Best Scores Of 2017

 
NUTS4R2s Top
Fifteen Scores of 2017

Okay... so I’ve been fairly ruthless again this year with my selections. If the film was released first run either at the cinema or ‘straight to home’ releases then it’s eligible on my list, as long as the score got a CD release. If it only got a vinyl release or, worse still, some kind of rubbishy electronic download (okay, those two formats are almost as bad as each other these days), then it’s not going to be on here.

Also, no archival releases are on here. As with most recent years, there have been some absolutely fantastic CDs of great, past scores in 2018, most of which would easily win out against the newer ones... so it’s not really fair to let them be on this list.

Anyway, here’s are my picks in reverse (aka ascending) order...

15. The Limehouse Golem by Johan Söderqvist
Söderqvist wrote a pretty cool thriller score which included some nice string orchestrations for this Victorian mystery tale. I could also hear some very specific influences from Jerry Goldsmith making their way into the film (although I don’t remember if those sections I’m thinking of made it onto this album). This CD was a very limited release from Varese Sarabande but... well... at least we eventually got a CD version. You can read my original review for this movie here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-limehouse-golem.html

14. Wind River by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Wind River had a very quiet and contained score, to match the icy visuals of this stark chiller. Everything seems like it’s a lesson in restraint as the score keeps sounding like it’s going to burst forth in anger at any moment. It also contains some vocal passages which I really didn’t like at first but which have grown on me and work as a part of the stand alone listening experience. My review of the accompanying film can be found here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wind-river.html

13. Pirates of the Caribbean - Salazar’s Revenge/Dead Men Tell No Tales by Geoff Zanelli
Probably the best of the poor crop of sequels to the original, much better movie, Zanelli’s score uses the themes developed by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer throughout and, it has to be said, he does so in a much less subtle but certainly way more entertaining manner than most of the sequel scores manage. I was pleased that this didn’t jettison the soundscape developed over the years and was delighted with the results. My review for the ‘not as good as the score’ movie can be found here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/pirates-of-caribbean-5.html

12. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women by Tom Howe
This is a lovely selection of cues from an amazing movie. When you have a dialogue based film with a script that sparkles the way this one does, without relying on any action sequences, some composers are better off just letting their music get out of the way as a support to the visuals. However, Tom Howe provides a rich accompaniment which raises the emotional highs and lows of the characters perfectly. It was an absolute nightmare to get hold of this CD, for some reason. After my third supplier told me it had somehow been lost in the post (How, when every other thing I ordered this year arrived safe and sound, did three copies of this from three different suppliers get lost in transit?) I despaired of ever getting to hear this before it went out of print but, thankfully, it’s here now and worth the wait. My movie review is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/professor-marston-and-wonder-women.html

11. Happy Death Day by Bear McCreary
This is one of a few movies with scores by the wonderful McCreary in it this year, for what turned out to be a kind of teen slasher remake of Groundhog Day, no less. Bear’s score matches the slow burn shock of waking up every day and I love how the first four cues on the album, titled Day One through to Day Four, have similar, chilling, slow building openings to the tracks to enhance the familiarity of where the main protagonist wakes up every morning. The film wasn’t without some minor flaws but the same couldn’t be said for the score, which is absolutely marvelous.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/happy-death-day.html

10. Dunkirk by Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe and Benjamin Wallfisch
I’m not the greatest fan of Christopher Nolan’s, admittedly epic feeling, movies but I do like the scores on some of them and this one is no exception (thankfully, it’s no Inception, either). The film is quite intense in the way it piles on the suspense but I think, if you took away this score which, it seems to me, is doing all the work, then the whole film would collapse. So a score which, I suspect, saved the move in some ways. As reviewed here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/dunkirk.html

9. Spider-Man Homecoming by Michael Giacchino
The first of two Giacchino scores in my top fifteen this year is one which I wasn’t overstruck on when I first heard it (asides from the immediate impact of the Marvel Logo music being a new version of the old cartoon series theme). However, it’s really grown on me and it’s had a fair few spins this year. I reviewed the film here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming.html

8. Blade Runner 2049 by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch
This unwanted sequel to the greatest movie ever made really missed the mark in a big way but I was really interested in seeing what the director’s more recent collaborator, Jóhann Jóhannson, was going to do with the score. Alas, he was replaced fairly late in the game with Zimmer and Wallfisch, both excellent composers in their own right but almost every decision about this film seemed ‘off’ to me. However, this final score, with an overpriced limited edition soundtrack which then turned out to be not so limited after all, is an okay listen, although it never quite seems to get to the heights of sonic empathy it really sounds like it wants to in terms of relating to the original Vangelis score for the original classic. The CD album suffers from the placement of songs dropped into the score which doesn’t help maintain a steady atmosphere in places. My review of Blade Runner 2049 is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/blade-runner-2049.html


