All My CDs, pt 52: The Fountain

The Fountain: Soundtrack - Clint Mansell

The Fountain is my favorite movie, yet somehow I managed to get the soundtrack years before getting the DVD. Partly because I'm just not nearly as interested in movies as I am in music. I own less than ten of the former. As for the latter... Well, see the number at the head of this review.

This soundtrack is more typical of soundtracks than any other I own: all atmosphere and very little musical substance. The closest thing to a memorable melody is mostly a five-note string riff repeated over and over for several minutes while different instruments weave in and out to vary the sound a little. And that track, called Death is the Road to Awe, ends up being the most exciting track on the album. The rest are barely-noticable background music, serving only to evoke a mood... usually sadness. Pleasant, but ultimately not very memorable.

About Death is the Road to Awe. It’s time for me to admit that I’m persistently fond of long musical pieces with lots of false endings - that is, where the music will seem to die down and resolve, only to start back up again, like a runner getting a second wind. If the music is good, this gives me the feeling of getting a bonus - more of what I like, just when I thought it was going away. That may account for my intense liking of this track. It is eight minutes long, full of slow crescendos leading to sudden false endings followed by new crescendos, each new beginning more urgent and fast-paced than the one before, until the end. The music is, itself, a road to awe.

 This is what really makes the soundtrack worth listening to on its own as opposed to just leaving it in the background of the movie itself. I would go so far as to recommend skipping straight to it, but somehow I feel it's worthwhile to listen to the rest of the album as a lead-in, at least sometimes. Death is the Road to Awe owes a lot of its appeal to a slow build-up of tension, leading to a climactic release of energy at the end. The rest of the music simply extends that build-up from eight minutes to forty-six.

But if you only have eight minutes, you really only need that one track.

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