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.