7. War of the Planet of the Apes by Michael Giacchino
My second Giacchino score is his second score for the Planet Of The Apes series but, it’s also the first one of the modern films, as far as I am concerned, that doesn’t sound out of place with the stylistic leanings of the majority of the scores from the original, five films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. This one has some really great stuff in it including a kind of march for the apes to counter some of the rich, emotional stuff at other points in the movie. I reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/war-for-planet-of-apes.html

6. A Ghost Story by Daniel Hart
About the worst thing you can say about this truly interesting score by Daniel Hart for this amazing film is it’s too short. I could quite happily have listened to a double CD of this stuff. It even has a not unlistenable song on it which carries a lot of the emotional weight at times. My look at A Ghost Story is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/a-ghost-story.html

5. Shin Godzilla by Shiro Sagisu and Akira Ifikube
The score from Shin Godzilla is a far greater achievement than the actual movie itself, as far as I’m concerned. Shiro Sagisu’s new material blends in perfectly with the new recordings of Akira Ifikube’s melodies from some of the original films and it’s a pure joy to listen to this. The CD is a bit pricey, as it comes from Japan but, worth every penny as it’s been in my player quite a bit since it arrived. I recently reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/shin-godzilla-aka-shin-gojira.html

4. La La Land by Justin Hurwitz
Despite what I said in my initial review, this film has both a strong score and a pretty good, if small, range of songs in it too. When I’d listened to the songs a second time, after writing my review, I realised just how great they were and what I’d been missing. The album had a strange release in that it was split, unnaturally, into two albums... one for mainly score and one for mainly songs... which is an expensive way to do it, especially when I suspect most people, myself included, were going to recompile it into a proper album reflecting the combined order in film sequence. Then, towards the end of the year, a third double CD in a box was released with even more stuff and alternate material which is finally, more or less, what should have been released in the first place. My slightly wrong headed review of this movie is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/la-la-land.html

3. Jackie by Mica Levi
I was absolutely gutted this music by relative newcomer Mica Levi didn’t win the Oscar for best score last year. Well, at least it got nominated, I guess. Like her earlier Under The Skin score, this one is just pure genius and may take you to emotional places you didn’t realise you had. Any other year, this may well have been my number one choice but, as you can see below, the competition for the top spot was tough in 2017.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/jackie.html

2. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword by Daniel Pemberton
Well, this is one of those ‘not so rare as you may think’ instances when a quite terrible movie has a truly stupendous score which takes on a life of its own as a stand alone listen. This is right up there with Pemberton’s equally cool score for the same director’s recent reboot of The Man From U.N.C.L.E and it basically feels like... well... medieval rock n’ roll. The percussion and various other effects like the use of breathing as a musical instrument really serves to give a fresh and ‘beyond toe tapping’ suite of musical delights. I gave this one a lot of play and you can read my response to the less than stellar movie it’s trying its best to support here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/king-arthur-legend-of-sword.html

1. Wonder Woman by Rupert Gregson-Williams
I couldn’t believe I missed just how brilliant Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score for Wonder Woman is on my first listen through at the cinema. I sure as hell twigged it when I heard it away from the images which inspired it, though. This is a case of my number one film from 2017 and the score from the same both taking the top spot. While Gregson-Williams occasionally uses Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme from Batman VS Superman (to very good effect... less is more) he also introduced numerous rich, extremely emotional and, for sure, powerful themes which tend to sweep me off my feet every time I listen to it. In fact, when I was walking around London with earphones on and listening to this thing, I began to start tearing up exactly the same way that I do when I see the movie (actually, tearing up may be a bit of an understatement). A truly soulful set of cues which, considering just how much good music has been left off the CD, really needs an expanded 2-3 disc release from one of the boutique soundtrack labels like La La Land or Intrada. This disc has been played to death by me this year and I suspect it will be getting a lot of spins by me over the next decade or more. My review is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/wonder-woman.html

Shin Godzilla (aka Shin Gojira)

Let The Sun Shin In

Shin Godzilla (aka Shin Gojira)
Japan 2016 Directed by Hideaki Anno
and Shinji Higuchi
Manga Entertainment Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Very minor spoilers here.

Okay, I’m really grateful to be able to finally see the recent Japanese Gojira movie since the UK theatrical release towards the end of last year was practically non existent. That being said, Shin Godzilla reminded me a little of the latest Star Wars movie in terms of my general experience of it. By that I mean there are vast stretches of this movie which are deadly dull but that every now and again (every time that we see some Godzilla action, I would say) we have some really cool stuff which does a lot to outweigh the rest of the picture.

