Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if your brain cannot get enough of Elliot Goldenthal's brilliant capability to create discord of immense torment within individual cues, for Cobb is a sentimental warm-up act for Titus. Avoid it... if your heart simply cannot tolerate the schizophrenia that results when Goldenthal intentionally flaunts disparate musical devices in a sonic battle that inevitably leads to a maddening album experience. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Cobb: (Elliot Goldenthal) The worst kind of movie you could have released late in 1994 was one about the American sport of baseball. A labor disagreement between the players' union and the owners of the clubs caused Major League Baseball to become the first professional sport in the country to lose an entire postseason due to a strike. Amidst intense fan discontent, Warner Brothers released a biographical movie about baseball legend Ty Cobb, one based upon the biographical work that sportswriter Al Stump did with Cobb in the last years of his life. Despite all the magnificent achievements that Cobb managed on the baseball field, he was an impossible personality to deal with, a vindictive and abusive man who had few friends by the time of his death. The Ron Shelton movie that detailed the relationship between Stump and Cobb (and told of the latter's career in retrospect) was challenged itself by a bittersweet personality, the depictions of Cobb and his legendary outbursts delivered without remorse by Tommy Lee Jones. Its release at the end of 1994 all but doomed its prospects, and generally poor reviews of the unsavory topic combined with the disdain of most towards baseball at the time to cause Cobb to become one of the year's most embarrassing fiscal disasters at the box office. Other than Jones' lead performance, one of the few enduring qualities of Cobb worth mentioning is Elliot Goldenthal's score. The composer was enjoying the most fruitful period of his career in terms of mainstream film scoring, transitioning into a series of blockbuster science-fiction and fantasy assignments noted for their wildly inventive and unconventional music. By 1994, he was a known commodity, supplying films with strikingly intelligent music that often applied instrumental techniques of unique character where unnecessary. He was developing a reputation for writing not only challenging orchestral scores, but extremely schizophrenic ones as well. While his involvement with projects like Batman Forever and Titus yielded the craziest and least consistent stylistic scores during this period, Cobb is a slightly more cohesive sibling to these works. Goldenthal has never been afraid to force disparate musical genres into a single score (and even individual cues), and this 1994 effort is clearly an instance where the composer intentionally pitted a variety of sounds against each other to cause a feeling of torment and discord. It's difficult to dismiss Cobb because of the consequent schizophrenia that it so adeptly flaunts, but the score is nevertheless a fascinatingly maddening experience on album. Expect to read many accounts that applaud Goldenthal's approach to Cobb, most of which once again glowing about the composer's wildly inventive clashes of musical identities. Indeed, there has to be intellectual appreciation of what the composer accomplishes here; rarely do you hear film music with so many intentional collisions of disparate tones, genres, rhythms, and pitches. At the same time, Cobb is a score without any sensible cohesion outside of its direct adherence to the context of the movie. On one hand, you hear Goldenthal addressing the pastoral aspect of the sport and its legend, using a wholesome trumpet theme over sentimental strings for what little sincerely caring angle exists in the story. Heard in "Variations on an Old Baptist Hymn" and "Stump Meets Cobb," the idea dissolves in much of the score until a melancholy reprise in "Cobb Dies." Even within these seemingly wholesome passages, Goldenthal toys with the progressions of the theme to twist it into the minor key at periodic intervals. The same technique permeates the lengthy Americana string performances in the "Cooperstown Aria" cues and "The Homecoming," all of which brooding more often than not. Other motifs exist in the score, but not to a structurally important end. Rather, the score's chaotic blend of vintage jazz, hymns from America's Deep South, and roaring action sequences keep the listener guessing. The opening hymn utilizes Goldenthal's own gritty, soulful vocals in eerie layers, and "Stump Meets Cobb" features unnaturally skittish string figures to perhaps represent the scheming Stump. While "Nevada Nightlight" and "Meant Monk" present straight forward vintage night club jazz, "Newsreel Mirror" and "Georgia Peach Rag" intentionally mangle that genre with extremely abrasive brass and woodwind textures supplemented by groaning dissonance and shattering percussion that wouldn't be out of place in Alien 3. The two "Reno Ho" cues offer tremendous symphonic action akin to Goldenthal's Final Fantasy work (stripped back in "Sour Mash Scherzo"). Softer cues of battling tones on woodwinds and strings in "Winter Walk" and "Hart and Hunter" are unsettling at best. Throaty horror overtakes the pastoral side in "The Baptism," a cue that ends with a rowdy crescendo of pure, swirling Goldenthal character. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the cue "The Beast Within," inspired by Alien 3, is credited and included on this soundtrack, followed by the vintage baseball-appropriate song "The Ball Game." All together, every moment of Cobb contains Goldenthal's usual brilliance of construct and instrumentation, but unless you specifically seek the composer's score to appreciate them intellectually, don't expect this work to hit a home run. Like many of the composer's most impressive achievements, Cobb could drive a person crazy.
Music as Heard on Album: *** Overall: **** Track Listings:
Total Time: 42:50
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