The Sounds of Desolation

I had high praise for composer Howard Shore's work on the first film of The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey. Nevertheless, it took me until after the home video release of the last film before I finally picked up the soundtrack to the middle film, The Desolation of Smaug. While this score certainly does have its highlights, it's not the grand accomplishment of its predecessor.

Part of the problem is that Shore seems to have lost some of the desire for experimentation he showed on An Unexpected Journey. Much of his score for The Desolation of Smaug relies quite heavily on what I'd call "the chords of the Rings," a distinct style he'd established on four prior Tolkien movies -- to a point where the sound begins to constitute a bag of tricks. The album kicks off with a particularly egregious example of this, "The Quest for Erebor," a sort of shapeless collection of minor chords and languid strings. And while Shore tries shaking things up with the use of a solo boy soprano in several tracks ("The House of Beorn" and "Feast of Starlight"), the same regurgitated underpinnings from the orchestra leave those efforts rather dull.

Some of Shore's new attempts at themes fall flat as well. The new hero of the film, "Bard, a Man of Lake-town" gets an amorphous tune, largely in free time, rather than the strong (or even noticeable) anthem he deserves. Even his ancestor, "Girion, Lord of Dale," gets a more potent melody -- and Girion only actually appears on screen in the Extended Edition of the film.

But fortunately, there are also many cues where Shore snaps out of his funk. "Wilderland" builds from a slow pulse to a relentless race over five tense minutes. "Mirkwood" is a fantastic and eerie track with a whispering choir and odd clanking that one could imagine being recorded in the basement of an abandoned factory. And if some of the quieter moments of the album seem a bit vague, the action cues are bombastic in opposite measure. Shore uses thundering timpani, furious strings, and growling brass for "The Forest River," "My Armor Is Iron," and the sprawling, nine-minute "The Hunters." And I found "Flies and Spiders" to be a particularly thoughtful evolution of the "giant spider music" he wrote for Shelob back on The Return of the King -- he again focuses on strings that skitter around quickly within an octave, but this time with a different rhythm and greater support from the rest of the orchestra, all suggesting a greater number of creatures.

Shore also plays around with instrumentation in the last half of the soundtrack. First, it's just odd arrangement of his usual orchestra, creating the evocative "The Nature of Evil." Then, it's bringing in a harpsichord for "Thrice Welcome." But it's his leitmotif for Smaug that's most effective, an odd flirtation with a Middle Eastern style. Perhaps thinking of the Tales of the Arabian Nights that possibly inspired Tolkien himself to imagine a cave filled with treasure, Shore crafted a melody in a double harmonic scale and brought in unconventional percussion including zills (Middle Eastern finger cymbals) to represent the dragon and his lair. Over the course of three tracks ("Inside Information," "A Liar and a Thief," and "Smaug"), he plays around with these ideas, introducing something new and different to the musical language he has created for Middle-earth.

One other tradition of Peter Jackson's Tolkien films has been the inclusion of a song for the end credits. I've usually found these to be middling at best, but this film's "I See Fire," by Ed Sheeran, is a pleasant surprise. It's a real masterpiece of overdubbing, layering in the vocals and instruments one at a time. Sheeran starts with a single guitar and gradually adds bass, violin, cello (the only instrument he didn't play himself), and percussion. Similarly, his vocals, which begin in double-tracked unison one octave apart, gradually fill in with more harmonies each time the chorus comes around.

In all, I'd say there are more skippable tracks on this soundtrack than on An Unexpected Journey (or any of the three Lord of the Rings films), but there are still enough good ones for the album overall to get a B.