Identity
Music by Alan Silvestri
Available on Varèse Sarabande VSD-6459
Running Time: 32:12
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I have to say that I was hoping for a much more satisfying score than this from Alan Silvestri. The Hollywood Studio Orchestra of some 75 personnel is subordinated through much of the 32 minutes of this album to the sort of synth ghostly screechings and clangings that has become the stock in trade of so many modern crime/ supernatural thrillers. Occasionally they are some novel effects combined with orchestral material to produce music, for example, that one associated more, years ago, with marauding Indians of Hollywood westerns. For much of ‘May 10th’ and elsewhere the score is thinned out quite starkly to very high string sonics and rolling percussion or just a simple heartbeat pulse, no doubt for great dramatic effect.
For me, Silvestri’s score is saved, just, by the long-breathed attractive plaintive theme for strings (almost drowned by high string twittering as though of a thousand mice caught in sewer) stated in the Prologue.
No doubt this score works well with the stormy darkness of the screenplay but as a listening experience on its own there is not much to commend it beyond its main theme.
Ian Lace
3
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