Cliff Martinez - Drive Soundtrack

First time reviewing a soundtrack for a movie. I've been a big Cliff Martinez fan since seeing the Steven Soderbergh rendition of  Solaris (2002), which also featured Cliff Martinez (former drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) formulating the soundtrack. Drive came out earlier this year without much buzz, but the storyline caught my attention as it was about a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as the driver for get-away cars in heist jobs. The movie stars Ryan Gosling, who's been making quite the name for himself as of late with a number of "big time" movies coming out. The film is shot with plenty of care and consideration in each scene, and the pacing of the film called for a soundtrack that matched and accentuated this feel.

Most of the songs or arrangements are by Cliff Martinez, there are a couple of songs by others (College (feat. Electric Youth)
, Riz Ortolani (feat. Katyna Ranieri)
, and Chromatics) but the majority of the tracks are Martinez's work. They are almost exclusively synth based, lots of long drawn out waves with a mix of blips and keyboards. Some guitar is present as well as drum machine sparingly. Production is excellent as you would expect on a film soundtrack and none of the songs are too long or overly boring. It's good background music to have on, and a few of the tracks can stand on their own.


Cliff Martinez - Bride of Deluxe

The final song on the album. After an eerie lead-in, some guitar starts and then with blips in the background and builds up to a crescendo and a moment of pause before a percussion joins in. Blips and some keyboards are able to ride out through this section giving the song character.


Cliff Martinez - "Rubber Head"

Conversely, this is the first Cliff Martinez song on the soundtrack. The buildup is slower and with softer blips, coming in alternating almost reverberated waves. These waves don't stick around too long, they sweep on through and things settle down and softly soaring chords ring out until the end of the piece.

Unlike the Solaris soundtrack, which is extremely difficult to find now at a reasonable price, Amazon has the Drive soundtrack for under $13 for the cd, and only $5 for the mp3 album, can't beat that price.