• Composed by Bill Brown
• moviescore media MMS-09017 / 2009 / 55:56

Cuba Gooding Jr., Ray Winstone and Ron Perlman lead the cast of The Devil’s Tomb, in which a bunch of soldiers unleash an ancient evil in an underground bunker – it’s been done a thousand times before, but can still be enjoyable when done right.  Composer Bill Brown took up the scoring duties – it’s his first major film score, after many years of writing music for video games (and more recently scoring CSI: NY). His music for The Devil’s Tomb is made up of a Prague orchestra, sometimes electronically-manipulated, along with high-quality samples (including a choir).  Budgetary limitations have not in this instance led to creative limitations, with Brown putting together a highly-entertaining score.  He nicely combines various different styles – he does the big action music when needed, but underscores the rest with a combination of Alien-style suspense (Alien being very much the ultimate score for this type of film – and indeed, the film being the ultimate one in the genre too) and more ambient electronics.  Everything fits together rather well.

One of my favourite things about it is that Brown keeps everything musical – of course, it’s film music and it sounds like film music, but everything has a proper structure.  You wouldn’t find this sort of music, with the combination of orchestra and electronics, anywhere outside of film music; but make no mistake, it is proper music too.  If I have a complaint, then it’s that at 55 minutes the album is probably a bit too long; and it would be remiss not to say that there is nothing here which we haven’t done before.  It’s just an enjoyable, well-crafted score which suggests Bill Brown deserves a shot at more high-profile horror movies. ***

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