There will be blood
NoNesuch
Outside of Radiohead, cherubic guitar-cruncher Jonny Greenwood has established himself as a formidably exploratory, experimental soundtrack composer. His meeting with Paul Thomas Anderson has plenty to do with that. Greenwood’s defining moment remains his renegade score for Anderson’s elemental epic of oil and ambition, for which the composer drilled into his classical influences and emerged with one of the 21st Century’s boldest scores yet.
Greenwood didn’t lack scoring previous. Pre-Blood, he’d furnished Simon Pummell’s experimental doc Bodysong with textured sounds and composed a piece called ‘Popcorn Superhet Receiver’ for the BBC. Alien frequencies scoured the surfaces of Radiohead’s OK Computer, too. But his union with Anderson – no slouch at music choices; consider Magnolia’s Aimee Mann heart-wringers – framed Greenwood as a composer able to navigate a film’s thickest shadows.
Just as Anderson used Mann’s music to unite isolated people across a city-sized sprawl, so Greenwood’s score pinpoints the tension between psychodrama depths and vast plains of infernal temptation. At one extreme,
Greenwood’s claim that he wrote “for the scenery” rather than characters is echoed by ‘Open Spaces’, which retunes Morricone-ish frontier music to a heightened pitch. At another, the lunging chamber strings of the feverish ‘Future Markets’ evoke that landscape’s hold on the fevered inner world of Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview, a man obsessed and possessed.
Elsewhere, Greenwood’s music for harrowed interiors and haunting exteriors is dissonant (‘Henry Plainview’) and agitated (‘Proven Lands’). True, it also shows an awareness that nothing sharpens the darkness like a little light: witness the Radiohead-ish ‘Prospectors Arrive’ or the contemplative ‘HW/Hope Of New Fields’, laments for lost souls both. Yet Greenwood’s primary focus is to burrow into profound currents of dread, a job accomplished from the tense, brooding title track to the high-end jabs of ‘Stranded The Line’.
Greenwood acknowledged debts to classical composers Penderecki and Messiaen. The former inspired his atonal lurches, the latter his use of the ondes martenot – an early electronic instrument whose odd oscillations underpin the score. Yet you’d have to look to Kubrick’s classical lifts in 2001 and The Shining for close cinematic comparisons to Greenwood’s innovations in mood-soaked abstraction.
There wouldn’t be Oscars: the score was denied a nomination because Anderson used pre-existing classical works. Yet for Greenwood, its influence extended to live outings, further Anderson collaborations, and Radiohead’s increasingly atonal output. Just as those landscapes engulfed Plainview, its haunting power is massive. It eats you up. Kevin Harley