Elliot Goldenthal's vast creativity has led to him working on all sorts of different types of film, from violent science fiction / horror to Mexican romance.  He was in one of his most creative moods when he tackled Cobb, the biopic of baseball legend Ty Cobb (and not, as you may have thought, a documentary about crusty bread rolls).  The music conjures many imagines - enormous, evil creatures picking off their prey one by one - anarchic violence in an urban centre, police sirens wailing in the background - a serial killer sitting at home thinking about his past victims - but one thing it doesn't conjure any images of, curiously, is baseball.  Goldenthal explains this himself far more fluidly than I could - "Cobb's classical, scientific approach to baseball both collided and cohabited with his irrational, almost transcendent abandon in the game.  Those opposing forces in him gave me the key to composing the score: composition as collision."

Those three words sum up this score more perfectly than any full-length review ever could.  The score opens with earthy, rasping vocals in a Gospel style - performed, incidentally, by Goldenthal himself - and then segues into a beautiful main theme with a faintly Irish lilt.  I describe it as beautiful, but there is an underlying tension - one might even say violence.  "Cooperstown Aria (Part I)" is terrific, an almost traditionally classical string aria (I say this with reservations, since "traditional" is not an adjective that crops up too often when commenting on Goldenthal's works).  "Reno Ho' (Part I)" introduces an action motif, a terribly imposing and portentous figure for the brass that simple exudes power.  You can almost hear the walls of the scoring stage shaking while it was being recorded, such is its might.  Following this come two more jazzy tracks, "Newsreel Mirror" with its piano rags and the loungy "Meant Monk".

We get back to the real meat and bones of the score in the continuation of the "Cooperstown Aria" from before.  Goldenthal writes such transparent music for strings, seemingly producing a sound that shimmers around and above the listener, through careful orchestration and the use of unexpected harmonies.  Think of the finales of Michael Collins and Titus - this is more of the same beautiful material.  "Georgia Peach Rag" is a cue singled out by Goldenthal in his liner notes, featuring a happy, playful ragtime piano solo being gradually enveloped by wildly dissonant orchestral textures, before emerging again the other side, an ingenious technique.  "The Baptism" is another great piece of music, with circular string figures making all sorts of impact; this segues seamlessly into the second part of "Reno Ho'", reprising much of the material from the cast-iron first part.  The beautiful "The Homecoming" is similar in spirit to "Cooperstown Aria"; a curious mix of the uplifting and the dour.  "Cobb Dies" is about as cheerful as you might expect, though the trumpet solo is moving in the extreme.  I can't think of another film composer who writes quite so well for the instrument.  Rather curiously, after that comes "The Beast Within" from Alien3, which was apparently tracked into  Cobb (and if you want a perfect illustration of my earlier point about this not being music that makes you think of baseball, you'd never guess that "The Beast Within" wasn't written for the same score as the rest of the album if it didn't say on the packaging). 

In many ways, Cobb could be seen as being the score that laid down the foundations for the composer's phenomenal Titus.  The two share much in common, though Goldenthal's unexpected juxtapositions of differing musical styles was taken to far greater extremes in the latter.  Virtually all of his scores contain much to savour - but Cobb contains even more than most.  The film was released at the worst possible time - in the middle of the first-ever nationwide baseball strike, when the public's appetite for the sport was pretty low - and barely anyone saw it.  But surely the music will live on for a lot longer.

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