There Will Be Blood

Here's another bit of music I heard recently and have fallen in love with it. The review in another form will appear shortly in BT More. Here's the unedited version.

Johnny Greenwood- There will be Blood

If Thom Yorke is Radiohead’s resident genius, then Johnny Greenwood has to be the band’s secret weapon. He is one of the best English guitar players to emerge from the Nineties, along with Blur’s Graham Coxon. But if the latter is a pop stylist par excellence, the former is an auteur of the instrument, equally capable of ballsy riffing and getting weird sounds that you wouldn’t believe could be coaxed out of an electric guitar. However, Greenwood’s musical palette far outstrips anything that he’s done to date with Radiohead. Following Greenwood’s stint as BBC’s in-house composer in 2005, director Paul Anderson approached him to score his epic oil movie There Will Be Blood. Now scoring a film is not your average rockstar gig. Not only does it call for a certain cinematic sensibility of mood and tone, but also economy and setting. This breathtakingly bleak score delivers on all these counts, and in spades. If There Will Be Blood is about wide open spaces, loneliness and the heart of darkness of a ruthless man, then the soundtrack echoes it with grand orchestral sweeps of cellos and violins and counterpoint melodies which get under your skin and haunt relentlessly. On viewing the film, one is as struck by the moments of silence as by the music. Running at a sparse thirty-something minutes, you can listen to the soundtrack at one sitting and be stunned by it. Opening with the grave vistas of Open Spaces scored for cello and violin, the piece draws the listener in with its glissandos (the music sliding from one pitch to another) - it’s the musical equivalent of seeing a blood red sunrise over a vast desert landscape. Then the strident, staccato cellos of Future Markets arrive, with restless plucked violin strings acting as a counterpoint to a raging string section. The emotion is occasionally relieved by pieces of such beauty as Hope of New Fields, where violins create a mood of heartbreaking beauty. Greenwood reserves the bleakest soundscapes for the central pieces of Henry Plainview and There Will Be Blood. In the former, an unrelenting character study of the cold, ruthless oilman, the strings fade in from the middle distance like a squadron of fighter planes, building on sound and fury only to crash like a gigantic wave and retreat. Thereafter, the track becomes a succession of long held notes blowing like the barren soul of Henry Plainview. There Will Be Blood builds similarly, and then becomes a spiraling landscape of noise where furiously sawed violins and cellos battle for space, creating sonic mayhem. Greenwood shows his indebtedness to such path breaking 20^th century Classical composers as the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Frenchman Oliver Messiaen. This is a work of a profoundly gifted musician.