The Daily Spin, September 8

Hans Zimmer | Interstellar OST

Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. 250 down - what a massive milestone. Thank you all!

Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.

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Album: Interstellar OST (2014)

Artist: Hans Zimmer

Link:  

 

There are a lot of things you can say about movie scores - some we’ve touched on previously, with our reviews of the Spider-Verse dual set and the How To Train Your Dragon score, and some things we’ve not yet covered. Music, especially in the hands of scoring, has such potential to convey a range of emotion that I think is impossible outside of essentially any other genre - by not limiting itself to words (outside of the occasional choral venture), there’s no restricting factor - it’s just sound, manipulated at its fullest to evoke.

In the modern era - say, the last fifty years or so - there are few composers who have done this so brilliantly as the indomitable Hans Zimmer. Outside of John Williams, I’m not sure there’s any one person who exists on the same plane as Zimmer in terms of ability to push and pull sound, to master the art of that ripcord tension that bleeds through every single note, iconic sounds that have traversed generations - the same haunting horns that call us home to Isla Nublar, or the deathly pounding of the Imperial March, it’s that same ability to drive home such a distinct notion of what a specific world sounds like.

For Zimmer, this is best displayed through his towering organ arrangements, of which the Interstellar soundtrack is absolutely full. Of course, there are the classic moments - the first slamming wave of sound in ‘Mountains’, a sound that even now evokes the goosebumps I felt the first time I watched the movie, or the urgent anxiety of ‘No Time for Caution’, as the ever-encroaching reaper knocked a gnarled finger on that space shuttle’s door - but it’s more than that, and this is where Interstellar outshines the rest of Zimmer’s catalogue by some distance. 

Around these massive movements come these lighthearted dancing strings, nimble piano and plucky guitar, the sort of ethereal spacing score that… well, does fit a movie set almost entirely in space pretty damn well - but it’s the ability to fill that space (pun intended) so well that sets Zimmer apart, because in lesser scores it wouldn’t be quite so tightly wound - but this is very Williams-like, strings that wave and beckon hypnotically, the siren’s call to any explorer. It’s the allure, the danger, and the love that any person would feel going into space encapsulated in a single sound, all the while touching on the innate terror that is running at base throughout this entire film. 

Rarely do I feel like a score so perfectly matches an entire work, and yet, over nearly three hours, I’m left feeling as though there’s not a more perfect duo - from those first pulsing notes in ‘Dreaming of the Crash’ to the final scene of the film, it’s just about perfect, the sort of score that will stay with you as long as you live - and I truly don’t know how to pay it higher regard than that. 

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Rating: 9.9/10

Best Tracks: No Time for Caution; Mountains; Stay; Coward

Worst Tracks: n/a