In my opinion, this is the single-coolest thing related to the Hobbit all year. It’s a preview of the track Radagast the Brown from the soundtrack of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Straight up: it’s fantastic.
The lietmotif is a lurching thing of strings and gearlike percussion that could almost be the work of rock auteurs Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and some of Ellis’s work with The Dirty Three. Throughout the piece, this lietmotif repeats several times, one of the variations adding a piercing choir. Gripping stuff, and really puts me in mind of Radagast working in his digs in Rhosgobel. It’s an unbelievable improvement on the bland canned music that was underneath the second trailer (which incidentally was not the work of Shore). Since, as we all know, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, I’ll just stop at this point and say: go listen to it yourself.
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