First listen Impressions: Michael Jackson - Immortal

Listening to some samples of the new Immortal soundtrack for the Michael Jackson Cirque de Soeli show. Its not a full review, just some initial bullet point esque opinions. As it it just a soundtrack you could say its something of a cash in but on the whole, its not too shabby at all!

• One of the best things about it is its tracklisting: it has about 12 or so songs on it that wouldn't be familiar to people only familiar with his work with Quincy Jones. I say fair dues for not including just the big hits that everyone would know, so it may encourage people to investigate his 90's (which I thought was criminally overlooked) material more. 

• There's also a good number of mash-ups here, whilst they're all pretty good (and some are really good) my only greivance with that is that too often one song just kind of goes into another. The songs aren't really mixed together as such or played off each other. The Immortal Megamix sounds really good but Don't Stop Till You Get Enough just sort of goes into Billie Jean with no real build up which is a shame as a proper mixing of the two would sound phenomenal I think.

• The tracks aren't vastly different to the studio versions a lot of the time which is good, so I never heard a song and thought "What the hell have they done to this?". They've just tweaked the arrangements more or less. However, sometimes it doesn't really work. Human Nature has some new bits that don't really go with the original and it does spoil it slightly. Having said that, I'm hard to please with remixes of that song to be honest as I love the original so much. Also, you've got to give the people behind this some credit, remixing a body of work as iconic as Michael Jackson's would be hard and as the originals are so well known any tweaks are going to come as a bit of a shock

• It doesn't rip off any live arrangments from tours either which is nice. Listening to it, it feels like they've tried to make an individual soundtrack and a lot of the songs here had never been performed live.

• There is 27 tracks on the CD which is a lot. As such, basically all of the songs and mixes are much shorter than the originals or any live arrangment Michael would have used. Some of the songs loose mommentum for that I think, Wanna Be Starting Something is only half the length it originally would have been which sort of kills the build up to the "Mama se mama sa mama coo sa" chant. Its like they'

• The short lengths are a hindrance on the mash-up tracks too. A lot of them tend to be more focused on one track than the other. For instance, Speechless and Human Nature are paired up which I thought would be brilliant. In reality, 20 seconds in it goes straight into Human Nature and there is no more elements of Speechless used. Don't get me wrong, it sounds good but I do think some mash-ups would benefit from a mash up of tracks more

Overall its perfectly decent, even if it is a bit of a cash in. I hope his studio albums being remastered becomes a priority now, Off The Wall is begging for a deluxe edition treatment! Having said that, with Bad 25 next year it doesn't look likely for a while.