From Hell

But it's the dark, brooding score of largely unsung South African composer Trevor Jones that's the real focus here. Jones's masterful use of orchestral color and pacing, punctuated by slight percussive, choral, and electronic flourishes, paints a musical landscape as bleak as it is suspenseful. The composer's use of melody is spare, deliberate, and minor key, helping to infuse the score with a very human sense of melancholy even as it tightens the screws of dramatic tension. The concluding track, "Bow Belle (Absinthium)," offers up the strangest treat: a swirling, psychedelic cocktail of twisted, 19th-century ballroom gentility and contemporary digital sorcery that seems to crackle through a gramophone player. --Jerry McCulley