westworld-fullWatertower Music, out February 3 (physical CD), available now (download)

Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi moves to the wild west (sort of) for HBO’s follow-up to Michael Crichton’s first stab at ‘theme park in peril’, Westworld, and delivers a gutsy, authentic cowboy vibe with some very modern touches.

There’s a point in the first episode of Westworld during a bank robbery when the plinky plonk Old West saloon piano music takes on a new vibe – it feels very familiar – and then it hits you: this is the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black, western style! It’s a bold move, as this anachronism pulls you out of the period drama, but then that’s the whole point of it. Westworld the resort is a fusion of the old with the modern; it might be set in the West of old, but doesn’t actually take place there, different timelines notwithstanding.

And it’s not just Paint It Black that gets this treatment, so too do Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, Radiohead’s No Surprises and Fake Plastic Trees, The Cure’s A Forest and The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun. Collected together on one album this might seem a bit gimmicky (The Best of the Western Orchestra playing classic top pop hits) but they’re spread more sparingly across the entire ten-episode season.

The two-disc release clocks in at an impressive 1 hour 49 across 34 tracks. In addition to the pop covers there’s Dwajadi’s underscore which anchors itself around the Sweetwater theme, a typical old-fashioned Western theme that might have come from any frontier oater of old. It’s a bit Morricone, Bernstein, Tiomkin – the references are all in there, again matching what we’re seeing on the TV. The Westworld location is a living cliché, peppered with gun fights, bank robberies, goodtime saloon girls and it’s only right that it has a theme that places it right in the middle of the genre. But what a catchy theme it is, as it appears in other tracks across the CDs (and indeed the series), sometimes as an echo or even as a stride piano version.

Season 2 of Westworld will invariably have to be a different beast to its first season in light of what has happened and where everyone is at. Whether the same approach of to Westerning (Westernising?) pop songs will continue, or if that’s just a staple of Season 1, is yet to be discovered. But as he has proven in both Game of Thrones and The Strain, Djawadi is the go-to man for episodic fantasy TV, imbuing each drama with its own identity and driving the on-screen action.

Verdict: A lovely, full release – if only we could get this multi-disc treatment with Game of Thrones. 9/10

Nick Joy