Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are Australia’s greatest contributions to the world, after Vegemite and Russell Crowe of course.
So, when they get together, good things usually happen. Take for example, the soundtracks of The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Yep, you can thank Cave and Ellis for those… and countless other soundtracks for that matter.
On September 29th, the boomers (that’s a male kangaroo — more Australian humor) of post-punk will celebrate their work as soundtrack extraordinaries with the release of two-disc compilation album entitled White Lunar.
Disc #1 is a bit self-indulgent, featuring the score to the Cave-penned The Proposition. The gritty and tense film tells the tale of the brothers Burns and their imposed sibling rivalry that outshines even Romulus and Remus. The other tracks on the CD come from the forthcoming film, The Road. A heartwarming road trip between father and son in post-apocalyptic America, the movie, and by extension the soundtrack, will undoubtedly be bleak, vast and nearly colorless, opting instead for relentless fear.
The second disc features songs from The Girls of Phnom Penh. Painting the grim life of three Cambodian girls sold into prostitution, the soundtrack should be fertile ground for Cave and Ellis’ open ended production style. The disc also offers tracks from the English Surgeon soundtrack. Dr. Henry Marsh struggles to save lives in a Ukrainian hospital amongst questions of morality and ethics. Sounds like soundtrack typecasting if there ever was any.
What’s more, four songs on the second disc should delight back catalog fanatics. Named after craters, archived tracks like “Halo”, “Daedalus”, and “Magma” range in feel from the light sweet tones of a flute to Cave’s description of “Zanstra” and how it “swarms like a storm of hornets besieging a submarine”. Pleasant to say the least.
To hold you over, have a listen to some of the duo’s previous work, this in the form of a song titled “Song For Bob” from that aforementioned, poorly titled film involving Jesse James.
White Lunar is scheduled for release on September 22nd via Mute Records…
