MP3: Privileged, The (2013)
Score: Very Good
Label: Jagged Music
Released: March 3, 2014
Tracks / Album Length: 22 tracks / 44 mins.
Composer: Jeff Toyne
Special Notes: n/a
Review:
Jeff Toyne’s third film score for writer / director Leah Walker (after the short The Knockout and prior feature film The Third Eye) is an eerie, silky orchestral score pretty much bereft of brass instruments and overt electronics.
Toyne’s strengths are in creating very precise moods using strong themes, and the music of The Privileged is anchored to a moving piece which lends itself to utterly bleak presentations (as in “Prologue – Main Titles”) and more heartwarming / hopeful incarnations (“Cottage Country”). Using a simple set of ascending / descending notes, Toyne changes colours through shifting saturations of strings, sustained chords, and piano – the latter used to evoke either angelic, emotionally shattered sensations, or deeply pensive statements.
The suspense score’s star is the strings which Toyne applies in broad strokes, and occasionally has passages where they drift or twist into little bits of discord and dissonance. A few tracks have percussion, mostly to add momentum to the score’s midsection (“Into the Night,” “John Fox”) and denouement (“Tara, Run!”). A hurdy-gurdy makes a brief appearance in “The Shotgun Goes Off” prior to a nice section of gnarled sounds, and although most cues tend to have been constructed to bleed in and out of scenes, their brevity doesn’t detract from the score’s ongoing shifts between desperation and faint hope (“Sara Steals the File”).
The Privileged has an elegant classical structure, and the digital album is nicely sequenced and mastered, with the beauty of the strings’ vibrato coming through very clearly.
A podcast interview with Jeff Toyne is also available at Libsyn and SoundCloud (audio only) and YouTube (with video enhancements).
© 2014 Mark R. Hasan
Additional Links:
Composer on IMDB — Composer Filmography
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