Autumn sonatas

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis -The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Jesse James is a typically anachronistic American legend. While essentially nothing more than a bandit in his lifetime, his myth has long passed into American folklore as a crusader for freedom, an anti-establishment figure around whom many stories are told—a myth smelling of sawdust and gunpowder. If this almost sounds like a character out of a Nick Cave album, then you should not be surprised by this soundtrack.

Written by Cave and band mate Warren Ellis, the score captures the soul of James the outlaw and James the myth beautifully. If you know of Nick Cave solely as a witty, weird, hell-raising rock star, then you are in for a surprise. Creating a wonderful soundscape of 19th Century Americana with fiddles, glockenspiels, droning pianos and rough sounding guitars, the set is a complete one, full of subtle nuance and grand cinematic gesture from one end to another. The first track, Rather Lovely Thing, is a beautiful, lingering piece of music with entrancing piano and string work.

The proper introduction begins with Song for Jesse, with gently tinkling pianos and funereal finger-cymbals. Elsewhere, as on Falling and the stately Song for Bob, the tunes are carried by violins and cellos, simultaneously evoking feelings of dread and sepia-tinted melancholia.

The waltz-time guitar and violin of Carnival aptly underscores the point. While it evokes visions of circus tents and sawdust, it also brings to mind the desolation and emptiness at the end of the carnival. More introspective pieces like What Must Be Done deepens the pathos of this incredible myth. Another masterpiece from the redoubtable
Nick Cave.
Download the album from www.emusic.com

Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood
If Thom Yorke is Radiohead’s resident genius, then Jonny Greenwood has to be the band’s secret weapon—an auteur of the electric guitar. 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.

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. 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. 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. There Will Be Blood is a spiralling landscape of noise where furiously sawed violins and cellos battle for space. This is a work of a profoundly gifted musician.
A must-buy.
Download the album from www.emusic.com