Search - Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld :: Ghosts of the Civil Dead

Caught behind musical bars and fences

yorgos dalman | Holland, Europe | 02/10/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Concidering the musical explosions and outbursts Nick Cave and his crew of Bad Seeds can cause during a live performance, this soundtrack to the John Hillcoat movie is surprisingly understated and nihilistic. It's an atmospherical and moody mix of dimmed music, seemingly lost voice-overs and eerie soundscapes.

The story is set in a futuristic maximum security prison and listening to the soundtrack you can almost hear the electrical wires buzz. There is a tension through out the whole album that never lets go and that can't be said of most thriller- and horror scores, not even from the so called `great names' in the genre.

High pitched flutes, flares really, are scarcely dropped throughout the movie, giving us the creepy feeling of total alienation. The soundscapes on the cd are as desolate as the landscape in which the movie's prison is standing. One could even speak of a `sense of nether worldy', for both movie and score gives us the strange feeling that the rest of the world, the Common Sense World that is, is gone, and we have become as much a prisonner as the movie characters have and that there is really... really... no way out....

"