Danny Elfman
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Elfman has been contributing to the latest album by rapper A$AP Rocky. I have no connection to A$SAP Rocky, rap or hip hop (other than some of those early 80s pioneers, like Grandmaster Flash and Sugar Hill Gang), but that was a neat hook-up. He participated in their music videos, and also appeared with them, on drums, in the SNL performance a few days ago. Hard to believe Elfman is 72 years old!
I am not a hip hop/rap fan but after hating it in the 80s/90s I come to accept and like some forms of it – result via some German acts I admit – as the range is quite wide.
Hard to believe Elfman is 72 years old!
Indeed, but as with all artists doing what you love keeps fresh apparently. See Williams being over 20 years older, even if the age sadly nowdays peaks a little more…
John Williams looks like he’s at death’s door these days, sorry to say (I just saw the pictures from last night’s Boston concert), but 93 is a lot more than 72. One ages rapidly in those 20 years. But I have a feeling Elfman can keep chugging for a long time. He has a very Iggy Pop thing going on! My dad is 75, he looks nowhere near this.
Yes, Williams sadly looks very fragile on those photos.
But the Elfman comparison with Iggy Pop is fitting 😉
It’s strange, because Elfman HAS written a rather large amount of scores that don’t really do anything for me, but he’s still my second favourite film composer after Williams. It might be that I identify with him as an angsty weird nerd with a lot of self-doubt and a very interesting journey from theatre musician, drummer, pop/rock musician and performer, into film composer and later a more classical composer. And his work that speak to me, REALLY speak to me in a big way. He’s just done so much different stuff.
I like his more mature 2000s period where he was sort of leaving behind the early Kurt Weill ompa-ompa style and taking a huge left turn, becoming more heavily influenced by the Philip Glass style of patterns and ostinatos in strings and melodic percussion. BIG FISH is a huge favourite, with some really beautiful main themes in strings and woodwinds, mixed with folky guitar patterns and fiddle. Just amazing. I also absolutely love THE UNKNOWN KNOWN and STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, and also PROMISED LAND and RESTLESS. It’s interesting how he really is a completely different composer if he works for Burton, Morris or Van Zandt. Having said that, I also love a lot of his Burton stuff, NIGHTMARE is an absolute masterpiece from beginning to end. And PLANET OF THE APES is a really bold score with its brutal col legno string-slapping, tribal percussion fest and distorted synth bass trip! All of these very different scores have inspired my own work at some point.
Indeed, Eirik, your taste within the Elfman canon pretty much mirrors mine. Prefer the more alternative, downkey, “shimmering” indie scores in the last two decades, not that enthused with the noisy blockbuster stuff. My love of old-school Elfman still persists (meaning 80s up to the mid 90s), but I have to admit I’ve also outgrown it a little bit. So weirdly, even though I’m still a completist of his work (once you’ve started, it’s difficult to stop), Elfman has fallen JUST outside my top 10, after having had a secure second spot for decades.
I think I actively discovered him with BATMAN. I don’t really have top 10 but he does not get past Williams or Goldsmith for me. But he is high in rank as he is so versatile. I also love NIGHTMARE which is my favorite score for “two seasons” 😉
I saw SEND HELP today, at a press screening – the new Sam Raimi film with an Elfman score. It was a decent film (CAST AWAY meets LORD OF THE FLIES meets THE WAR OF THE ROSES) with some old-school Raimi “gore” touches, but also problematic in some ways (there is no sympathetic character, no “centre”). While I didn’t care much for Elfman’s suspense and action music here, there were some really cool bits, like wordless female vocal, ethnic percussion and the kind of lowkey music he mostly does for indie films, which is what we talked about earlier. I’m very curious to hear how it holds up on album.
Listening to the album now. It isn’t quite as interesting as I remembered it from the film. What I DO like about it is that it’s “leaner” in sound than many of his noisy blockbuster fests in recent years. But relatively meager on themes (except that lovely opening vocalise), mostly just classic Elfman suspense or horror chords rummaging around. A bit like THE FRIGHTENERS, perhaps.
The latest Elfman film score that I really, really liked remains THE CIRCLE, and that’s almost 10 years ago now. Thankfully, there have been some good concert works in the period.
Elfman’s score for the new Gus van Sant film, DEAD MAN’S WIRE, has been put up on the composer’s own site at https://www.dannyelfman.com/.
Not terribly exciting. Minimal instruments, no themes. Lots of percussion, some piano, some strings, HARP, a contrabass.Some of it sounds like an unplugged version of DEAD PRESIDENTS, although not on that level, of course. But still, better than some of those bombastic affairs he’s done in recent years.
I wonder if this means it will get no soundtrack release, neither digital nor physical. Now that he’s put it up on his own site, I mean.
Could be temporarily until there is one. Didn’t get all recent works at least a digital release? Btw, I find his siterather annoying as you cannot even link to any section or individual page… This “Enter” Intro page is something you actually don’t do anymore for years anymore… It’s not flash but behaves exactly like those annoying sites back then…
Seems he is this year again featured on some rock festival as he posted on social media.
Yeah, it’s a rather annoying site. A blast from the past, when there were all those fancy flash thingies. But leave it to him to be unusual. 🙂
Often I think, to be a true Danny Elfman fan you already must have been an Oingo Boingo fan.
If you were coming to him from a John Williams filmscore angle you might be struggling with him again and again.
Sometimes I excitedly love his work and sometimes I find his music either tiringly trivial or or annoyingly blase.
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