Assignment X

CD Review: The Best Scores of 2012

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/06/2013

CLOUD ATLAS soundtrack | ©2012 Water Tower Records

THE BEST SCORES OF 2012 BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin / Cinereach Music) An adolescent’s ability to turn a dangerous world into a place full of fantastical possibility provides the subtext for this strikingly fresh, Cajun-cum-magical realism score by director Benh Zeitlin and co-composer Dan Romer. “Beast’s” flooded island is a palpable, dangerously enchanted place in this jambalaya of music box bells, fiddles and plucked strings, strongly melodic storytelling that dances with local flavor while taking listeners to a truly new, mythic land where giant prehistoric pigs can come to life. In the their native […]Read On »

COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: NORWEGIAN WOOD soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 03/28/2012

NORWEGIAN WOOD soundtrack | ©2012 Nonesuch Records

While it’s the famed Beatles tune that spurs a Japanese man down a 1960’s-set relationship memory lane, what you’ll get here is a far more demanding type of musically pleasing love, courtesy of THERE WILL BE BLOOD‘s Jonny Greenwood. And while his latest score might not spill over with quite as much milkshake-worthy insanity, there’s again no denying that Greenwood is right at the top of the Avant-garde scoring movement between dissonance and melody. However, the trick of the Radiohead member-turned-composer is turning what could be as unlistenable as a lot of today’s “modern” classical music is into something truly […]Read On »