Album review: Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Soundtrack)

Published on Tuesday 3 January 2012 00:00

Reznor’s career with Nine Inch Nails spanned two decades of gut-wrenching heat-splintering rock music, and his first venture into scoring films won an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

That was for his work on David Fincher’s Facebook film, The Social Network, and now he collaborates with the American director again. Just as he brings a Hollywood chill to the Swedish original, so Reznor and Ross create sonic chilblains with an atmospheric score from the frozen tundra. Apart, of course, from the Led Zeppelin cover version that opens proceedings, with Karen O doing her very best impression of Robert Plant on The Immigrant Song. The rest is bass rhythm heavy and anonymous, in a brooding sinister way.

It works as a standalone piece of music in the same way as Hans Zimmer’s Black Hawk Down or Vangelis’s Bladerunner, albeit in a colder more fractured fashion.

Judicious electronic percussion and piano tinkling flirting with the oriental are the order of the day, creating a much more menacing sense of claustrophobia than Fincher’s film ever does. But then as a director perhaps he has always been more concerned with the sinister nature of wide open space, panorama paranoia if you will.

Download this: Immigrant Song, One Particular Moment

Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Rating: ***

Mute, £22.99

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