Death Wish [Original Soundtrack]

Hancock’s side gig scoring motion pictures netted him a classic out of the gate with his take on London’s Swinging Sixties for Michelangenlo Antonioni’s ’66 mod thriller Blow-Up, but the real surprise gem in his filmography comes from a significantly less countercultural movie. Michael Winner’s vigilante fantasy Death Wish might’ve been a reactionary take on the state of urban crime in a decaying New York — a major tonal shift from Hancock’s previous film-score job, the Black Power deep state spoof The Spook Who Sat By The Door — but in the wake of the commercial smash success of Head Hunters, his score gave him an opportunity to imbue his funk-crossover moves with a sense of anxiety and suspense that Jerry Peters’ orchestral flourishes don’t need to strain to heighten. The opening title theme — punctuated by both vertigo-inducing skyscraper strings and some of Hancock’s most caged-tiger electric piano playing — shifts from dread to calm and back so restlessly that it captures the kind of thematic underlying paranoia that Charles Bronson couldn’t fully embrace as a leading man. And the way “Joanna’s Theme” transforms from romantic soul-jazz idyll into a gathering-storm sense of looming tragedy is an unsettling account in itself. The rest of the album is rounded out by a handful of context-heavy cues (the stalker-paced proto-disco groove “Do A Thing”; the cavernous, almost droning queasiness of “Party People”), a selection of tension-building symphonic pieces given the snarky title “Medley: Suite Revenge”, and the bristling closer “Fill Your Hand” — the latter featuring Hancock reaching back to the more cathartic and intense tendencies of his Mwandishi sextet to make Paul Kersey’s fate feel more traumatically doomed than a restoration of law and order.