Clint Mansell Featuring Kronos Quartet - Requiem For A Dream

The music makes the movie, and the soundtrack is excellent. There are a few different themes within this CD, and they are interspersed within 3 "seasons" or "acts" if you will. In this sense, this release is sort of like a modern-day opera. However, don't be fooled by that label (if you don't like opera). If you've seen the movie, you know how the music adds to the tragic scenes of the characters. With that said, you will know that the music in here is not happy. It's depressing, nervous, and busy.

Mansell and the Kronos Quartet definitely did a great job on melding strings and electronic elements together in different genres of music expressing a full range of human feeling. For the main theme which expresses tragedy, you've got strings in a very traditional approach for a soundtrack. For the tense moments in the film, Mansell uses his electronic equipment effectively in nervous, twitchy IDM that works well as an almost transparent background noise for the film, yet works well standing alone, to complement the other tracks. In the last "act," the Kronos Quartet really shows us some of the most tense and dissonant music ever made for a movie. Dissonant, chaotic, shrill, grating...all of these words can be used to describe the tone of the four string instruments. In the movie, these tracks were used in order to augment and mark the most horrible and sickening parts of the film, and to what effect! These are the tracks that have made an impact on the moviegoers, and these are the tracks that give way to the tragic last two tracks on the CD, which go back to the original themes, completing the work in a catharsis.

This CD is the embodiment of tragedy. You have a beginning, a middle, and a catharsis that releases all the tension that has been built up in the course of the music. Does it sound sad? It sounds tragic. Is it good? It's fucking terrific. It may not be suitable for everyday listening, but you have to listen through it once, and appreciate the work that went into this.

Many soundtracks sound great when mixed with the film but feel emotionally empty when simply played on a CD. Other soundtracks, great soundtracks, are able to stand alone from the film and help you to remember those moments from said flick that grabbed you. Listening to Clint Mansell's score for Darren Aronofsky's drug-addled nightmare "Requiem For A Dream", I still get shivers in my remembering the tragic events of the film via Mansell and the Kronos Quartet's wonderful work.