Score Awe

It wasn’t so long ago that film scores were treated with a hi-brow snootiness – like the classical section in your local record shop, they existed  behind a metaphorical glass wall of nerdy exclusiveness, the sort of place where only lecturers, Classic FM presenters and Stephen Fry dare to venture. Not now though – as Daft Punk’s mind-blowing Tron Legacy soundtrack, out this week, demonstrates in neon-lit explosions, film scores are the new rock’n’roll, swaggering out of the long cast shadow of their star-studded sibling, the motion picture soundtrack. As underlined by the Twilight series’ ham-fisted attempt at chucking as many credible and cost-a-lot artists at the wall and seeing what sticks, soundtracks are not cool. Scores are.

2010 has played host to three stellar scores – first, Hans Zimmer’s Johnny Marr-featuring Inception soundtrack, complete with that big fucking horn sound and drums the size of a continent, was widely acclaimed upon the brain-frazzling blockbuster’s release earlier this summer. Zimmer was arguably striding down a clearing of his own making here – the architect of more blockbuster scores than Harry Redknapp’s Spurs team, it was with the dramatic, bold bluster of his Dark Knight score that film scores slipped out of the realms of, well, people who don’t get out much. Inception raised the bar further, though – listen, as ‘Dream Is Collapsing’ gradually swells around Johnny Marr’s stark, industrial riff into a surge of militant, caustic strings, or the rolling drum emotional cascade of ‘528491’. It’s certainly more emotive than anything Klaxons managed on their last record, anyway.

Trent Reznor’s work on The Social Network with Atticus Ross, meanwhile, veers away from the gritty electro swarm you’d expect from the NiN man and into a warm electro glide – perhaps reflecting the lack of hi-octane action in a film about one man and his way with html codes. The brilliance of Reznor’s score is in its creeping simplicity – the brooding buzz of ‘In Motion’, the calm, ever-so-slightly demented austerity of ‘Hand Covers Bruise’ and the Nutcracker-reworking space march of ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’.

Which brings us to Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack which, unlike the two noted above, arguably has people more excited than the actual film. Like all great film scores, it’s a mirror image of the themes central to what its soundtracking; a cross-collision of worlds, where Daft Punk’s futuristic electronica meets a classical, panoramic orchestral swell. It’s at all times brilliant; the opening one-two-three of ‘Overture’, ‘The Grid’ and ‘The Son Of Flynn’ are jaw-droppingly hypnotic, with ‘Derezzed’ pure Daft Punk’d digital-dancefloor adrenaline and ‘Fall’ a wave of sonic intensity. It’s exhilarating – more exhilarating than any run-of-the-norm soundtrack, more exciting, in fact, than most releases this year. It’s why bands like Muse shouldn’t be wasting their time in penning ‘The Resistance’-afterthoughts for Twilight soundtracks. Film scores were made for a brain as mad as Matt Bellamy’s – it’s only a matter of time, surely, before he and his like join Daft Punk et al in the brave new world of film scoring…