Buy it... if you can appreciate an extremely diverse collection of percussion and vocals over a relatively simplistic orchestral construct.

Avoid it... if the pieces of music you've heard from the score sound far too similar to Hans Zimmer's stereotypical Media Ventures sound to salvage the worth of the album.

Howard

Blood Diamond: (James Newton Howard) Director Edward Zwick is a thinking man's moviemaker, giving intellectually world-conscious viewers tremendous historical films to chew on. In the case of Blood Diamond, the setting is Sierra Leone in 1999, torn apart by civil war, smuggling, and meddling by foreign powers. The film tells the story of three individuals brought together by the conflict: one a farmer violently torn from his family and in desperate search for them, one a South African soldier of fortune seeking an illegal diamond to sell, and one an American journalist risking her life to expose the diamond trade. Zwick shows the horrors of the region without hesitation, with violence so hardened that the atrocities strike your attention away from the narrative of the three primary characters. It's a rare miss overall for Zwick, who hired veteran composer James Newton Howard for the extremely diverse music for Blood Diamond. Howard joins James Horner and Hans Zimmer as notable collaborators with Zwick, whose films often tend to yield strong, if not outstanding scores. The diversity of Howard's talents would be confirmed to the highest degree in Blood Diamond, with the resulting score offering a wide range of cultural sounds appropriate to the region. He merges an orchestra (minus a traditional woodwind section) with multiple choirs and a plethora of soloists, ranging in specialty from the oud to the duduk. Prayer samples from Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn are even interpolated. These performers and vocals originate from all over the world, providing Blood Diamond with a score rich with fascinating ethnic performances. Howard would tie all of these elements together with a variant on a tribal song that serves as the relatively simplistic, but extremely satisfying title theme for the film.

From the perspective of a film score collector, the most interesting observation about the music for Blood Diamond is that it sounds in many parts like a true Hans Zimmer score. Maybe Zwick had Tears of the Sun in mind when consulting with Howard, but, conversely, maybe Howard achieved the sound completely by accident. Either way, Howard proves in Blood Diamond that he can expand upon Zimmer's styles better than Zimmer himself. The concept of Blood Diamond is this: take a simplistic set of themes and rhythms and flesh them out with outrageously diverse sounds and mix them into a result that defies the underlying simplicity. While the primary theme resembles the qualities of a tribal song, it also follows stereotypical, minor key progressions of a very basic Media Ventures theme. Howard often hands this theme to a unified string section, furthering the connection. The action pieces feature frenetic, rhythmic pounding of varied percussion and quick brass spikes also reminiscent of a score like Tears of the Sun. A nearly constant electronic element is also present, from the synthetic wailing of a guitar to an extremely powerful base. A solo flute over percussion, solo female voice, expansive bass, and heavy strings in "Crossing the Bridge" absolutely begs for comparison to similarly harmonic sequences in Zimmer's Beyond Rangoon. Where Howard manages to excel beyond this Zimmer template is in two areas: pacing and instrumentation. The selection of specialty instruments has already been applauded, to some extent, though a special mention also needs to go to the merging of the two different choirs for the project. When Howard inserts his set of vocals over a percussively powerful thematic progression (as in "Solomon Vandy"), it's more elegant and authentic in its rendering.

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The superb pacing of the score is a carry-over from Lady in the Water, a Howard effort from earlier in 2006 made irresistible by its keen sense of movement. The simplicity of the title theme in Blood Diamond allows Howard to roll it along as effortlessly here as he did in Lady in the Water. Several sensitive cues extend lengthy performances of this theme, and while it may be repetitive in the fact that it has only one measure of variation in its bars, its highly exotic conveyance is addictive. The light electronic presence at the end of "London" is complete proof of the effectiveness of synthetics in a stunningly beautiful role amongst a full orchestral and choral ensemble. The action material is not quite as listenable, and with their faint similarities to the brutality of Black Hawk Down, wild cues like "Village Attack" and "Fall of Freetown" will interest you for only one listen. Overall, Blood Diamond is a fascinating, but somewhat unrewarding listening experience. If only Howard had been able to fuse the pacing and mixing of the softer cues in some way to make the action cues flow with better consistency, the score could have been magnificent. As it stands, parts of it suffer from a hyperactive bass region caused by incessantly rolling percussion. Still, the six or seven conversational cues featuring the title theme, along with the harmonious "Crossing the Bridge" cue, make for a very strong listening experience apart from the film. On the other hand, the rap song featured over the end credits of film is a horrific inclusion (Zwick actually had a hand in writing that trash?), and score collectors will be well served by ignoring the songs at the end of the album. The score has its flaws, but with some rearrangement on your own compilations, what you get from Blood Diamond will be extremely satisfying. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31 (in 53 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.16 (in 58,041 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.