Road to Perdition

• Road To Perdition Soundtrack

Amazon.co.uk Director Sam Mendes's much-anticipated follow-up to his Academy Award-winning American Beauty finds him exploring the period gangster film--but with a moral fibre and undercurrent of family tragedy familiar from his Oscar triumph. As he did with Beauty, Mendes again wisely entrusts the film's music to Thomas Newman, a composer with an instinctive knack for getting inside a film's characters via innovative and often orthodox methods. As many of Newman's preceding scores have been rhythmically driven and rife with improvisation-driven experimentalism, it’s good to hear his equally distinctive writing for orchestra largely take centre stage here again. But Newman's inquisitive musical instincts can't be denied, and his melancholy string writing is leavened first with subtle uilleann pipe flourishes that echo the characters' Irish-American roots, then with savoury, yet ever-restrained touches of his own ethnic-defying instrumental colour and rhythmic accents. It's another moody and introspective gem, seasoned with some lively period jazz (courtesy of the Charleston Chasers, Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra, and Chicago Rhythm Kings) and a warm, final surprise: a duet of John M Williams's autumnal title track performed by none other than stars Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.--Jerry McCulley Product description Various Artists / Thomas Newman / The Charleston Chasers ~ Road to Perdition