Preoccupations – Preoccupations

Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2020/06/24/solitude-sounds-preoccupations-preoccupations/

Album Review: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Road (Original Soundtrack)

Having read the Road a few months ago in anticipation of the movie, I was pleased to discover that Nick Cave and Warren Ellis had recorded the soundtrack. I greatly enjoyed the book, and the music absolutely complements it. The music is all instrumental with piano and cello mainly featuring. It’s pretty grim, but in a good way. The title track is fairly typical of the album. Percussion is almost entirely absent, and a lone piano leads in to a wasteland-evoking string section. Much of the soundtrack is in this vein, though it is punctuated with some harsher tracks (The Cellar is a prime example) which are a little hard to listen to, and disturb the mood a little.

The better tracks feature the least percussion (Storytime, The Real Thing, Memory) and are quite simply mood pieces. And what a mood it is. It is the sound of a wintry landscape: beautiful, if a bit forbidding.

I also thoroughly recommend their compilation of soundtrack works – White Lunar, which features music from their soundtrack work for The Proposition and the Assassination of Jesse James, along with some obscure documentary work.