Yep, you wait years for a Nick Cave/Warren Ellis nouveau western soundtrack and then two come along at once. Okay, not exactly at once. And they are very different entities. The score for John Hillcoat’s The Proposition was a comely but rough-hewn thing composed of folk song fragment, displaced Scots-Irish airs and the odd blast of violently distorted violin. Jesse James, by contrast, is much closer to conventional film score.
The chief departure is that, this time out, the pair have contracted the services of a sizeable orchestra, and the result is impressive. If advance reports of the forthcoming Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! suggest Nick and Warren have abandoned their regular musical posts, anyone missing that distinctively mournful violin and stately chamber piano will find plenty of solace in pieces like ‘What Happens Next’ and ‘Destined For Great Things’.
The luminous ‘Song For Jesse’ betrays the will o’ the wisp music box influence of Tchaikovsky’s ballets, while the central suite of ‘The Money Train’, ‘What Must Be Done’ and ‘Another Rather Lovely Thing’ linger under the same aurora borealis as Prokofiev and post-rock. As is often the case with Warren Ellis, there’s the palpable influence of Arvo Part and perhaps latter-day Ennio Morricone (‘Falling’), but also a Zen class of holy minimalism in ‘Moving On’. More unusually, there’s a whiff of Klezmer fatalism on ‘Carnival’, while ‘Cowgirl’ pairs scratchy electric guitar and lilting violin in a woozy waltz.
I haven’t yet seen Andrew ‘Chopper’ Dominik’s film (which sees Cave share screentime with Brad Pitt for the first time since Johnny Suede), but if this soundtrack is any indication, it’s an austere and elegant piece of work.