REVIEWS BY DAVE ALEXANDER, KEITH CARMAN, EVAN DAVIES, THE GORE-MET, MARK R. HASAN, LAST CHANCE LANCE, AARON VON LUPTON, SEAN PLUMMER AND TREVOR TUMINSKI.
THE CRAZIES (2010) Mark Isham
SOUNDTRACK
VARESE SARABANDE It’s been a few years since Mark Isham’s been involved with horror, but unlike his score for The Mist, his latest return to the genre marks a welcome revisiting of the ethereal/in- dustrial electronica that helped make The Hitcher such a terrifying cult film. Isham knows how to exploit fears within insular communities and his clean sonic designs support stories where a hard-to-pin-down force is slowly wreaking havoc. Whether it’s hard percussive hits or digitized rhythms, one feels immediate un- ease. His grasp of melody ensures small pockets of humanity within the sound of The Crazies, but their shredded form infers a steadily in- screasing body count. Varese’s hour- long CD features lengthy cues that ebb, flow, smash and soothe. Isham’s hypnotic electronica’s been sorely missed in horror scores. Welcome back, man. MRH 0000
modern and experimental writing, as well as the heavy use of processed sounds. Solo cello and female vocals are the sole “nor- mal” elements within the score, and as the mother’s mental break- down worsens, string and grungy woodwind sounds flicker and snarl, and small melodic fragments are smothered by pulses and winds of vocal echoes. Grace is refreshing in the way it consistently piques the listener’s curiosity, and subsequent listens reveal even finer nuances that make Wintory’s score a genre mini-classic. It’s not exactly acces- sible, but for those hungry for ab- stract ideas, Grace is a warped little gem. MRH 0000
it’s not consistently engaging, but believably scores what might be taking shape in the shadows ’round bedtime. TT 000
ROBE. Bleak
EXPERIMENTAL
GRACE Austin Wintory
SOUNDTRACK
BUYSOUNDTRAX RECORDS Austin Wintory has composed a score that directly and intimately addresses the drama of a woman desperate to succeed as a mother, even as her child is rotting from the inside out. That physical and men- tal weirdness is captured through
CRUCIAL BLISS RECORDS The latest release of doom drone from the prolific duo of Kyle Willey and Adam Cooley is an exercise in control. With Bleak, which eschews song titles for four lengthy self-ti- tled segments, the Indiana musi- cians/filmmakers demonstrate the marriage between visual and audi- tory elements by composing creep- ing dread so convincing, it may induce panic in the listener. Their toolkit seems limited to efferves- cent static and twisting creaks built on groaning foundations, but listen too long and, like staring into a snowy TV, you’re bound to start imagining things in it. The third act is where the bad noise really starts to bare its claws, introducing fuzzy discordant melodies like funereal foghorns wafting into a rickety, haunted harbour. But for all its nu- anced discipline, Bleak also be- comes an exercise in patience. Like most sparse instrumental albums,
ROOTS MUSIC VOLUME IV Various DEVIL’S RUIN If you’re searching for a theme here, artist names such as Murder by Death, Reverend Deadeye and a Slow Death & Loneliness, plus song titles including “Dead Men and Sinners,” “Devil, Devil” and “Lucifer” are your first clues – after the “Best of Dark Roots Music” in the compilation’s title, of course. Taking an unrepentant approach to traditional tunes about killin’ and conspiring with Old Scratch, Devil’s Ruin gives us seventeen selections from its catalogue that range from Dimestore Troubadours’ Tom Waits-like clanker “Dark Rooms,”
RODENTUM: THE BEST OF DARK
to classic murder ballads (Red Clay River’s exquisite “Rattlesnake Mountain” and Warren Jackson Hearne’s languid “God Will Strike Me Down”), to some seriously evil- sounding electric blues. Both “Snakebite” from Reverend Dead- eye and “Roses on a Grave” by Phantom of the Black Hills lay down hell on hot asphalt. Need redemp- tion? Piss off. Wanna dance with demons on the banks of the lake of fire? Well sinner, yer home. DA 0001/2
ROOTS
:WUMPSCUT: Siamese
INDUSTRIAL
METROPOLIS I’ve always been a little pissed at :Wumpscut: for stealing the Weyland- Yutani Corporation logo from Alien, but I can mostly forgive them after listening to their latest CD, Siamese. Definitely their darkest album in more than a decade, with tracks such as “Falling from Lucifer’s Grace” and
THE WOLFMAN Danny Elfman
SOUNDTRACK
VARESE SARABANDE If you blender the sounds of Wojciech Kilar (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Ninth Gate) and John Williams (Jaws, Star Wars), and filter the most organic components through Danny Elf- man’s mind, you get The Wolfman, a shock- ingly effective work that evokes the elegance of central European classical and vintage monster movie music. Transcend- ing the wants of Wolfman’s filmmakers, who dumped and later restored his score shortly before the film’s release, Elfman’s grandiloquent portrait of a tor- mented man-beast is filled with beautiful moments of intimate self-loathing, hunger for redemption and a nasty, snarling presence – all conveyed with- out synths or electronic pulses. It’s a massive orchestral immersion into an era of rustic superstitions and gas-lit intellectualism, one that will certainly outlast one of the year’s biggest cinematic fumbles. MRH 00000
A U D I O D R O M E 89RM
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