Weekly Recommendations – w/e 23rd September 2022: Pearl, General Electric Theater, The DioField Chronicle…

Here’s a round-up of recommended scores that caught my attention over the week ending, 23rd September 2022. Titles include a number of interesting scores for games as well as small-scale TV scoring.

Pearl (2022) – Tyler Bates & Timothy Williams (A24 Music)

The story of Pearl concerns a young girl who dreams of Hollywood stardom but who is trapped to her life on the family’s isolated farm. But at some point all her repression builds to breaking point. The composers give the movie a score that’s – at the start – very “classical Hollywood” in style (e.g., melodic strings-driven orchestrations). One of the intriguing aspects of the score is how, from a musical point of view, the opening lush score disintegrates from a grand almost melodramatic score to something more akin to a horror score dripping in darker more portentous moments. It all mirrors the deterioration of Pearl’s dream-world. It’s an album that’s both beautiful and is an interesting musical journey over the course it its playing time.

THE EXORCIST – Tyler Bates

In 2016, the American broadcasting network Fox debuted a TV series based on the 1971 William Peter Blatty novel The Exorcist. Creator Jeremy Slater’s journey back into the world originally established by the novel was received positively by critics. Whereas Season 1 focused on telling the whole story of the demonic possession that grips the Rance family, Season 2 followed the format of an anthology series, where Fathers Tomas (Alfonso Herrera) and Father Marcus (Ben Daniels) come to the aid of another family whilst tackling a number of additional ‘problems’. Although several of the main characters (e.g., both Fathers Tomas and Marcus) in the show appear in both seasons, many do not feature in Season 2. Mirroring some of the significant changes in the show between seasons, composer Tyler Bates wrote the score for the second series, taking over from Season 1 composer, Daniel Hart.