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•	1995 TVT Album

•	2016 Howe Album

•	1995 TVT Album

For the sinister and methodical rituals of Spacey's "John Doe," Fincher turned to an original score by Howard Shore after hearing his restrained suspense music for The Silence of the Lambs. The director would collaborate a few more times with Shore for subsequent character-centered thrillers as well. Even here, though, the impact of the music is secondary (at best) compared to the intensity of the plot. There exist really only two modes of operation for Shore's underscore in Seven: the quietly mechanical primary theme for Doe and the alternately heightened, broad strokes of deep brass for scenes of elevated activity. Most of the film utilizes the first element, with the Doe theme mixed very minimally in between extended conversational scenes that feature no music at all. If Seven has a significant weakness, it is in the pacing of some of these slower scenes, and the application of Shore's churning score doesn't assist the film in overcoming the hiccups it experiences along its path to the inevitable. Like nearly every expression in the score, the composer identifies the theme with extremely low brass in slightly dissonant chord structures. There is significant menace to be heard in both of the two types of cues that Shore offers the film. If you're seeking much intelligence in the actual constructs underneath this brooding ambience, you might be disappointed. Shore does, likely intentionally, form the Doe theme using seven notes (two descending pairs followed by three pulsations), and, on occasion, he uses a briefly rising alternative to this figure when Gwyneth Paltrow's character is on screen. The secondary motif in the score is a more primal rhythm extending from the three final notes of Doe's theme, methodically pulsating on the low brass with crashing piano, thumps from percussion, and muted trumpets creating disharmony with each calculated throb. This motif accompanies a few of the scenes of police movement in the middle of the film, but it makes the greatest impression in the hair-raising electrical grid scene that closes the narrative.

In both the car ride to this final location in Seven and in the crescendo to the conclusive execution, Shore's pounding and difficult score makes its most lasting impression. At the end of that scene, Shore hints at the development of an even more melodramatic seven-note theme based on the same general movement of Doe's identity, but as in the rest of the work, this theme is never fully realized. It's the primordial pounding of taiko drums on those final notes of the Doe theme that prevail, as the action of the young detective prove the worst inclinations of man as predicted. Ultimately, this is a low-key, dissonant score that doesn't have much more than an ambient impact on the film. While Shore does utilize crescendos in abundance during the work, it's easy to get the impression that the movie would have functioned almost as well without any original music until the final fifteen minutes. Industrial sound effects would have sufficed, essentially, up until that time. The brightest moment of contrast in the score, the opening "The Last Seven Days" piece of marginal optimism, was rejected in favor of a song placement. The original 1995 album is dissatisfying not only because the score really doesn't translate well into its own listening experience, but also because the aforementioned songs by Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie ("Closer" and "The Hearts Filthy Lesson," respectively) were inexcusably not included by TVT Records on the product. After a collection of mostly incongruent vintage jazz and light rock, the album concludes with almost twenty minutes of Shore's score in two tracks. These two tracks conveniently divide the brooding, ritualistic Doe theme (in "Portrait of John Doe") from the agonizingly climactic pounding of the ensemble for the final scenes (in "Suite From Seven"), but they aren't worth the album alone for score collectors. A 60-minute Concorde score-only bootleg expanded the misery in the late 1990's, and Shore's own label eventually released a slightly rearranged version of those same contents in 2016. It's a mind-numbing hour to tolerate on those longer presentations, one that requires extreme patience and an intellectual appreciation of an art form that can never yield a truly sane listening experience.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Howard Shore reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.56 (in 25 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.32 (in 101,260 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.