Review by Paul Cote

Rating: **** 1/2

There are a small handful of composers that I can count on to write something great every time they score a new movie. Like, five of them, tops. Thomas Newman is one of them. He wasn’t always. Back in the late 1990s, he was a very hit and miss composer for me and quite a few of my brethren. But just about everything he’s written after The Road to Perdition in 2002 has been bold and brilliant to my ears – even slighter scores like Jarhead and Little Children are brilliant musical solutions to difficult films. So when I say that WALL-E is my favorite Newman score of the past 5 years or so, I actually do mean that as big praise. Building off of the endlessly inventive musical landscapes he created for children’s films like Finding Nemo and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Newman’s crafted his most imaginative, confident, and emotionally varied fantasy yet. It takes a few listens and a little context from the film to appreciate the full magic of the music, but god is it worth the effort.

The score offers just about everything that Newman’s always done best and a few things that Newman’s now doing for the first time. The eclectic instrumental textures and bittersweet melodies that he’s always thrived at are back in full force, and they’re as gorgeous and infectious as ever. The romantic material in cues like “Eve” and “Define Dancing” stand out in particular – with all of the tender and effortless grace of Angels in America, these pieces elevate the already beautiful animation into pure ballet. And the quirkier tracks are as clever and playful as ever – at times Newman even seems to be gently parodying himself, from the comically chipper whistling in “WALL-E” to the mockingly banal dreaminess of “72 Degrees and Sunny” (which he later hilariously turns on its head for the call-to-flabby-arms, “March of the Gels”). This familiar Newman material is joined, however, by thrilling new excursions into full-fledged space opera. This comes out most stunningly in “Eve Retrieve,” one of the most thrilling action tour-de-forces of recent memory. Imagine the escape sequence from The Shawshank Redemption reconceptualized as a heart-stopping brass thrill ride, and you’ll start to get the idea. And surprisingly, Newman also isn’t afraid to tip his hat to other composers who turned space opera into a musical sub-genre. I can’t think of many occasions outside of The Good German where Newman bothered to reference other composers’ work, but here he tips his hat to everything from Herrmann’s Fahrenheit 451 (“2815 AD”) to Williams Star Wars (“WALL-E’s Pod Adventure”) to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (“The Axiom”). Mind, the references are always subtle and too entrenched in Newman’s own style to drift into pastiche, but hearing Newman reinterpret these iconic pieces is really something else, even thrilling in away. It’s rare for somebody to break into other composers’ territory without losing any individual personality in the process – I’m not even 100% that Newman did this in The Good German but he does it here.

Thomas Newman

But as much as the score has to offer, it is missing one thing that seems to be breaking it for some people – a binding main theme. There are a handful of strong melodies for different ideas, but they rarely appear more than twice in the score. I should think that anybody who’s listened to more than a handful of Thomas Newman scores over the past two decades should be used to this by now – very few Newman scores have ever focused much on a theme-and-variations approach. Many get frustrated with that, as oft-times gorgeous Newman melodies surface, never to appear again. I understand that frustration to an extent – we like themes, and moreover, we like to hear every possible variation when we like the themes. I wish, however, that people would learn to get over the fixation that every single score needs to operate this way. The pleasure that you take from a Newman score like WALL-E does not come from hearing your favorite melody 26 different ways. The pleasure comes from letting Newman carry you from one wildly imaginative and moving vignette to the next. If material only occasionally carries over from scene to scene, it’s only because Newman approaches each new scene as a unique set of challenges that requires a unique musical solution, a solution that doesn’t necessarily come from the same place as any of the surrounding scenes. There is method to the madness, mind, but the method comes from knowing how long to leave the audience in one place before taking them someplace new. If “Eve Retrieve” pummels us with a bombastic assault, “The Axiom” will ease us from that bombast with subdued serenity (until “Foreign Contaminant” urgency shakes us awake once again). Newman knows exactly how long to leave us in one place so that the thrills don’t overwhelm us and the serenity doesn’t bore us. And the joy of discovering this wildly divergent sequence of highlights wouldn’t quite be there if the same thematic material ran through each and every piece of music.

