Our next release is Howard Shore’s score for the 1995 crime thriller Se7en, directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a prominent cameo role by Kevin Spacey. The film follows a pair of detectives, the methodical William Somerset, who is nearing retirement, and hot-headed David Mills, who has just been relocated to replace the former, as they attempt to capture a serial killer and prevent him from completing a series of gruesome murders based on the seven deadly sins. A critical and financial success, Se7en is regarded as one of the best mystery thrillers ever made, as well as a distinctive influence in filmmaking due to its aesthetic, style and plot.
After the infamous Alien 3 experience, Fincher was able to express his true voice as a filmmaker in Se7en, presenting an irredeemable and decaying society trapped in a depressing world of ugliness, depravity and despair. With its dark color palette, the film showcases a gritty noir style, being bleak, intense and quite horrific in its subject matter. It successfully captures the viewer's attention despite its grotesque depictions of violence. Fincher wittingly chooses not to have the killer's victims finished off on-screen. Instead, he shows the crime scenes, providing glimpses of the corpses, leaving the audience to imagine and visualize the killer's atrocities as they are analyzed and discussed by the protagonists, a storytelling resource that is disturbing as it is fascinating.
Much of the film’s grim mood is accomplished thanks to Shore's score, who Fincher approached after listening to his score for The Silence of the Lambs. Shore employed an orchestra of up to 100 musicians, combining elements of brass, percussion, piano, and trumpets. The music Shore composed consists of two distinctive qualities: a quiet mechanical underscoring approach, and a heightened and louder in-your-face approach. The former is used mostly during dialogue scenes and in some sequences in which the leads are investigating the crimes; in these sections Shore introduces his predominant musical identity for the score, a theme for the serial killer John Doe fittingly consisting of seven notes: two descending pairs followed by three pulsations. The latter approach is a lot more aggressive and rhythmic in nature, consisting of pulsating passages of low brass, crashing piano, timpani hits and trumpets, creating disharmony but producing a relentless sense of unease. The best and most memorable presentation of this motif is during the climax set in the desert, an ending that has been regarded as one of the best in cinematic history. Shore manages to surround and engulf the listener with the score’s apprehensiveness and atonal passages, making the music work as significant menace and turning the scenes into Doe’s perspective, even when the character is not even on screen. Great examples of these are the cues “Gluttony”, “The Apartment”, “The Desert” and “Envy & Wrath”, which perfectly elicit the sense that, as Somerset himself puts it, ‘John Dow has the upper hand’.
Regarding its album releases, Se7en is a complicated matter. An original soundtrack album was released in 1995 by TVT Records, consisting mostly of vintage jazz and light rock songs, with almost twenty minutes of the score in two lengthy tracks at the end, inexcusably omitting the songs “Closer (Precursor)” by Nine Inch Nails and “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” by David Bowie, which were used with great effect for the opening and closing credits. Concorde later released a bootleg in 1998 with 60 minutes of music, a presentation that was later leveraged by Shore’s own label Howe Records in 2016. These two presentations contain the complete score, which is quite difficult to tolerate in full given the nature of the music Shore has put together. This new release by Renovatio Records provides 45 minutes of Shore’s music, including the best and most memorable parts of the score. The main and end credits songs have also been incorporated, as they are both as pivotal to the tone of Se7en as Shore’s own score.
2. Main Titles: Closer (Precursor) (2:48) - Performed by Nine Inch Nails
3. Gluttony (4:57)
4. Greed / Behind The Painting (3:09)
5. Sloth (3:32)
6. Chasing Joe Doe (5:56)
7. The Apartment (4:09)
8. Lust & Pride (3:53)
9. Arresting John Doe (3:53)
10. The Desert (7:06)
11. Envy & Wrath (5:13)
12. Somerset Alone (0:56)
13. End Credits: The Hearts Filthy Lesson (4:57) - Performed by David Bowie
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