By Ramin Djawadi,

Watertower Music

 

A concluding foray into the musical worlds of Westworld.

Westworld’s fourth and final season has come and gone, and through the series as a whole, Ramin Djawadi has brought us a genre-bending mix of Western soundtrack tropes, jazz, trance, epic sci fi tonalities, and created several distinctive worlds from the Old West to the Second World War, to medieval Japan, to a couple of decades in the future.

He does most of that again here in season 4 on its own too, eventually bringing us full circle back to the beginning with the all too brief  piano themes of the Old West town of Sweetwater in “Sweetwater Reprise”.

Most of the soundtrack takes upon itself a 1920s-sounding jazzy tone, with plenty of piano and meandering horns, and this extends to the familiar themes from previous seasons – “Sweetwater Temperance” gives us the familiar town’s tones with a Prohibition-era twist that works well, and later gives rise to a blend of jazz and threatening synth mixed with airy SF and tension-building pulse all flavoured with elements of the show’s main theme that is “They Are After Your Hooch.” Tracks like these are just stunning blends of things that shouldn’t work together this way, but Djawadi guides them to totally flow together in a shockingly natural way.

Yes, there are other tracks that are fairly standard drones and tones of threat and mystery, such as “Time To Transcend” or “Outliers” – and special mention for “Annees Folles” which starts that way before dreamily introducing us to the jazz and traditional Westworld piano elements – or rapid electronic Terminator-like synths for more futuristic worries, but these are Djawadi’s standards, and those are higher than most, so it all fits beautifully with the previous seasons.

Westworld has also always  made something of a musical name for itself with its instrumental arrangements of well classic songs, starting way back in season 1 with its Western-styled take on “Paint It Black,” which accompanied the show-selling saloon robbery in the pilot episode, and which was then turned into a Japanese version for season 2. For this fourth season, the series goes out on a multiple high, with a beautiful 1920s jazz styled “Enter The Sandman” and a gorgeous and emotionally breathtaking piano and strings version of “Perfect Day.” These two alone are unmissable.

It’s not perfect – musically and thematically “Sweetwater Reprise” should have closed the album rather than being followed by “Our World,” and some of the synth tones can become a little samey if you stop paying attention or are distracted by something – but it’s not far off.

In fact, really, the soundtracks for the four seasons are themselves a musical arc, growing and evolving and becoming its own thing, just as the Hosts in the show have done, albeit with a lot less slaughter and confusion.

Verdict: It’s a good closing volume to a lovely set of season scores, and an improvement on the third season soundtrack (which is great, but something has to come last). Wonderful, and more subtle than you might imagine, when you start to notice the deconstructed themes threaded through. 9/10

David A McIntee