Norwegian Wood OST

Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant There Will Be Blood score was credited with reinventing the movie soundtrack (no matter that, to certain ears, it sounded like a dead ringer for the title theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture). For his second soundtrack – for Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood – he cleaves to the same formula: a discordant mash-up of strings, ghostly chorals and atonal guitar (courtesy of the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Emperor Quartet). On the heels of the opinion splitting King Of Limbs, it isn’t a record that rewards cursory listening, with the inclusion of three Can songs initially overshadowing Greenwood’s original compositions. Approached as a purely ambient experience, however, it contains bright spots aplenty, conjuring a mood that is at once mysterious, gloomy and trembling with terrible beauty.