Buy it... if you have a proven track record of success with the sound design that Cliff Martinez provides for films, for his output for Drive, aside from a few more pleasantly tonal passages, is extremely typical to his limited range.

Avoid it... if you have difficulty forming emotional connections with anonymously droning, ambient, electronic scores meant to intentionally emphasize vague ethos and distorted realities.

Martinez

Drive: (Cliff Martinez) One of the enduringly curious aspects of downbeat thrillers with outrageous and violent displays of depravity is how popular they can be if they are well executed. It doesn't matter how brutal and senseless the killings shown may be so long as they are glorified with unique appeal. The 2011 thriller Drive is one such example of a film with absolutely no redeemable social mores and a depressing storyline that has enjoyed immense critical and popular success because of exemplary script-writing, casting, and cinematography. As a tribute to the car-related crime movies of decades prior, Drive offers a fascinating character study of an unnamed man (played by Ryan Gosling) whose only true talent in life is driving cars and will do any task that can take advantage of those skills. He's a stunt driver and auto mechanic by day but a getaway driver for hire by night, living by strict rules of communication and avoiding personal relationships. When he becomes attached to his neighbor and her son, he immerses himself deeper into a crime syndicate than he ever intended to be, all in an effort to buy the protection of his neighbors. Depending on how you look upon the distorted reality of this movie's criminal universe, perhaps you could call his efforts a triumph, but there is little happiness implied at the end of the tunnel for anyone involved. Style is key to the success of Drive, and director Nicolas Winding Refn intentionally sought music for the film that would reflect the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of the primary character's motives. He had been a fan of Cliff Martinez's score for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and hired the composer to write what he deemed "retro 80's-ish, synthesizer Europop." Martinez, after wowing listeners with his original "sound design scores" for Traffic, Narc, and Solaris ten years prior, had dropped off of the mainstream radar until 2011 represented a significant comeback in his career. From his trio of Contagion, The Lincoln Lawyer and Drive in that year, general movie-goers and his collectors have rallied behind Drive as the pinnacle of the three. A wide range of praise landed upon Martinez for his work for this film, despite the fact that it is largely nothing different from what he has written for several other pictures. The music does indeed fulfill the director's wishes in supplying an intentionally vague, ambient soundscape, but outside of achieving this simple task, it's more likely that the accolades Martinez is receiving for Drive are a result of the other qualities of the film rather than any particularly transcendent aspect of his music.

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To say that Martinez has been manipulating the same music to apply to all of his assignments through the years would be unfair to the composer, for he does have some variance in his methods, but to casual ears, you'll be hard-pressed to hear anything radically new from him in his selection of 2011 scores. The ingredients in Drive include the usual synthesizer array, a cristal baschet (essentially a glass harmonica, which is rendered useless in an otherwise synthetic environment because it has no organic tone anyway), electric guitar, saz, and sitar, all of which manipulated heavily to subtract all the vibrant qualities of those instruments out of the equation. There is no thematic development in the score, nor is there rhythmic cohesion. Martinez does reprise his clicking loops from his other works, though they are softer and less focused here. Only in "Bride of Deluxe" does he really push them into the 80's "Europop" realm that the director requested. Rather unusual for Martinez is his application of tonal shifts to his keyboarding in this and "Hammer," among others, faintly echoing the drama inherent in Vangelis' mannerisms of the target era. Addressing the understated love story, this surprisingly pleasant material is a welcome reminder of Solaris, albeit brief. At the same time, outside of a few of the passages for the disgusting hand-to-hand violence in the film, Martinez refuses to really throw much outwardly challenging dissonance at the listener, making Drive one of his more accessible works. That said, however, his general methodology, despite all the acclaim this score has received, is still acceptable in similar films simply because of a fad that exists in contemporary times. Ambient music without synchronization points, multiple lines of action, or melodic attribution is en vogue at this moment, as evidenced most clearly by the nonsensical praise for the scores of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Because the process is different (ambient music is recorded with intentionally vague boundaries so a director can insert it where he or she arbitrarily wishes in a picture) and relatively new, it's thought to be superior. This approach does basically function in a heartless, directionless movie like Drive, but it's still gaining attention because it's "different" rather than "good" on its own merits. On album, the score is tedious and repetitious in its droning anonymity. The director chose a collection of songs for inclusion in the film, and other than a Brian Eno entry, they are presented at the album's outset. Unfortunately, they are stylistically all over the map and having little in common with the score other than the feeling that someone has just bludgeoned you over the head with a brick. Martinez fans will love this score, but older collectors of movie scores will find little merit in its assumption that sound design can make better emotional connections than traditional film music. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download