It was a year when both we at Empire and the good folk of BBC Radio celebrated the ground-shaking majesty of the movie soundtrack. But which fresh scores and soundtracks caught our ear during the 12 months just past? It may not have been a vintage period for soundtracks, but any year that boasted efforts from John Williams and Hans Zimmer, had Jay-Z overseeing the soundtrack to an F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation, Tom Tykwer and Shane Carruth adding the role of composer to already arduous directorial gigs and Danny Boyle reuniting with one half of Underworld can’t be bad. Here’s our pick of the ten records you’d want under the Christmas tree.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
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LINCOLN
Still belting out effortlessly classy Spielberg soundtracks, John Williams had a typically industrious year. When most 80 year-olds (and, in fairness, quite a few 30-somethings) were looking for the remote control and a cuppa, Williams was signing up for the new Star Wars movie, turning out a soundtrack for The Book Thief and picking up an(other) Oscar nomination for Lincoln. The latter, while not as instantly catchy as his very finest work, was still a yard better than most other contenders, boasting a main theme that bristled with presidential grandeur and a suitably stirring arrangement of ‘Battle Cry Of Freedom’. For those who complained that the track title ‘Appomattox, April 9, 1865’ was a massive plot spoiler, wait until you get to the bit in the film where Lincoln dies.
CLOUD ATLAS
Cloud Atlas co-writer, co-director, co-producer and probable co-tea-maker, Tom ‘When Does He Sleep?’ Tykwer’s joint soundtrack credit makes him possibly the co-est man in movie history. A true creative powerhouse, he teamed up again with German composer Reinhold Heil and Australian Johnny Klimek, his fellow Perfume alumni, for a score that had to expand on the film’s multiple, genre-twisting threads and knit them together all at the same time. Then there was the additional pressure of actually have to write the fictional Cloud Atlas Sextet that plays a role in the plot, a Debussy-esque piece of classical elegance, as well as central motifs in ‘All Boundaries Are Conventions’ and ‘The Cloud Atlas March’ to glue the six story arcs together. An unscorable score for an unfilmable film? Apparently not.
PRINCE AVALANCHE
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IRON MAN 3
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THE GREAT GATSBY
MUSCLE SHOALS
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GRAVITY
The British composer tackled the unique challenge of giving voice to the noiseless expanse of space with a score that edged delicately from melody to ambient soundscape and back again over its 16 cues. Alfonso Cuarón’s brief called for a sense of perpetual motion, eshewing the percussion so beloved of action scores and recording instruments in isolation to lend intimacy to the mini-apocalypse unfolding above an oblivious Earth. Highlights include ‘Shenzou’, a gradually swelling concerto of spacy scares, the haunting beauty of main theme ‘Gravity’, and an 11-minute epic, ‘Don’t Let Go’, that toggles through just about every emotional state available to a imperilled astronaut, and a few more besides.
DJANGO UNCHAINED
Another year, another uniquely QT-ified movie soundscape. This one, for Tarantino’s slice of blood-splattered spaghetti coolness, is replete with callbacks to the Westerns to which the film paid homage as well as more contemporary rap cuts from Rick Ross (‘100 Black Coffins’), RZA (‘Django’) and the raw-like-a-chainsaw ‘Unchained’ by James Brown and 2Pac. The film’s fuse was lit by Rocky Roberts and Luis Bacalov’s theme to the Sergio Corbucci Django, but there’s also plenty of Ennio Morricone for fans of the genre to appreciate. The great man initially dismissed the results as being "without coherence" but later released a statement claiming that the remarks were out of context and expressing his "great respect" for Tarantino.
WARM BODIES
