Loin des Hommes Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
(Goliath)
Three stars
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, best known for their amorphous, long-running band the Bad Seeds, have also carved out a canyon-sized niche in time-stoppingly evocative cinematic accompaniments over the past decade, from The Assassination of Jesse James... to The Road. This latest score – backing the Viggo Mortensen-led drama Loin des Hommes (Far from Men), in which a murderer is escorted across the barren Atlas Mountains in Algeria – is textbook Cave/Ellis material. Accordingly, the darkness that has always lurked just beneath the surface of the duo's work is here in spades: Ellis's haunting, creeping violin lines claw their way through Bloody Cheche, while Dust Storm is five enveloping minutes of quiet neo-classical portent. Cave doesn't take the intense, charismatic lead as he does in the Bad Seeds, his sardonic drawl as sparsely applied as the Atlas vegetation. But the subtle majesty on display is enough to inspire genuine intrigue in the movie itself. As with most of the best soundtracks, the finest way to experience Loin des Hommes will no doubt be ensconced in a surround-sound cinema, drinking in its full audio-visual splendour.
