The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Soundtrack

by Andre Veloux in Album Reviews, New Releases, Reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You’ve read the book, you might go and see the film, but what would the music sound like? For 3 hours and 39 tracks spread across 3 CDs you can find out. This soundtrack which has been just released by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is something worthy of the title an opus. Although opening with a cover of Immigrant Song and closing with a cover of Bryan Ferry’s Is Your Love Strong Enough, these two vocal tracks are anomalies that bookend 37 instrumentals. Because those two vocal tracks aside this is a largely ambient piece of work.

As a fan of Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV experimental, instrumental release, on which he also worked in tandem with Atticus Ross, I was looking forward to this. Ghosts seemed dark at the time, but this is slower and sombre by comparison. The soundscape being very much a dark Reznor one, with piano, synths, guitar and heavy drums, all of which are peaceful and violent in rotation, this at times seems to me like a progression from Brian Eno and his ambient pieces such as Music for Airports or Music for Films. It’s true at times the synths kick in, the electric guitar churns, the pace quickens and the music is loud, but the for most part the music drifts and floats around in the available space in your room or perhaps your mind. It probably is the kind of sound that fills the mind of the kind of girl with a dragon tattoo. It might explain something of her behavior.

But ultimately is it any good? Yes it is. I like those Eno works, and I like this, in fact at times I think it is absolutely amazing. That’s not to say you can sit down for 3 hours and just listen to the thing from start to finish too often. But when you need something for those times when you want to fill everything up with deep ambient sound, so you can get on with whatever you do at those times, like work, sleep, meditate or just think and hopefully not some of the things that happen in the film, then this is the kind of music to take you there. It certainly makes a change from the kind of cut and paste soundtracks that we get with most films. Reznor and Ross have produced a piece of ambient art that compliments the film, but also stands alone as something quite remarkable.