Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
The Road soundtrack (2010)
White line fever: The Road soundtrack.
I am a big fan of spooky soundtracks. The Boys by The Necks and Snowtown by Jed Kurzel are my favourites. Big fan of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' movie soundtracks too; The Road, The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James. Something like Snowtown – in terms of a deep listening experience, perhaps with the real life South Australian serial killings as a kind of subconscious mirage – is so scary that it brings you closer to death in order to appreciate life. But Cave and Ellis's beautiful work for films, while they are on downtime from the Bad Seeds, is about contrasting the two extremes (beauty and horror) in either one suite of "songs" or one "song" itself.
So what have the pair done with the charged, post-apocalyptic narrative of Cormac McCarthy's 2007 novel The Road? In the book and film a father and his young son walk through a ruined American landscape (ruined from what? weather? war?) toward the sea and, they hope, certain redemption. But that redemption never comes.
From McCarthy – in my opinion the greatest living American writer – we can learn much, but one of those learnings is that not everything, not every journey, needs to be transformative. From Cave and Ellis here (mainly employing their trademark instruments, the piano and the violin), we can learn nowhere near as much, because we aren't supposed to.
In fact watching the film recently I hardly noticed the music, which is the whole point. It works in tandem with the camera, with the script, with the actors and with the editors. Tracks here like The Cannibals, The House and The Cellar are about discord and terror; The House is industrial metal, slamming doors and windstorms. Yet in a perfect example of the contrasts at play in the soundtrack, The Church (like many of the rest) is a hymn without words.