Jonny Greenwood - 'There Will Be Blood' (Nonesuch) Released 17/12/07

We all need our hobbies, pilot-projects, pet-projects, and grand designs on remodelling the world. For musicians that may involve a fray with the acting world, session work, making cheese or bottling jam. Radiohead polymath Jonny Greenwood has been moonlighting some time now with his multi-instrumental talents and scoring movies such as Bodysong, Smear, Piano For Children, and Popcorn Superhet Receiver for which Greenwood received the accolade as the Listeners' Award for Radio 3 at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), 'There Will Be Blood' is an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel which takes place amidst the corruptions of the developing Californiian oil industry. Featuring moments from Popcorn Superhet Receiver amidst feuding fugues and effete movements of a lugubrious quality, 'There Will Be Blood' seems geared for the ears of the Radio 3 audience and features little by way of challenge or innovation.

Sophoric Chamber pieces weave with 'Open Spaces',  the chilling 'Stranded The Line' as for 'Eat Him By His Own Light', the latter with the addition of piano-colour, yet, the melancholic 'Prospectors Arrive' with the weave and weft of the pastoral-feel of 'Oil' provide sublime moments. Chilling strings and pizzicato cello build ominous, broody airs on 'Future Market' speculations, and 'There Will Be Blood' has the saw-tooth John Williams-like ominous strings with "danger, shark!" possibilities or just the ruffling of movement behind the curtain, whilst Popcorn Superhet Receiver tracks - the percussive 'Proven Lands' and grass-growing, lacklustre strings of 'Henry Plainview' ponder the validity of the Radio 3 Listeners Award.
 
Undoubtedly sympathetic to the movies' tides of suspense, 'There Will Be Blood' feels stilted by a maimed quality, an effeteness, where the only stirring movements are the eyeball in REM-sleep. As a stand-alone album, even the fans will be hard pushed to part with their spondulicks.