Album Review

Clint Mansell – Black Swan Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

• 19th Jan 2011

For those not in the know, Clint Mansell is the former lead singer and guitarist for 90’s band Pop Will Eat Itself. Anyone familiar with that band will know of their experimental and heavily electronic and sometimes often industrial sound. Their last full album even had some of the production helped out with by Nine Inch nails Trent Reznor. It is then amazing to see his talents go from this type of work into the world of scoring music for films. Mansell is Darren Aronofsky’s regular composer for all of his films and his work is nothing short of great.

Here he has excelled further with his melding of orchestrations with that associated with the White Swan ballet. Mansell may have that great masterpiece with which to work, but any composer can take a masterpiece and really screw it up. Here he manages to thread his work in and out of it which both beautifully compliments the original as well as adds layer to the psycho-drama on screen.

If you look online at Mansell’s filmography he has worked on a wide variety of films – of course he is more known in this field as the Aronofsky’s regular composer – and listening to any score it is not hard to see why.

It’s truly a beautiful score leaping in and out of the familiar orchestrations of the Ballet and a tribute to Mansell’s work as a modern day composer.