3 out of 5

Produced by: Hans Zimmer, Ramin Djawadi

Label: Silva Screen

This starts out really promisingly, Djawadi adding splashes of his noise experimentations – a la Mr. Brooks – to a very guitar-driven score, while also bringing in the density that would come to define Ramin separately from his Zimmer tutelage, but after a few beats-around-the-theme tracks, the score oddly never crystallizes into anything thematic enough.  Oddly because this is Iron Man, which seems ready-made to have some kind of memorable, Sabbath-y thing going on.  In a way, points to avoiding that, and the casual romp of opener Driving With The Top Down leading into the tear-it-up riffage of Merchant of Death (the most impressively heavy and varied track on the album) sets up some nice tonal barriers to bounce between, but Djawadi simply doesn’t capitalize on it.  The focus on distortion ends up harming things a bit, as the other layers are really downplayed, which makes us hear the core chords that are the attempt at the theme (because, again, it’s not really memorably thematic) front and center again and again…  Which makes it sound more annoying than intended, when I really just mean to say that it doesn’t excite.

Moments of interest poke out: the Mark tracks (introducing the models of the Iron Man suit in the film) have momentum, and the boss battle Iron Monger track is all over the place, but the places are pretty compelling.

It would take Ramin a couple more soundtracks to sort of master the pacing and range of these things (and maybe to fully escape papa Zimmer…), so while Iron Man isn’t there yet, there are certainly enough indications of the man’s skills to be worth a spin.