Buy it... if you still have a soft spot for Howard Shore's tense, brooding thrillers, in which the orchestral ensemble is used as a blunt tool for rumbling ambience for much of the scores' duration.

Avoid it... if a mostly themeless, gut-wrenching underscore of thirty unmemorable minutes on album isn't your cup of tea.

Shore

Panic Room: (Howard Shore) Let's start by asking this question: if you're looking at purchasing a home that comes with a panic room, isn't that some kind of indication that you're moving into the wrong neighborhood? A novelty item that was strangely becoming popular in upscale homes at the turn of the century, a panic room was the defining subject of the 2002 thriller named, not surprisingly, Panic Room. David Fincher's suburban tale pits a homeowner (Jodie Foster with just enough skin showing to attract more fantasizing criminals) and her daughter against a gang of ruthless burglars. The tension is a high as it can be, with the threat extending from the sexual domain all the way to one of life threatening proportions. Needless to say, it's an unpleasant concept for a film in every regard. It's also the kind of production for which an orchestral score could serve its duty as a footnote for whatever composer was involved, though the footnote in this case is more interesting than in most other cases. The continuing collaboration between Fincher and Howard Shore meant that Panic Room was sandwiched in between the first two scores for Peter Jackson's trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, for which Shore was in the process of winning an Oscar when he recorded Panic Room. The genre of films that these two bring to life are trademark modern thrillers, with The Game and Seven offering bleak scores for troubling films. The amount of psychological trauma that is often inflicted upon the viewer in these productions is something that Shore seems to be able to understand and perpetuate, because the composer has had a knack for bucking Hollywood trends and providing equally disturbing music for these projects. Whereas a composer like Jerry Goldsmith often preferred to score his horror assignments of the time with a more extroverted stylistic and thematic identity, Shore was content to travel closer to the Bernard Herrmann route, occasionally using the orchestra like a blunt tool with which to draw out the primordial emotions of the audience by making an underscore that sounds more like noise rather than music. If not for its accomplished textures, the work would indeed exist in the realm of ambient sound design. Shore specifically responds to the gloomy suspense of Panic Room with an equally abrasive, difficult, and tense orchestral score that shatters whatever comfort you might think exists in suburban lifestyles.

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Employing a nearly a full orchestra (minus trumpets), Shore uses the ensemble as a noise-generating machine to create a range of sounds from spooky ambience to grinding horror. He never unleashes the ensemble into a distinct or crashing motif, but rather instructs his beastly creation to simmer underneath the surface for the entire film. Instead of allowing an array of synthesizers to produce largely the same effect, Shore uses the ensemble's size in its lower regions as an even more gut-wrenching instrument of terror. The constant bass strings, low woodwinds, and brass produce a sinking feeling in the stomach of the listener from the start to end. Some of this material will remind listeners of the tone for Isengard in the famous Tolkien adaptations, especially when Shore adds the element of clanging percussion (as in "Zone 19 Disabled"). If you want to look for even more similarities between the two works, you'll hear a faintly heroic motif in "Castle Keep" that sounds like a merging of the Isengard and Rohan themes. Such slight similarities are understandably inevitable. The score lacks a strong thematic identity in traditional respects, although the main title sequence offers a Herrmann-like plucked and chopped string idea that only resurfaces with any significance in "Fourth Floor Hallway." Despite the slightly more harmonic nature of this title cue, the attitude of the chopping violin motif is a prelude to the prickly sense of unease that would inhabit the mood for the rest of the score. The closer danger comes to the homeowner and her daughter, the more pronounced the single strikes of these strings become. Still, while the texture is intriguing in parts and the ominous tone of the work is effective in a functional sense, Shore leaves little memorable material to occupy an album. To some casual ears, the score for Panic Room will seem (from beginning to end) to be an exercise in sound design. And acknowledging what Shore enthusiasts attempt to say about the development of complex layers in this score, there is something to be said about using the rumbling power of an unguided ensemble to raise fear without overtly sophisticated measures. On album, Panic Room doesn't offer much for the listener, and the choice to release the score at all was likely a reaction to the composer's popularity immediately after his Oscar win (and continued success) for the first The Lord of the Rings entry. Even for the sake of mood-building, the score's presentation on album is too short and underdeveloped to translate into a substantially interesting listening experience. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Howard Shore reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.43 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 93,154 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.