Milan Records release Daniel Blumberg's original score for The Brutalist. Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost...

The original score for The Brutalist collects together 32 tracks (1 hour, 21 min, 39 sec) of atmospheric themes that take us on quite a musical journey. It's diverse and constantly engaging, as it shifts and changes from track to track.

It opens with the unnerving, rather unsettling, 'Overture (Ship)' which is followed by the more melodic piano-based 'Overture (Laszlo)', which then opens out to the more theatrical 'Overture (Bus)'.

The rest of the album is a constant flipping back and forth between melodic and bizarre unsettling avant-garde set pieces.

A challenge for composer Daniel Blumberg was how to create a coherent score across a narrative arc spanning the 1940s through to the 1980s. For a key jazz club scene he assembled a quartet to perform electrifying jazz versions of his theme live on set. Final cue 'Epilogue (Venice)', meanwhile, required a radically different sound palette to the rest of the score, when the narrative leaps forward to the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale of 1980. Traveling to New York to collaborate with synth-pop trailblazer Vince Clarke (known for his genre-defining work with Erasure, Depeche Mode and Yazoo), Blumberg interpolates the film’s key themes into a redemptive, synth and drum machine-driven dance track.

It may be a little too atmospheric in places for those who are looking for a heavy laden theme based score. I enjoyed the, at times, jarring mixture of themes and ambient noise, which builds an engaging story through music.

7

Darren Rea