Randy Newman

Dark Matter

NONESUCH

8/10

Uniting sardonic gospel songs with complex orchestral scores.

- John Lewis

Since the early 1980s, Randy newman’s day job has been writing orchestral scores for big Hollywood movies. Some might feature the occasional knockabout song – like “You’ve Got A Friend in Me” from Toy Story or “if i Didn’t Have You” from Monsters Inc – but newman’s primary role is to provide detailed, timecoded, instrumental underscores that bring the visuals to life.

These soundtracks have always been kept quite separate from newman’s increasingly rare, once-a-decade studio albums, where his croaky, sardonic vignettes are usually backed by an ornery barroom band, but Dark Matter finally sees him uniting those two professions. Here each satirical sketch is lavishly arranged like a miniature film score, with multiple characters, shifting points of view and dramatic lurches in musical style. earlier newman tracks – like the Brechtian “A Piece Of The Pie” (on 2008’s Harps And Angels) or the episodic paean to Karl Marx “The World isn’t Fair” (on 1999’s Bad Love) – have attempted this, but none were as ambitious as anything on this album.