The film is actually a reboot of the character and, I believe, it’s the first time this has been properly done in Japan. Although there have been three previous ‘waves’ of native Gojira movies, each series has usually referenced at least the original 1954 version of the film. This one doesn’t and when I say it’s a reboot it’s pretty much, in some ways, a remake of that 1954 classic.

The film mainly takes place in boardrooms and focuses on the political PR and committee response to the new threat of a giant monster doing a ‘Tokyo stomp’. There are lots of actors in here who I recognised from various movies over the years and, if I could match faces to names from the terribly sparsely populated photo section on the IMDB, I could point them out more clearly. However, I can say that various people from movies such as the Takashi Kitano version of Zatoichi, Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Takashi Miike’s Ichi The Killer, among others, are here and are easily recognisable.

The film mostly takes place in various rooms with either bureaucrats trying to figure out what they should be telling the public or with a pool of ‘professional nerds’ who are coming together to find a solution to the problem at hand and, as the film progresses, sometime before the US of A, on behalf of the United Nations, drops a nuclear bomb on Tokyo in a desperate attempt to kill Godzilla. While some of these sequences are quite interesting, they do kinda get a little dull when you realise the majority of the movie is pretty much just the same kinds of discussions going on. There are not very many true hero characters who go off on their own and get into the thick of the action here... although there are plenty of candidates in this who have the kind of personality that could have carried the film in such scenes. In fact, the director seems so intent on making this look almost like a documentary film that, in one scene where officials are holding a meeting, the screen briefly blacks out and the words “Following abbreviated” are flashed up.

The film picks up a fair bit in the Godzilla carnage sequences but the introduction to the character is a bit of a slow burn.

For instance, I was completely taken aback when the sea creature who starts messing with Tokyo, who we can only see from the back fins and a huge, somewhat out of place tail, turned out not to be Godzilla at all. In fact, it looked a little like one of The Big G’s oldest foes, Anguirus. When his head finally surfaces, I couldn’t help laughing because it looked totally unrealistic with these terrible stuck on eyes. I realised that the Japanese had gone back to the whole ‘man in a suit’ way of doing things which kinda made me happy except... I just found out that the monsters in this new movie is 100% motion capture CGI. So what that means is... they’ve done their best to make them look like a badly made costume but, in fact, they aren’t (go figure). I mean, if you’d have stuck googly eyes on this thing, it could not have been more inappropriate to the tone of what I was watching.

Then came a bigger surprise because, after a while... it turns out this is Godzilla, after all. He’d just not ‘metamorphosed’ into his more familiar form yet... which he promptly does about 10 minutes later. Okay, so the strangely ridiculous eyes have gone but it still looks like a man in a suit (which I frankly love, although they might have been better going with practical costumes instead of using computers). I can also confirm that, alas, this is a much less comical Godzilla, more reminiscent of his first cinematic appearance. So anyone expecting to see him/her jumping for joy and kicking his/her heels together or teaching the offspring to blow smoke rings, as in certain previous movies, is going to be disappointed. This is a serious ‘kick Tokyo’s ass’ version of the character. How serious? Well, there were one or two surprises when he started battling those pesky human aircraft in this one.

For instance, before he starts utilising his fire breath, a little eye shield like an extra eyelid covers the eyes to stop them getting scorched. But not only does he have a fire breath... he also seems to have a laser breath, for some unknown reason, which he uses to slice up hostile aircraft and buildings as he goes about his daily carnage. The best additional surprise though, when you can accept that this creature would somehow be able to shoot laser beams out of its throat, is that the creature’s back spines can throw out an equally deadly laser grid to take out anything attacking from above. This looks duly spectacular and it’s one of the reasons I elevated it into my top 26 movies of the year (which you can read here).

That and the music.

The score combines material from composer Shiro Sagisu with new recordings of classic Godzilla themes by ‘the John Williams of Japan’, Akira Ifikube. So a lot of the familiar marches and menace music that people associate with the series are here for you to tap your toes along to. And, thankfully, Sagisu’s new compositions are, frankly, excellent and just the kind of thing you want to be listening to here. They already sound like classic Ifikube pieces and cement in with the older material perfectly. This is easily one of my favourite scores of the year, it has to be said and probably one of the better scores of the entire range of movies.

So yeah, the film uses lots of dryer, boardroom scenes to contrast with the monster shenanigans and, while I could have done with a little less meeting scenes and much more fire breathing, laser slicing, explosive action... I can kinda see why the studio went with this approach.

Shin Godzilla isn’t, in any way, a hard slog of a movie... it’s just a tad dull in certain places but it really, as I said before, makes up for it with some standout Monster VS Military action. Perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea but certainly something that I suspect will please longstanding fans of the titular monster, for sure. Check this one out if you can’t get enough of Godzilla but, if you are not that familiar with the character, maybe go back to the monochrome 1954 version instead.