Sherlock: Official Television Soundtrack Review (3/5)

Lock the doors, bring the music of Holmes back into your life, but only if you're a big fan of the show!
This new soundtrack from Silva Screen Records compiles the music of Sherlock's first season of three episodes (i.e. A Study In Pink; The Blind Banker and The Great Game), and like the annual Doctor Who series releases from the same music publisher, the album leaves something of an acquired taste. If you're a mainstream viewer who simply tunes into the series to see its new storylines, then this definitely isn't for you, yet even if you consider yourself a hardcore fan of the show, you may still be left wondering as to the point of having a number of fairly similar tracks which carry an overriding theme straight from the theme tune throughout. Heck, even I'm not going to get this release, and I'm a BIG fan of both Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' fabulous new modern reinterpretation and of the Silva Screen range. Simply put, although the ever-brilliant Opening Titles and The Game Is On set a nice benchmark for the tone and structure of many of the pieces that follow, this just means that numbers like Pink, Pursuit, Light-fingered and A Man Who Can are left feeling sheerly repetitive come the album's end, with only a couple of nice distinguishing highlights like Woman on the Slab and Final Act serving to mix things up a bit towards the tracklist's climax. Whereas Murray Gold impressively manages to keep his tones and melodies for each separate episode of Who unique and innovative, in many ways Sherlock rests on its familiar theme in order to maintain a sense of continuity and audience recognition of the building-up of a intelligence-based or action orientated setpiece, a trait which can't really be portrayed as accurately on CDs or iPods as it can on a television set. For now, I'd recommend sticking to the admirably priced Series One and Series Two DVD and Blu-Ray boxsets, both of which contain a great special feature and pack in some of the best TV episodes of recent history to boot. I'll let you know whether the Series Two soundtrack changes things up at all later month, but in this instance I'd say things are too samey to warrant your time listening to any piece except the first and final tracks (both of which can be found for less than a pound each on iTunes).