Top 5 Tracks of Thomas Newman's Scores (2012-15)

Bit cheeky this one but he's the only other to have done more than one film and though the scores are same-y nonetheless they are scores.

EDIT- I didn't make it clear which is my fault that it's top 5 tracks PER score. Make it a little more interesting

1. Tennyson
2. Shanghai Drive
3. Komodo Dragon
4. Los Muertos Vivos Estan
5. Modigliani

Too easy. And it shouldn't be.

Skyfall

1) Tennyson
2) Severine
3) The Chimera
4) Komodo Dragon
5) Enquiry

Spectre

1) Backfire
2) Snow Plane
3) The Eternal City
4) Tempus Fugit
5) Madeline

reached for the last couple

Ah. If we split these in two:

Skyfall
1. Tennyson
2. Shanghai Drive
3. Komodo Dragon
4. Modigliani
5. Severine

Spectre
1. Los Muertos Vivos Estan
2. Donna Lucia
3. The Eternal City

I like bits and pieces in Backfire. Maybe Vauxhall Bridge. Eh.

That's the trouble with Spectre, soundtrack-wise, is that it has fewer options that aren't Skyfall.

Doesn't help that it retreads the most generic aspects of Skyfall's music (the action cues) for Spectre, making for rather dull and repetitive listening.

Exactly. Maybe as well he wasn't returning for NTTD. I'm intrigued at Zimmer. The film is going to be long and I am not optimistic for his score. Liked him back in the day but he seems to follow the same route nowadays. I imagine the Bond theme will be in a great deal maybe and a fair amount of drums.

Zimmer has been hit and miss for me but I'm cautiously optimistic his Bond score would be an improvement over Newman's efforts - and well, less ambient noise filler and more colour.

To clarify, the repeated tracks from SF on SP wasn't Newman's call. That was all Sam Mendes and editor Lee Smith. When they assembled the workprint, they used SF cues for temp tracks. However, Mendes thought the tracks worked so well with the footage that he decided to keep them in there, and then had Newman write a new score around the SF sessions, telling him to stick to the same sound aesthetics as SF so that SP could sound like it's continuing what SF started rather than feeling like a completely different score.

It's a shame. I do think some of the reused tracks work in context like the reprisal of "Mother" for Judi Dench, "Close Shave" for Moneypenny, etc. That way they work as recurring themes for characters. However, reusing tracks like "Someone Usually Dies" for the Nine Eyes vote and the action cues was unnecessary.

All that said, I do wish Thomas Newman had a proper crack at doing a full new score. I like a lot of the newer stuff in SP. And if he came back for a third, it would be cool to hear what he cooks up that's different from SF. I actually do like his newer stuff in SP than SF, because they have a more confident sound to them.


Anyway, my top 5s, but in chronological order as I can't rank them.

SF:

Grand Bazaar, Istanbul
Shanghai Drive
Tennyson
She's Mine
Mother

Honorable Mention: The Bloody Shot, New Digs, Komodo Dragon



SP:

Vauxhall Bridge
The Eternal City
Backfire
Silver Wraith
Madeleine

Honorable Mention: Los Muertos Vivos Estan, Secret Room, Detonation

MP wrote:

To clarify, the repeated tracks from SF on SP wasn't Newman's call. That was all Sam Mendes and editor Lee Smith. When they assembled the workprint, they used SF cues for temp tracks. However, Mendes thought the tracks worked so well with the footage that he decided to keep them in there, and then had Newman write a new score around the SF sessions, telling him to stick to the same sound aesthetics as SF so that SP could sound like it's continuing what SF started rather than feeling like a completely different score.

Interesting. Didn't know that.

MP wrote:

All that said, I do wish Thomas Newman had a proper crack at doing a full new score. I like a lot of the newer stuff in SP. And if he came back for a third, it would be cool to hear what he cooks up that's different from SF. I actually do like his newer stuff in SP than SF, because they have a more confident sound to them.

I can't subscribe to the idea that the new stuff for SP is better than SF's. Not that SF's is vastly superior, but the likes of Shanghai Drive and Tennyson far outrank anything in SP. Newman just wasn't a good choice to score a Bond movie, let alone two. So much of his music feels like it could be lifted from any other movie he has scored - it's that same sense of bleakness and sterility that pervades his soundtracks and usually takes me out of the film. And it's that that is the antithesis of James Bond.

Backfire has some decent elements, such as the choric vocals as Bond and Hinx pass Vatican City, but the rest of it is mostly just generic noise, which is what some accuse Arnold of... At least he had some beautiful motifs that he'd employ for his action sequences, even if they weren't part of the theme songs, such as in Die Another Day.

For me Newman's work is easily the best Bond music since Eric Serra's, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Speaking of Arnold, I do rank DAD as his second best score. At least with that he was swinging for the fences, yet even his fans seem to rank that one pretty low which I don't agree with. It's probably the Brosnan Era score of his that I've found myself listening to the most.

DAD is his 3rd best effort behind TND and TWINE for me. I enjoy it immensely. As noted in his similarly dedicated thread, I quite enjoy QOS also. Even as a fan of Arnold's work I still can't get behind CR's score.

To rank the two most recent eras in scores:

TND
TWINE
GE
DAD
QOS
SF
CR
SP.