In the latest issue of The New Yorker, the magazine's music critic Alex Ross examines Jonny Greenwood's "unearthly, beautiful score" for There Will Be Blood and finds in it music that is a world apart from the usual film fare.

"There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score," Ross suggests, continuing:

Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices ... that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliché. So it is with Paul Thomas Anderson's movie There Will Be Blood, which has an unearthly, beautiful score by the young English composer Jonny Greenwood. ... [A]s Orson Welles once said of Bernard Herrmann’s contribution to Citizen Kane, the music does 50 per cent of the work.

Complementing Daniel Day-Lewis's bravura performance as rising oil baron Daniel Plainview, Greenwood's score plays a significant role in the development of that character. "The coalescence of a wide range of notes into a monomaniacal unison," writes Ross, "may tell us most of what we need to know about the crushed soul of the future tycoon." Of the music, he says:

Greenwood writes rugged open-interval motifs ... mechanically churning Bartókian ostinatos ... primitivist drumming ... and long-limbed, sadly ecstatic, Messiaen-like melodies ... It's hard to think of a recent Hollywood production in which music plays such an active role.

In his work with Radiohead, Greenwood has created "a fascinating synthesis of 20th-century sounds," according to Ross, "avant-garde Romanticism, you could call it," and with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a piece featured in the film score's tracks "Henry Plainview" and "Proven Lands," Greenwood has created his "most ambitious score to date." The piece, says Ross, "has an elegiac air," one that

may explain why the work has such a powerful effect in There Will Be Blood, which, beyond the melodrama of Daniel Plainview's external rise and internal collapse, shows a primeval American landscape on the brink of violent transformation ... [I]f the smeared string glissandos on the soundtrack suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain. The cellos cry out most wrenchingly when Plainview scratches his name on a claim, preparing to bleed the land.

To read Ross's article, pick up the latest issue of The New Yorker or visit newyorker.com. To listen to three tracks from the score, including "Proven Lands," visit nonesuch.com/twbb. To purchase the soundtrack, with three exclusive bonus downloads, visit the Nonesuch Store.