Artist: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Label: Mute Records
Release: 2009
Rating: 4/5
“The Road” is a film that should have come out back in 2008. Its director is once again John Hillcoat, as with “The Proposition,” for which Warren Ellis and Nick Cave had already provided the musical backdrop. The fight for survival, the core motif of “The Road,” pushed the two musicians to bring their score very close to the music of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis make a great pair of partners in crime. They’ve known each other for years, they’re inseparable collaborators, and there are few musical secrets left between them. Anyone familiar with Nick Cave’s rock output knows this is a musician who has always been drawn to themes of life and death. His work isn’t rosy — everything is draped in black and final doom. Rays of light only peek through in that atmosphere now and then. Nick Cave, deep down in his soul, isn’t all that far from “the end of the world” to begin with. And the music for The Road isn’t far from it either.
“The Road” is a film with a post-apocalyptic vision. A mysterious catastrophe, on the scale of a true biblical prophecy, swallows human civilization. In this horror story of survivors who wander aimlessly across a dead planet, killing each other for food and, in that vein, eating one another, we find a father (Danish actor Viggo Mortensen) and a son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), struggling just to stay alive. Is there survival, or isn’t there? Does staying alive even make sense? And finally: what even counts as survival in a situation like this? Violence, mercilessness, the ruinous hand of God’s wrath, and a yearning for salvation. A climate that’s tailor-made for Nick Cave, in other words.
The music is constantly caught in a play of darkness and light. This time, of course, it’s pushed decisively toward stacking up gloomy shades, with a lost ray of light only occasionally breaking through. If the opening track Home conjures the warmth and safe shelter of a home’s doorstep, the title track “corrects” that impression, and in the duality of Warren Ellis’s fragile violin and low-ringing piano tones, we set off down a road that’s wrapped the whole way, like a delicate veil, in a longing for everything we’ve lost and everything that was ever dearest to us in life. Really, that’s the strength of a film score like this. The more it’s made up of tender, fragile musical collages built on direct, minimal, naturally sounding strokes, the more it touches the heart and stirs up powerful emotions. Storytime carries on the feelings laid out in The Road, but things turn pretty quickly when The Cannibals presents a deeply carved contrast between wild tribal rhythms (the hunt for prey), while the biting, dissonant violins point to a total chaos and confusion that nobody in the age of human civilization would have dared imagine even in their dreams. The collapse of civilization and complete devaluation.
The collages are built simply, they’re bare and hide absolutely nothing. No shame. It’s all a game of stringing together the feeling of longing, which occasionally finds relief in a blade of hope, in moments when a ray of sunny warmth shines through the music. But this brightening is momentary, fleeting, and feels downright cramped, since it’s accompanied by the true essence of illusion and, on that front, by the empty “self-torture” of memories that keep father and son stuck in the past. In this manner, the masters Ellis and Cave, without much strain, handle every situation the film script throws at them.
And the moment in the film when the son asks his father: “Dad? What color is the sea?” and the father answers: “I don’t know. It used to be blue!” couldn’t better capture the search for a goal that may not even exist anymore.
All in all, the music is repetitive, so don’t expect thrilling leaps in the arrangements or revolutionary musical experiments that would serve up anything particularly ingenious, exciting, fresh-sounding, never-heard-before. The film score is dry in its own right, and without watching the movie, only the most hardcore fans of Nick Cave’s work will gladly listen to it. Even though it’s arranged quite differently from what Nick does on his studio albums with the Bad Seeds, that familiar morbid vibration will surely feel very much like home to you. For all fans of Nick Cave’s musical stamp. It reflects the physical state of total devastation that we experience as a fight for survival (a bleak atmosphere wrapped in darkness), but deep inside that form, subtle moments hide, born of emotion, creating a ray of hope. Through the music for the film, just like through the film itself. So the music for “The Road” has fulfilled its basic purpose.
Lineup
Nick Cave – guitar, piano, arrangements, vocals
Warren Ellis – piano, guitar, violin, arrangements
Production
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Track list
1. Home
2. The Road
3. Storytime
4. The Cannibals
5. Water And Ash
6. The Mother
7. The Real Thing
8. Memory
9. The House
10. The Far Road
11. The Cannibals
12. The Journey
13. The Cellar
14. The Bath
15. The Family
16. The Beach
17. The Boy
