"Proven Lands" by Jonny Greenwood
Over the course of four films, director Paul Thomas Anderson developed a stock company of actors and collaborators. For his fifth, There Will Be Blood, he parted ways with the familiar, including musical cohorts Jon Brion and Michael Penn, whose carnival-esque cabaret sounds helped define films like Boogie Nights and Punch Drunk Love. Instead, he called on Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood has been moonlighting as a composer for a few years, and he could probably make a full-time go of it, based on his work here. His score alternates between dissonant atmospheric work ("Henry Plainview," the title track) and delicate, almost-but-not-quite-pretty string pieces ("HW/Hope Of New Fields," "Prospectors Quartet"), all of it shot through with a doomed sense that things are on the verge of going horribly wrong. In other words, it matches the film perfectly.
A.V. Club Rating: A-
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