It’s not unfair to say that I have been looking forward to this one for a bit. I’ve liked a lot of what Danger Mouse has done previously, I’ve enjoyed what little I’ve heard so far of Daniele Luppi’s orchestrated work to date (my fault!), and I really loved their previous album together.
And I utterly adore the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and Ennio Morricone’s place in them.
On an initial small budget and at the beginning of a hip new era of cinema (amongst everything else), Morricone bolstered his relatively modest musical arsenal with an electric guitar (taking the idea of Monty Norman’s James Bond theme and running amok with it) and the characteristic whistling of Alessandro Alessandroni in amongst the mix of various other atmospheric bits and bobs (not least, director Sergio Leone’s fondness for exaggerated gunshot sounds). So, right at the start of Fistful of Dollars, before The Man With No Name (or Joe as he’s named and credited) plods silently down the street atop his mule, and even before anyone can mutter “hang on, isn’t this Yojimbo?”, the stage is set for something new, visceral, and a little bit funky thanks to its slightly odd but utterly compelling opening credits sequence.
So anyone deciding to do anything in the spirit of these pioneering compositions and arrangements would really need to do their homework. Thankfully, Messrs Burton and Luppi have managed this with amazing aplomb, capturing the spirit, landscape and indeed several musicians of the originals and spending five years making something very special indeed.
To say that it beings in spine-tingling fashion is an understatement. Theme of “Rome” is dusty, atmospheric and slow-burning before the remarkable voice of soprano Edda Dell’Orso (whose voice took one of Moriccone’s most memorable works, The Ecstacy of Gold) into the heavens) pitches in to place this project exactly where the creators want the listener to be; slap bang in the middle of a 1960s film where atmosphere is all. The half-decade spent getting everyone and everything just-so is an extraordinary effort in these times of reduced attention spans and the care lavished over every aspect of Rome’s creation is obvious from start to finish.
For a film nerd such as myself, the initial thrills in Rome come from plucking memorable snippets of ideas from the films where the original work came from. The three short interludes in particular (Morning Fog, Her Hollow Ways and The World) all contain that distant music-box echo that gave For a Few Dollars More its heart and soul. And elsewhere, the opening strains of Rose With a Broken Neck is reminiscent of Duck, You Sucker! (sadly later renamed A Fistful of Dynamite to cash in)’s lighthearted main theme.
It’s not all long coats, closeups of eyes and occasionally odd dubbing however. Norah Jones’ introduction on the record, Season’s Trees isn’t so much Morricone atmospherics as John Barry stylish Bond swells, with the two composers’ styles combined beautifully in Roman Blue. And lead single Two Against One sees Jack White taking the spirit of the album and taking it to a more contemporary place, with its B-Side Black seeing Norah Jones doing a similar Hotel California-infused manner.
In some cases, this does feel at times like two separate ideas running alongside each other, with soundtrack subtlety on the one rail and more in-your-face pop sensibilities on the other, crossing each other on some tracks and running parallel on others. This may seem a bit disjointed and almost like two different records on paper (and initially, on the ears at times), but it’s testament to the apparently dying art of song-ordering that the finished album is so carefully arranged so that everything flows as a single piece as if it were (no, really?) the backing to the film that Rome is arranged, performed and packaged as. Even the song titles evoke scenes that wouldn’t feel out of place in some of Italy’s finer slices of psychedelic American West Revisionism (The Gambling Priest and The Matador Has Fallen being particularly fine examples of “Scenes I’d Like to See”).
I love this record not just because it is so good and has lived up to and exceeded every expectation I had of it, but because of all the other stuff that comes with it. Just as Soulsavers albums come with their own attendant biblographies and filmographies, Rome has me once more digging through piles of films for that really awful-quality DVD I have in here somewhere of Death Rides a Horse (Kill Bill fans need to see this one; it’s more or less the same film but with more sand) and every Once Upon a Time In… that I have ever seen, in order to see them again. It may seem a bit self-defeating for an album to encourage people to do things other than listen to them, but Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi have combined their obvious love of an era and have made something that is now a part of it. Stunning.
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