After seeing the movie several times, and loving it, I finally purchased the soundtrack today. It is haunting, calming, stirring, ethereal, evocative and beautiful. Appreciate that it includes the voice over of the Maori chants. Can't recommend it enough.

I recently rented the movie Whale Rider, and shortly into it became aware that the main atmospheric motif, (a kind of ambient piano riff) was in fact lifted hook line and sinker from track four of an album entitled 'Waiting for Cousteau' that was released in 1990 by Jean Michel Jarre.

The instrumentation, production and melody are identical, and unsurprisingly the interview with Lisa Gerrard on the DVD failed to include any reference to the earlier recording as an influence.

The other tracks on the Whale Rider CD/DVD bear no such resemblance and are nice evocative pieces of the subject of the movie. It's a nice easy listen, but any owners of Waiting for Cousteau out there might lift their eyebrows a little when the main theme comes over the stereo.....

If you're a fan of Lisa Gerard's "Duality" or Dead can Dance, save your money because you won't get your fix here. I found this CD unmemorable and disappointing.

Music has the power to take you to the other world, to the other time. It can make you cry and make you smile and you don't know why. The beauty of it is that the music is powered by your imagination and you start to see with your eyes closed. All of this is more than true with Lisa Gerrard's beautiful and emotional score to the Whale Rider.

Lets just make couple of things clear at first. Whalerider is not another Gladiator in any way. Gerrard's vocals are not as present here as they were in Gladiator. Her voice can be heard only a couple of times, and even then her vocals are not the main instrument. They are used only on the background. This score doesn't include any wagnerian type of recognizable themes like Gladiator did, and most of the scores nowadays. This score doesn't include any "hit tracks" either, like for example "Now We Are Free" in Gladiator.

Whale Rider is pure mood. It is a symphony of ambient. It is like the ocean, it moves and changes without any predictions. People have said that Whalerider score needs the movie to work proberly, with the story, actors and landscapes creating the emotions. Of course the score music always works best with the movie. These two elements needs each other and the music is made to elevate the film. However I think the score for Whale Rider works also on its own. I can say this because I haven't seen the movie yet. I know so little about it. But the funny thing is that after listening to Lisa Gerrard's score for a while, I suddenly started to see the story. I started to feel the atmosphere and sense the mood of the story.

What makes Whale Rider strong is the whole album and the way it is built. It starts with the sound of the ocean, which instantly sets up the mood. Then we hear voice by a girl, with a New Zealand accent, talking about the background of the story with Gerrard's music. All the tracks from this point on are building up the story piece by piece, taking listener little by little deeper in to the other world. When the album ends, we hear the sound of the ocean again and then we are taken under water and soon we will hear the whale. The story has come to the conclusion. The structure is just so beautifully crafted. There is so much depth in it.

Gerrard has composed music like a painter. She has taken a certain mood and emotion and used it to create a landscape. The music is mostly ambience, it is mostly background, but it is very rich. It has so many layers. There are so many layers of emotions and feelings happening at the same time that you find yourself weeping just because of the scale of the palette. Strings lead the way and all sorts of sound effects and human voices, including maori chanting and Gerrards own, creates textures. In some occations we can also hear the traditional instruments used by Maoris, which creates a sense of place and history. The traditional culture of the Maori people is very important in Gerrard's music in Whale Rider. It is like a tin whistle for Irland. It tells its own story and gives us some kind of perspective of the history. "Waka In The Sky" and "Go Forward" are simply beautiful examples of this.

What she does is that she keeps it very simple. And the simplicity is the key element, which keeps it so fresh and makes the score work so well. It makes it powerful and emotional. It doesn't even have a clear theme in it, but the Whale Rider is the kind of score that doesn't need one! It is a score about peace and beauty. It is a great addition to Gerrard's previous filmwork. She has created her own style, where the main thing is to create an atmosphere and set up the tone, e.g. The Insider, which had a perfect score in it. This one is different, but only in a postive way. Whale Rider takes you on a journey, and when you close your eyes and open your heart, what a journey it is.

This is a collection of mood pieces written by Lisa Gerrard for the film _Whale Rider_. There are a lot of echoes of Dead Can Dance here: a tendency for the compositions to involve first laying down a drone, then some slowly changing chords over that, and sometimes some of Ms Gerrard's own vocals on the top: world music with a Gothic accent.

So it's not groundbreaking in any sense. If you've liked Lisa Gerrard's other albums, also Dead Can Dance, then you know pretty much what to expect. But albums don't always have to be groundbreaking: being beautiful is enough.

I have a couple of minor reservations. I love Lisa Gerrard's voice, so I'd have liked to hear more of her voice in the foreground, while on this album she's mostly an ethereal presense, just heard through the mix. And I suppose I might have hoped for a more adventurous use of Maori chant, to produce something more local, more idiomatic to New Zealand.

The use of Maori women's chant (karanga and karakia don't seem the right words, when the chant is addressed to whales, though I'm speaking from ignorance there), also men's working chant, in some tracks is great, and the Maori musical elements work well in the mix. But still, I'd have been interested to have Lisa Gerrard make more of those distinctive Maori sounds. But I'm certainly happy with what I got.

As with any film music, it probably helps to have seen the film (and that's no hardship: you _should_ see "Whale Rider"), but this music does absolutely stand up by itself, without the accompanying images. If you want Lisa Gerrard songs, rather than instrumental mood pieces with vocals, then you might prefer others of her albums. But if you're prepared to take this for what it is, you'll be well rewarded.

Highly recommended.

Cheers!

Laon