Trevor Morris won an Emmy award for his amazing score to the first season of the Showtime series. He continues here in what has become his most complete and well rounded work to date. Morris composed around 4 hours of music for the second season and gave us around 77 minutes on this release; so it's more of a selection but works extremely well as a standalone listen.
The score is string based and is mostly moody strings but occasionally you'll hear some percussion come in. The score always seems to be teetering on suspense and romance. In other words it's a very romantically suspenseful score. There are some ascending cues that resonate swelling emotions and are very beautiful. Towards the end of the album the music becomes more airy and you can tell by the tracks kind of how things resolve and it's reflected in the music. The way I describe the second half is a series of emotional echoes. Listening to the music definitely gives your mind a sense of reflecting back on things, but it never becomes "period" music. There is a timeless feel to it infused with Morris' modern style.
What I love this time around is that he takes the main theme motif and infuses it in a few cues to ground the score. I think what the first season had was tons of amazing music but no grounding. Here he cycles through a few motifs. One of them is a single female vocal that echoes despair. A few times the Hans sound came through such as in "Dreaming Of Anne Boleyn" and "Confessions & Arrests". You can definitely hear the East India Trading Company motif from Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End, which made me smile.
Trevor Morris' score is a fantastic listen. It embodies the feel of the emotions rather than the period, but it also never lets you forget that it's rooted in the modern style. I've been listening to his music since he started out and I can honestly say this has impressed me the most as a complete sound and voice from one of today's talented composers. I can't wait for the season 3 release!