And make no mistake, this eclectic sequence does not mean that the score doesn’t have any binding structure. It has structure, but the structure doesn’t come from one central theme or motif that ties everything together – it comes from the reoccurring textural patterns and instrumental choices. The prominence of harp, for example, forms a link between a number of otherwise unrelated melodies – cues like the bleak “2815 AD,” romantic “Eve” and mysterious “Bubble Wrap” don’t necessarily have many melodic similarities, but the harp-driven orchestration ties them into the same musical universe. Newman has created a unique enough musical landscape that everything feels like it belongs, no matter how wildly divergent some of the vignettes may seem.

The only slight problem with the album comes from the intrusion of non-Thomas Newman material from the film. Oh, the clips from Hello Dolly are admittedly charming (and particularly meaningful in context) and Newman’s contribution to the Peter Gabriel song is at least intriguing even if the result doesn’t necessarily make for a good song. But the sound effects that occasionally introduce Newman’s score tracks are really too much. It’s bad enough that Newman has to compete with Ben Burtt’s irritatingly cute robot voices and sound effects for attention in the film – do these voices and sound effects really need to follow Newman on the album as well? I mean, Williams took a beating from Burtt in the Star Wars prequels, but Williams at least had the soundtrack albums to himself. We can’t even give Newman that much? The sound effects only really make a minor intrusion into Newman’s album, but they leave slightly sour aftertaste behind (maybe I’m just bitter that Newman managed to land a film with almost no dialogue and still managed to get shafted on the sound mix).

That aside, this is a wonderful score, my favorite of the year so far and my favorite from Newman since at least Angels in America. Those who have already decided exactly what a score for a space fantasy should sound like may be disappointed, but anyone who’s been thrilled with Newman’s body of work in the past decade (and/or anybody who saw and loved WALL-E) should be left breathless.

Music Composed and Conducted by Thomas Newman; Orchestrations by Thomas Pasatieri, J.A.C. Redford, Gary K. Thomas and Carl Johnson; Recorded and Mixed by Armin Steiner; Produced by Thomas Newman and Bill Bernstein; Label: Walt Disney Records; Availability: In-print; U.S. Release Date: June 24, 2008.

01. Put On Your Sunday Clothes (1:17)
Performed by Michael Crawford
02. 2815 A.D. (3:28)
03. WALL-E (2:00)
04. The Spaceship (1:42)
05. EVE (1:02)
06. Thrust (:42)
07. Bubble Wrap (:51)
08. Eye Surgery (:41)
09. Worry Wait (1:19)
10. La Vie En Rose (3:24)
Performed by Louis Armstrong
11. First Date (1:20)
12. EVE Retrieve (2:20)
13. The Axiom (2:25)
14. BNL (:20)
15. Foreign Contaminant (2:07)
16. Repair Ward (2:20)
17. 72 Degrees and Sunny (3:13)
18. Typing Bot (:48)
19. Septuacentennial (:15)
20. Gopher (:40)
21. WALL-E’s Pod Adventure (1:14)
22. Define Dancing (2:23)
23. No Splashing No Diving (:48)
24. All That Love’s About (:37)
25. M-O (:47)
26. Directive A-113 (2:06)
27. Mutiny! (1:29)
28. Fixing WALL-E (2:08)
29. Rogue Robots (2:03)
30. March of the Gels (:55)
31. Tilt (2:01)
32. The Holo-Detector (1:08)
33. Hyperjump (1:05)
34. Desperate EVE (:57)
35. Static (1:43)
36. It Only Takes a Moment (1:08)
Performed by Michael Crawford
37. Down to Earth (5:59)
Performed by Peter Gabriel
38. Horizon 12.2 (1:17)

Total Playing Time: 61:51