I must admit that my 47-year-old brain struggles to keep up with events in Chief of War (I remember as a child sitting with my parents and them keep asking “who is that?” “why is he doing that?” etc and I am now in that place) but it’s an entertaining historical drama about the late 18th century war between the four kingdoms of the Hawaiian islands, and ultimately unification. Jason Momoa stars and, with Thomas Paʻa Sibbett, writes and executive produces the show and his charismatic performance does a lot of hard work.
The score is credited to Hans Zimmer and James Everingham and is an interesting clash of styles – it would be easy to describe it as a Polynesian extension of Dune, and because I like taking the easy way that is exactly how I will describe it. The main title theme crams a lot into its 84 seconds, with sections of quite different ethnic singing cropping up around the anthemic main theme. It’s not hugely memorable but it gets the job done.
The score itself often uses the theme in various ways, but most often it’s percussion-heavy action music which sounds like it’s performed by a mix of a small number of instrumental soloists and vocalists blended with electronics (though you can never really tell these days what’s real and what’s not).
My favourite moments are when the score becomes more ethereal – as you’d expect, the show does include some spiritual elements and the strained strings of tracks like “Rising Flame” and “A New Awakening” do their best to ratchet up a sense of awe, though in keeping with a lot of modern tv music for shows like this the effect can be rather diluted since the composers do their best to avoid even the vaguest hint of sentiment and while much of it is melodic, it seems written in a way to try to avoid drawing attention to the melody.
Don’t worry though, this isn’t another Shogun – for one thing, it manages to do the basic fundamentals of what dramatic underscore is supposed to do. The plentiful action music is often far from easy listening – frequently with a guttural, almost feral feel to it (very much in the Dune vein). The non-action/non-spiritual tracks in between are usually either quite tense pieces with slow-moving phrases suggesting doom is not far away, or even slower-moving straight drama cues. Perhaps the pick is “Gods of Our Beginning and End” with grand vocals lending the piece a somewhat epic feel (nobody was afraid of drawing attention to the music with this one).
Bring all of this together on the lengthy album and there’s a fair amount to admire, but quite how much I would say I actually enjoy listening to it I am not too sure. The listening experience would be better-served by losing some of the fairly samey slow-moving dramatic pieces, though I appreciate the effort taken to create a reasonably well-rounded listening experience. At times it makes you sit up and take notice, at others it floats along so calmly you can forget it’s even there.
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