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| CD Review: Sin City |
| Posted By: Andrew Granade on September 13, 2005 - 10:00 PM |
CD Review: Sin City
Sin City *** 1/2
ROBERT RODRIGUEZ, JOHN DEBNEY, GRAEME REVELL
Varèse Sarabande 302 066 6442
24 tracks - 58:16
While it's wonderful when a director takes such obvious care in the
placement and selection of music in his films (would that more
directors would follow his example), Robert Rodriguez's scores often
leave much to be desired, lacking the harmonic and rhythmic complexity
we expect from contemporary scoring.
Sin City is no exception. The
album's opening cue, "Sin City," is a good depiction of Rodriguez's
technique, as it features a straight, driving rhythm, background
ambience, and various motives floating in and out. But while there is
not much harmonically and rhythmically going on, Rodriguez cleverly
focuses on his strength, which is textural manipulation. The sounds he
generates are interesting in their own right, especially those for
saxophone, which he blares and roughens the edges on, adding a gritty
sound to this neo-noir tale. For instance, in "That Yellow Bastard,"
one of his strongest cues, he combines strings that bow hard to create
rasp with overblown brass and piano clusters. While other composers
might write dense lines of polyphony to create a sound of ordered
chaos, Rodriguez does it with texture in this cue. He then, strangely,
builds tension that he never releases, instead simply ending the cue by
having the instruments slowly fall away.
The most interesting aspect of this score is not Rodriguez's technique,
but rather that he shares writing credit with two other composers. He
knew that he would not have time to finish the entire score himself,
and as the movie contains three distinct storylines, he chose to ask
composers with whom he had worked before to score the separate
episodes. By giving each composer the same theme to work from and
specific instrumentations to use (as I said, he understands texture),
the score is actually unified. It is a marvelous idea and well executed.
Graeme Revell did the Marv episode and brought his typical ambient
sound. Revell's scores are rarely full of complex, recurring themes or
motives, instead focusing on mood and character. Listen to "The Hard
Goodbye," for an example. His use of the sax is languid, and by
combining it with our good friend the wailing woman, he creates an
atmosphere we immediately recognize as noir, but with a twist. He then
sets up an arrhythmic ostinato and allows it to grow, slowly layering
electronics and acoustic instruments and shifting meters unexpectedly
to create a nice action cue.
John Debney was brought in for the Dwight episode and, as you expect
from his previous scores, his section is the most traditional in its
orchestration and harkens the most back to 1940s noir stylings. His
melody for "Dwight" on flugel and sax is mysterious and with its dark
coloring would fit in perfectly in any Sam Spade movie. By the time it
appears in the score's best cue, "The Big Fat Kill," it has been
compressed in its intervals and accompanied by the string section,
shows the moral descent of this episode's main character. This cue is
spellbinding.
Overall, in terms of complexity of writing and originality of playing
with noir musical archetypes, Debney's contribution is the most
rewarding and warrants the most sustained listening, but that doesn't
mean there aren't other interesting things to hear throughout.
Rodriguez even throws in a concert work by Eduardo Mata that is
amazing, but out of place on an album that seeks to be, and is, so
unified in tone and effect. Still, as an exercise in collaboration, Sin City excels and makes me long
to hear other interesting twists on contemporary
scoring. -- Andrew Granade
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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Today in Film Score History:
December 6 |
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| Dave Brubeck born (1920) |
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| Hans Zimmer begins recording his score for Broken Arrow (1995) |
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| Lalo Schifrin begins recording the original soundtrack LP to Bullitt (1968) |
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| Lyn Murray born (1909) |
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| Maury Laws born (1923) |
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| Morgan Lewis died (1968) |
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| Mort Glickman born (1898) |
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| Patrick Williams records his score for The Streets of San Francisco episode “Bitter Wine” (1972) |
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| Piero Piccioni born (1921) |
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| Recording sessions begin for Sol Kaplan’s score for Destination Gobi (1952) |
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| Richard Markowitz died (1994) |
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| Roberto Pregadio born (1928) |
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| Willie Hutch born (1944) |
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