instrumental soundtracks, too; soundtracks standalone, too. For the past two years I’ve gotten heavy rotation out of Thom Hanreich, Rene Aubry and Jun Miyake on the Pina soundtrack. But that has one key improvement over this: it’s scored — and paced — for dance.
[4]

William John: I got back into Game of Thrones this year after a few seasons off (too many indistinguishable white men with beards and basic Anglo names but with one or two letters changed). A key feature of the show I’ve observed as a relatively passive non-expert is its capacity to create characters so heinously evil that someone who has plotted innumerable murders and has sex with their brother on the regular merely ranks as “problematic” in the overall hierarchy. In “Light Of The Seven,” given prominence in the latest season finale, Ramin Djawadi’s ominous cellos and organ are paired with devastating, gossamer piano. It’s an appropriate soundtrack for “problematic” Cersei Lannister’s implementation of the end of everything, but divorced from the dramatic visuals, it’s not music I’d return to in a hurry. Could we get a Susanne Sundfør remix?
[6]