There Will Be Blood - Soundtrack

The first thing I noticed about There Will Be Blood was how metal its title font was. In this case, though, the black metal was black gold. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood scored Paul Thomas Anderson's portrait, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil!, of oilman Henry Plainview. If you see one film this year, see this one.

Future Markets
There Will Be Blood

Unlike most pop musicians entrusted with soundtracks, Greenwood doesn't just cobble together songs. He's using real strings and scoring the film's details. I'm wary of non-classically trained celebrities wielding classical resources just because they have money. But Greenwood got viola lessons as a child; more importantly, he got on-the-job training as BBC's composer-in-residence, which meant having the BBC Concert Orchestra at his disposal.

The training has paid off, as There Will Be Blood has fine music. Whether it has a fine soundtrack is debatable. The combination of emotionally wrenching movie and emotionally wrenching music is often too much. I don't like being manipulated, to be told, "Feel anxious, now feel sad, etc." But Greenwood does help raise climaxes to fever pitches. Perhaps they would have been even more devastating had he stayed silent (see Jim Jarmusch; see also the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, which has very little music).

Modern dissonance and microtone-heavy glissandos are jarring to hear over scenes of the Wild West. Perhaps such anachronism speaks to the story's timelessness. Capitalism and religion are still snakes as bedmates. I prefer hearing the soundtrack by itself (inexplicably, it omits the movie's most thilling music, an unforgettably percussive squall). But for better or for worse, its sounds are now inextricably tied to the best attempt at The Great American Film in years.

This soundtrack is available at Amazon, physically and digitally.