Dan Deacon has lived a fascinating professional life, going from Baltimore art-kid party-starter to blog sensation to, now, blockbuster film-score composer. Deacon has been doing movie work since 2011, when Francis Ford Coppola recruited him to do the soundtrack for his experimental feature Twixt. Since then, Deacon has scored many more movies — some documentary, some feature.
Two years ago, Deacon was spotted on-camera at the Oscars, having scored Ascension, which lost Best Documentary to Questove’s Summer Of Soul right around the same moment that Will Smith smacked Chris Rock. Last year, Deacon did the music for Hustle, the deeply watchable Netflix joint in which Adam Sandler played an NBA scout. Now, Deacon has scored a damn Venom movie.
Today, multiplexes around the world have been forced to contend with Venom: The Last Dance, the third and possibly final entry in the series in which Tom Hardy plays the dual role of investigative reporter Eddie Brock and the titular bloodthirsty goo-monster that shares Brock’s body. The last two Venom films were big hits, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of excitement around the new one, which currently holds a robust 36% at Rotten Tomatoes. Still, this is your opportunity to hear how a Dan Deacon superhero-movie score sounds.
It mostly sounds like a superhero-movie score, full of portentous strings and pounding drums, though tiny bits of squiggly-synth weirdness pop in here and there. Unlike the last two Venom films, this one does not feature a song where Eminem raps about Venom. Sadly, then, we don’t get to hear Eminem on a Dan Deacon beat, though there are a couple of collaborations between Deacon and frequent Em hook-singer Skylar Grey. Stream Deacon’s Venom: The Last Dance score below.
