Western European Music Invades
On The Hustle, Anne Dudley opts for a vibrant and energetic French and Mediterranean style. While the score is built largely off of variations on a handful of themes and motifs, the short runtime keeps this repetition from dragging the score down. Dudley’s score is refreshing for the comedy genre, which recently has had a dearth of good original music.
Daniel Bloom delivers a striking and rather progressive jazz score for Dolce Fine Giornata. The heart of Bloom’s score is his piano work, which ranges from more suave melodies to discordance, arrhythmic interludes, and repetition.
Calogero’s score for Les Plus Belles Annees D’une Vie is the perfect example of why so many consider Paris the city of love and French the language of love. Calogero fills the score with sultry piano and vocals, backed by a slow playing accordion. The downside is that the score only contains five different songs, with another eight songs being slight variants. This lack of varierty drags down the score as it quickly gets over-repetitive.
Bear McCreary Continues to Impress
Bear McCreary accomplished the rare feat of releasing three scores in one month, the best of which is The Professor and the Madman. McCreary creates a somber yet inquisitive atmosphere through the use of repetitive violin melodies that eventually crescendo into a fast-paced explosion.
Dan the Automator, one of the biggest names in alternative hip hop, makes his first film foray with Booksmart. The score expresses the carefree attitude of adolescence through funky hip hop, electronic, and repeated dialogue sampled from the film. The score is intoxicating, addictive, and oozes.
Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek’s score for Deadwood conjures up nostalgia that had been previously buried for the past decade. Their score mixes all the best of western music, from saloon piano to the oppression of atmospheric strings.