Thomas Newman - 1917 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 2019 [FLAC-24-48] - 知音人音乐网

Slow, melancholic strings open the album’s first cue, entitled 1917. Almost immediately the music sets an air of solemnity, of sadness, even despair. The track itself comes in at just shy of eighty seconds long, but even with that short a runtime it manages to pretty perfectly capture the solemn reflection that most now feel when considering the First World War. It’s a powerful atmospheric introduction, and a very well-crafted album opener. Up The Down Trench then kicks the pace up a notch, adding light percussion in a semi-tense build-up-to-action manner similar to elements of Newman’s previous compositional work for Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre. Despite its rather extensive six minute length, the cue doesn’t really add much to the score aside from percussive mood setting, as the musical tension described above is (unfortunately) pretty much all it has to offer. Quiet, creepy electronics then form much of the baseline of Gehenna, with a piano making an infrequent and particularly sombre appearance until the piece reaches a loud strings-heavy crescendo before then closing out as ominously as it began.

Heartfelt strings are the enjoyable centrepiece of The Night Window, where the first glimmer of properly orchestral Thomas Newman score starts to shine through. At about two minutes in, dramatic brass and rumbling drums then join the strings for a loud and rather epic musical moment before things then sadly die back down again. Tense electronics then open Tripwire, which over the course of the cue’s two minutes slowly increase both in intensity and pitch in a curiously similar manner to that of Hans Zimmer’s Why So Serious? from The Dark Knight. The sombre piano then returns with strings in A Bit Of Tin for a few minutes of warm, methodical and rather relaxing orchestral bliss. So far, the album has been quite oddly twofold, consisting of quite elegant Newman-style orchestra on the one hand and harsh, in-your-face electronics on the other. One thing that has been pretty consist however is that its all atmosphere i.e. no thematic material whatsoever, which is a bit of a shame.

Lockhouse continues down the atmospheric path, opening with ominous-sounding electronics that then build up rapidly around the ninety second mark where tense percussion joins the fray. This anxious ambience continues for another two minutes before then coming to a now rather predictable loud crescendo and then fading out. Strings return in Blake And Schofield, though curiously with the gloomy electronics still lurking in the background during the cue’s opening seconds. Melancholic woodwinds then arrive about midway through the piece, delivering a sense of stillness and sorrow that manages to pretty perfectly recapture that mournful atmosphere established by the album’s first cue. I must admit, I sighed at the next track (entitled Milk) purely because of its absurd ten minute runtime. This score so far seems intent on being primarily ambient, making the prospect of a ten minute setpiece quite…dull to say the least. Haunting electronics and a solemn piano form the first four, before the music then rapidly builds into a rather hair-raising burst of terror that then fades as quickly as it arrived. The remaining four minutes are pure atmosphere, and by that I mean literally just moody, electronic nothingness.