Blind people, really

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - The House

I've not seen 'The Road' yet, and I probably won't this side of Christmas, so I stopped waiting and listened to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score. 'Atmospheric' scores can feel a bit redundant divorced of the images, but I thought Cave & Ellis' score for 'The Proposition' worked well in both settings. Before I get to it, let me just say I am pretty shocked that Godspeed did not get the commission for this. I mean, 'Dead Flag Blues' does the so-distraught-its-verging-on-self-parody thing almost as well as Cormac McCarthy (seriously: 'We're all stuck in the belly of this horrible machine. And the machine is bleeding to death.' Should have gone the whole hog and added 'Also, children crying. Buried alive. Rapists stealing money from blind people. Oh, it's awful so it is.') Anyways, 'The Road''s score is, as you would imagine, desolate, and not always in a pretty way. This is actually a good thing, theres not so many cues signifying the nobility of suffering, just emptiness, and in the case of 'The House', abject terror. Very good stuff.

Nite Funk - Am I Gonna Make It

When Nite Jewel and Dam-Funk get together, you know theres going to be keyboards (<- read that in the voice of Max off 'Heart To Heart'). I did mean to write something about Dam-Funk's stupendous 'Toeachizown', but there were other distractions. Long story short: it's pretty awesome. And, of course, Nite Jewel made one of the better albums from the chillwave/glo-fi/hypnagogic pop/whatever scene (or you could call it badly recorded electro pop I guess), 'Good Evening'. And given their common love of keyboards, bass, and melodies, a collaboration was a good idea. And it sounds exactly as you would expect: Dam-Funk brings the thudding beats, keyboards abound, and..well, it doesn't sound like Nite Jewel doing the lead vocal, but it doesn't sound like Dam-Funk either? I dunno. Either way, this song in five minutes tells you exactly why you should buy the Dam-Funk and Nite Jewel albums post-haste.