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Reviewed for FasterLouder

Over the last ten years Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have formed a tight musical partnership with Ellis becoming a lynchpin of The Bad Seeds and superseding Mick Harvey as Cave’s right hand man. Cave in turn has on occasion joined Ellis’s The Dirty Three on stage as accompanying pianist.

This cross pollination of bands and music has led the duo to explore composition outside the boundaries of rock. The strong thread of storytelling in Cave’s work and the emotional gravitas that Ellis conjures up through instrumental pieces means they are a directors dream team when it comes to soundtrack work; especially when strong drama, mood and dark atmospheres are required.

White Lunar is a 2CD package that collects their work for various films and documentaries including The Assassination of Jesse James, The Proposition, The English Surgeon and the upcoming The Road.

The majority of tracks are instrumental with Cave providing vocals for Gun Thing and The Rider Song from The Proposition. Both songs do take you away from the mood of the music as you consciously acknowledge that it is Nick Cave singing and you momentarily lose focus on the beautiful music.

There is a marked difference between the styles for each movie. The Road uses a lot of strings creating a heavy sense of dread and sorrow, especially on The Mother and the experimental drone of The Father, sounding very much like the digital static of composers like Fennesz and Robert Henke.

The pieces for The Girls Of Phnom Penh incorporate Asian wind instruments and are a calmer and more optimistic group of songs. The exception is Window with ominous grinding strings akin to fingernails on a blackboard. One can only guess at the nature of the scene it accompanies in the film – a portrait of three girls sold into Cambodia’s sex industry.

Ellis’s violin is the most identifiable sound across the two CDs and he proves he is a true master of mood and has an exceptional talent for breathing life and heavy emotion into his music. When the duo step outside their traditional instruments there are some beautiful moments to be had. The opening track Song For Jesse is echoing bells and chimes that melodically twinkle like a dreamy weightless dance. Road To Banyon carries a menacing bass-line underneath twitching plucked strings; jerky and intimidating.
Cave & Ellis now have such a solid and impressive body of soundtrack work under their belts that they should no longer be subject to any accusations of it being a rock star dalliance. They can convey unspoken meaning to a visual scene in much the same way that Neil Young did with Dead Man, making the soundtrack as integral to the film as any other element. Alongside their main bands and Grinderman their film work places them as two of the leading multi-genre composers of our time.