James Horner's career post-Titanic makes for slightly odd reading. Scoring noticeably fewer films than before, he has concentrated on big-budget studio material at the expense of everything else, seeming to leave behind the smaller movies with which he attracted much of the praise afforded him over the years. Iris marks a change of pace, a welcome return to the kind of intimate writing in which Horner specialises. He was a last-minute addition to the movie at the insistence of Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, keen to add yet further to the movie's distinguished list of artistic and technical credits by having a composer as highly-regarded as Horner. Horner managed to add to that yet further by attracting the services of virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell, one of the most in-demand musicians in the world.

Iris is Horner's smallest-scale score since The Spitfire Grill, though the faux-folk idiom in which most of the score is written is a very Americanised, symphonic version of English folk rather than the mid-US techniques he had lent on for his earlier, impressive effort. Bell's solos shine throughout, though as was the case with Charlotte Church in Horner's previous score, A Beautiful Mind, the solo parts are all reasonably straightforward and would not have challenged one of Hollywood or London's studio musicians.

The score is not, perhaps a little surprisingly, overly melodramatic or manipulative. Indeed, it remains fairly low-key throughout. This is perhaps why it doesn't work entirely as an album - while Horner generates the necessary emotions to provide a backdrop to a movie, he hasn't written enough attractive melody or provided enough variety to make an entirely satisfying album. My biggest complaint against Horner over the years has been his tendency to overfill his albums to the point of saturation, where the music's effect is removed by having so much filler music. While I wouldn't necessarily describe any of Iris as "filler", little variety is present between the tracks. There are eight unnamed tracks but frankly the music could have been presented as one long suite because nothing particularly stands out as being any different from the rest. Even at 50 minutes, the album is unbelievably repetitive, preventing it from becoming one of Horner's true gems. Indeed, I don't honestly think it can be considered to be in the same calibre as The Spitfire Grill, which itself suffered from being an over-long album. Nevertheless, Horner proves once again that he can score this kind of film as well as anyone and the album works as an inoffensive, pleasant background listen.

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