CD: Evil Dead (2013)

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Rating: Excellent

Label: La-La Land Records/ Released: April 9, 2013

Tracks & Album Length: 17 tracks / (71:35)

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Special Notes: 20-page colour booklet with liner notes.

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Composer: Roque Banos

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Review:

Roque Banos score for Fede Alvarez’ gory remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 film is an instant candidate for the best horror score of 2013, and LLL’s CD features a meaty 71 minutes of large-scale orchestral music (including expanded CD tracks) that neatly show off the composer’s incredible ability to transition from abstract to linear musical ideas, and never lose sight of his main themes.

Perhaps taking a motivic nod from The Grudge (2002), Banos has crafted the music equivalent of the guttural sound that marks the appearance of that film’s malevolent force, and for Evil Dead, the motif is a hand-cranked warning siren that’s a few octaves close to a wailing human voice. It’s recurrence within the score signals an imminent assault of brass and all kinds of bristling, coarse sound textures, and Banos also evokes the siren’s eerie tonal arc using instruments or a choir to infer its looming presence.

There’s also a four-note main theme that chimes and dangles over the orchestra, and Banos rarely develops any fuller theme variations, let alone anything broadly melodic. There are rare exceptions – “Come Back to Me” offers some rare tenderness, and the chorales in “The Pendant / Evil Tango” are fairly linear before the cue switches to a cheeky homage to Jerry Goldsmith’s The Omen (1976) – but this is a brutal, almost epic tribute to the mayhem of Raimi and Alvarez, and as Hellraiser (1987) put Christopher Young on the map for complex orchestral horror scores, Evil Dead is Banos’ calling card for further genre efforts.

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© 2013 Mark R. Hasan

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External References:

IMDB — Soundtrack Album — Composer Filmography

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Select Merchants:

Amazon.ca — Amazon.com — Amazon.co.uk — BSX — Intrada — SAE

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